Description
Author: Ma. Liza Ruth Ocampo, Ph.D.
What does it take to be a happy, reasonable, integral, and free person? In the light of the great human experience story taken as a whole, it takes a lot of living, thinking, learning and interacting with other human beings that enables each and everyone of us to find our place and intrinsic worth in the epic narrative of human existence. In sum, it takes a lot of deliberate human acts to build the human core, or the lack of it, in each person. It takes the art and science of ethics to consolidate our human identity as basically moral and rational. This introductory book on the fundamental principles of ethical reasoning invites the young person to seriously face the task of forming himself and herself to be a morally upright human being who is called to make of this world a better and more beautiful place to live in.
This work is a primer that equips the young Filipino studentto reflect on the wonderful and daunting fact that each and every human person is called to be a good person, a virtuous person, a happy person, and last but not the least, a free person. Happiness, freedom, goodness, and the virtues are not floating abstract ideals that are out there but are pressing realities that have to be tackled most personally by each one of us.
Ethical truths are not just ‘big questions’ that are out there and period. This primer walks the young student to face these foundational-existential matters with a sense of purpose and wonder. All human life is valuable, unique, and deeply irreplaceable. It is in the philosophical study of the human act that one gains wisdom, awe, and respect at that creature we call the ‘human person.’
About the Author
Ma. Liza Ruth A. Ocampo, PhD is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of the Philippines, Diliman. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts (Cum Laude) and her Master of Arts degrees in Philosophy from the same institution where she teaches Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophical Analysis, and the History of Ideas with a particular stress on Medieval Philosophy: Themes on the Philosophical Anthropology of Thomas Aquinas. She was awarded the UP Diliman Centennial Professorial Chair in 2008 and 2010 respectively for the following works: The Dignity of the Thinking Person: A Philosophical Reflection on Human Nature (UST Publishing House, 2006) and the article-essay, “Man’s Definition in Thomas Aquinas’s De Unitate Intellectus Contra Averroistas: Some Doctrinal and Historical Considerations” (2008). She finished her Licientiate and Doctoral programs in Philosophy at the Pontificia Universitas Sanctae Crucis (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross), Rome, Italy. Her stay in the eternal city of Rome served as a turning point in her understanding, study, and appreciation of each and every human person in action.