Oral Defend..

1. Philosophy as “love of wisdom” is a lifelong search for truth, an abstract transcendent truth which encompasses the human person and his fellow-seekers. Hence, the search for truth is (a) both personal and at the same time, communal and (b) an experience of the tension between a sense of knowledge and sense of ignorance.

2. One way of looking at the practical value of philosophy is to see the relevance of philosophy to the individual in terms of justice. To understand such a conception is to appreciate the affinity of philosophy and justice in two interrelated movements: (a) to do justice requires philosophizing and (b) to philosophize necessitates becoming just.

3. A brief survey on the history of western philosophy reveals how a prevailing comprehensive doctrine affects the course of world history and vice versa. The gradual shifts from one era to another showcase man's innate desire and continuous search to have a fuller, more meaningful existence.

4. Existentialism, as a philosophical movement or tendency in the 19th and 20th century highlights the despairing mood of human existence. It emphasizes man as the giver or discover of meaning to his own life and to the world by stressing human subjectivity, man's existence, authenticity, human freedom and responsibility as it peddles the post-modern belief, existence precedes essence.

5. Phenomenology is a way of seeing, of grasping the world from man's lived experience and as a method, makes use of epoche, and the phenomenological transcendental reductions to describe man's experience.

6a. The human being is a mystery, which must be learned slowly, lovingly, with pain and tenderness, and which is never learned completely.

6b. At first glance, freedom and responsibility mean the capacity to choose, to act on my own, to be the source of my concrete actions and to be accountable for them. But man, as he gradually unfolds in the world, "is" not only free, he "becomes" free and "response-able". Freedom then develops into "self-possession within an objectively directed project in life."

7. Man's being-in-the-world is not a bodily life alone nor a spiritual life alone. It is a life of an embodied spirit (etre incarnee).

8. Human labor is a human activity rooted in man's nature as a "species-being." Work is not simply “a means to a goal outside.” Rather, it is a "value" in itself for it is through work that man realizes his true humanity. Hence, the human person does not only “work in order to live” but “man lives in order to work.”

9. Love is an activity of giving, the disinterested giving of self to the other whereby I enhance the other's unique value and in so doing enrich my own. Thus, love of the other as other does not counter to self-love but presupposes it.

10. Man is a being-towards-death, and in death man comes to grip with his wholeness and brings to completion the commitment of his whole self to the whole of reality.