Western philosophy

SUBJECT & OBJECTIVES: Throughout history, the concept of human identity has been a challenging topic in philosophy, with the responses of philosophers influencing various branches of science. In contemporary Western philosophy, there has been a shift towards viewing humans solely as physical beings. However, Islamic philosophy takes a different approach, rooted in rationality and the teachings of Islam. The Misbah Yazdi is a prominent Muslim philosopher who greatly contributed to the field and shed light on many philosophical issues. He derived the concept of human identity from Islamic philosophy, enriching it with Islamic teachings and offering a solution to the puzzle of human identity.  He defined human beings based on their soul, rather than simply considering humans as a combination of body and soul. METHOD & FINDING: This research applies a qualitative approach with a critical analysis method. The primary finding of this article is to elucidate the key differences between Islamic and Western philosophy, focusing on Misbah Yazdi's perspective. CONCLUSION: The fundamental disparity between Islamic and Western philosophy concerning human identity lies in the concept of the soul. According to Islamic philosophy, the soul defines an individual's uniqueness, providing them with a clear and stable personality and identity. In contrast, Western philosophy leaves the identity of human beings shrouded in deep ambiguity. Misbah Yazdi presents a distinctive approach to this topic, offering insights and solutions that warrant further exploration.

The heart is the moral and affective center of the person, and plays a crucial role in spirituality. I examine the work of Dietrich von Hildebrand on the heart, in particular his call to restore the heart after its millennia-long neglect by Western philosophy. Von Hildebrand accounts for the neglect of the heart in terms of a Stoicism that views it as non-intentional, i.e. as disclosing nothing about reality. Instead of responding to objective values, the heart delivers an internal turbulence that distracts from the intellectual task of cognizing what is truly good. Stoicism reduces affective states to a preliminary sensation (propatheia) and a propositional belief that the intellect must evaluate. There is no disclosive capacity intrinsic to affective states that is untranslatable to intellectual propositions. Stoics stress conformity to an objective teleology of the person rather than feeling, through the cultivation of logic. The Epicurean embraces the opposite extreme, giving internal sensations of pleasure and pain pre-eminence over logic. Feeling pleasure supersedes any conformity to an objective standard. The binary of Stoicism and Epicureanism is a lens to understand the neglect of the heart, and to restore the heart. The heart both generates internal sensations, but also provides an evaluative disclosure of reality that is not translatable to intellectual propositions, and so the heart can unite both the objective and subjective domains emphasized by Stoicism and Epicureanism.