SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

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SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

• AN INTRODUCTION

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Social Philosophy and Social Science

• Although philosophy and science spring from
  experience, from the inherent desire of the human
  person to know reality, they differ in their
  approach and intent.
• Philosophy seeks to understand reality in its
  totality and ultimate value, while science
  attempts to control and manipulate it.
• Philosophical approach integrative of experience
  while science isolates a certain aspect of
  reality.

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• Social philosophy penetrates into the social
  dimension of human existence with the immediacy
  of intuition, searching its meaning and value(s),
  conceptualizing them for the sake of integrative
  meaningful living.
• Structures that social philosophy seeks to
  understand are not taken in isolation from one
  another but placed in a figure-horizon sort of
  way.
• Attempts to understand being-with-others-in
  society in total integrative way.

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• Social sciences try to examine a segment of
  social reality (a group of people, their culture,
  their economics or politics) as a fact and to
  explain it.
• Social scientist tries to find inter-objective
  connections between facts and formulates theories
  and laws, sometimes with measurements and
  statistics.
• Uses induction and deduction.
• Method limited to observable phenomena, to social
  reality as an object.

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• Social philosophy and social sciences help each
  other.
• Philosophers insight substantiated by facts
  provided by scientist, and scientist is impelled
  to probe into a social fact by the insight of a
  philosopher.
• Scientists methodology contains certain
  philosophical presuppositions for the philosopher
  to unearth and criticize.
• Philosophers understanding of social reality
  would remain abstract and unfounded without
  findings of the social sciences.

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The Social and the Interpersonal

• Social philosophy and social sciences deal with
  relating to others that is called socius.
• Socius differs from the neighbor. (Paul Ricoeur)
• Neighbor is the personal way I encounter another
  as a person, the interpersonal, with varying
  degrees of intimacy.
• Neighbor is the immediate direct relationship
  with another.

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• Socius is the human relationship I have with an
  organized group or the person I encounter through
  his/her social function.
• Socius is the mediate indirect relationship I
  have within the context of institutions and
  structures.
• In real life, the two overlap and crisscross each
  other.

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• The personal relationship of the neighbor passes
  through the relationship of the socius,
• works out through the fringes of the socius, and
• rises against the socius.
• The socius and the neighbor are two ways of
  relating with others, and we must avoid the
  monopoly of one or the other.
• The socius is not evil in itself it becomes
  treacherous when it absorbs and exhausts the
  whole of our relationships, for the ultimate
  meaning of institutions is the service which they
  render to persons.
• Nor can our relationships simply be that of the
  neighbor for this can easily lead to a false
  sense of charity or delusion. After all, our
  human existence is social through and through.

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Human Existence is Social

• Our life is social in everything. By
  everything we mean everything that is subject
  to human responsibility.
• The persons activities are social not only
  because he/she performs them with others but also
  because he/she learns them from others, executes
  them according to accepted patterns and does them
  for his/her fellow human beings.
• Even wanting to be alone is social.

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• Every genuinely human activity is interwoven with
  an orderly field of meaning, but this orderly
  field of meaning is at our disposal through
  others, through society. This is true in the
  areas of work, play, sense perception, thinking,
  and feeling.
• Orderly field of meaning in human activity
  depends upon our fellow human beings and is in
  turn dependent upon the human person.

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• Human existence is fundamentally social in that
• 1) human existence has a historical character,
• 2) we need others to enter into the human world
  of meaning and to make it our own, and
• 3) being-together is a fundamental value which
  gives authentic fulfillment in our life.
• The authentic being-for-others is being at
  the service of others that promotes the existence
  of the other for his own sake. Here, the
  being-for-others and the being-through-others
  merge.

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Social Unity

• The German philosopher Max Scheler (1874-1928)
  speaks of several essential types of social
  unity
• 1. mass (herd among animals)
• no understanding and experience of the other.
• There is only involuntary imitation and psychic
  contagion.
• The mob possesses its own lawfulness not
  determined by its members.
• No individuality and sphere of the person as
  transference of feeling takes place in absence of
  knowledge, and the individual member is absorbed
  in total experience. No solidarity because the
  individual does not exist at all as an experience

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• 2. Life Community (as in family, tribe, a
  people)
• There is understanding but not preceding the
  experience of togetherness.
• There is an immediate experience of the other and
  the content of all experience is identical,
  though varying in course and content in their
  total dependency on the variations of collective
  experience.
• Togetherness is experienced as common stream
  having its own lawfulness.
• Representable solidarity self-responsibility is
  built upon an experience of coresponsibility for
  the willing, acting, and effecting of the whole
  community.
• Corresponds to different tasks of community
  caste, class, dignity, occupation, etc.

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• 3. Society characterized by conscious acts of
  self and consciousness of acts of others.
• Artificial unit constituted by mature and
  self-conscious individual persons who agree to
  come together for common interests.
• Disposition distrust. Every willing together and
  doing together presuppose acts of promising and
  contract.
• No solidarity. Responsibility for others based
  on self-responsibility.

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• Yet, nexus between society and life-community
• There can be no society without life community
  (though there can be life community without
  society). All possible society is therefore
  founded through community. e.g. contract formed
  in common language.

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• 4. Highest type of social unity
• the unity of independent, spiritual, and
  individual single persons in an independent,
  spiritual, and individual collective person.
• On this level every individual person is at the
  same time a member of a collective person

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• Responsibility-for distinct from
  responsibility-to
• In collective person, every individual and the
  collective person are self-responsible and at the
  same time every individual is coresponsible for
  the collective person, just as the collective
  person is coresponsible for each of its members.
  Mutual coresponsibility between individual person
  and collective person.

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• Responsibility-to
• there is neither an ultimate responsibility of
  the individual to the collective person (life
  community) nor an ultimate responsibility of the
  collective person to the individual (or majority
  of individuals) as in society, but both the
  collective person and the individual person are
  responsible to the person of persons, to God, in
  terms of self-responsibility as well as
  coresponsibility.

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• Here solidarity takes on a new sense change from
  representable solidarity to unrepresentable
  solidaritythe individual person is coresponsible
  for all other individual persons in the
  collective person not only as the representative
  of an office, rank, or any position in social
  structure but also as unique personal individual
  and as bearer of individual conscience.

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• The principle of solidarity is an eternal
  component and fundamental article of the cosmos
  of finite moral persons.
• Total moral world becomes one encompassing whole
• Every person, both individual and collective,
  participates in this according to his special and
  unique membership

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• Two propositions of principle of solidarity
• 1. community of persons belongs to the essence of
  a possible person
• 2. a priori structure of mutuality, reciprocity
  of social acts such as love, esteem, promising,
  etc.

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• Our task then is to intentionally rise from
  life-community to bring society (where there is
  no solidarity) to the totality-person, where
  genuine solidarity reigns.

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Seminar Topics and Lecturers
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• Monday, May 9
• GABRIEL MARCEL ON THE FAMILY
• Dr. Manny Dy

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• Tuesday, May 10
• JUSTICE AND THE LAW
• Fr. Luis S. David, S.J.

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• Wednesday, May 11
• A VIRTUAL LECTURE on THE VIRTUAL SOCIETY
• Dr. Peter Murphy

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• Thursday, May 12
• CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
• FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE PRINCIPLE OF
  SOLIDARITY PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS FROM KAROL
  WOJTYLAS THEORY OF PARTICIPATION
• Dr. Rainier A. Ibana

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• Friday, May 13
• HANNAH ARENDTS SOCIAL PHILOSOHY
• Fr. Nemesio S. Que, S.J.

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• Monday, May 16
• CHARLES HARTSHORNES SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
• Dr. Tomas G. Rosario

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• Tuesday, May 17
• ART, CULTURE AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
• Dr. Jovino Miroy

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• Wednesday, May 18
• PAUL RICOEURS SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
• Dr. Leovino Ma. Garcia

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• Thursday, May 19
• RAWLS ON OVERLAPPING CONSENSUS AND PLURALITY
• Dr. Zosimo Lee

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• Friday, May 20
• LEVINAS SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
• Angelli Tugado

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• Monday, May 23
• HOSPITALITY AND SOLIDARITY
• Dr. Agustin G. Rodriguez

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• Tuesday, May 24
• MARCUSE ON ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN
• Dr. Remmon Barbaza

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• Wednesday, May 25
• SYNTHESIS