The Investigation and Critique of Brightman's Personalistic Temporalism Viewpoint

The purpose of this study is the investigation and critique of Brightman's personalistic temporalism viewpoint. To achieve this purpose, descriptive-critical method has been used. First, personalism philosophy is introduced and then Brightman's personalistic temporalism viewpoint and the quiddity of person are investigated. Ultimately, the viewpoint is critiqued. The findings indicate that Brightman presents a new conceptualization of "self". For him, self is empirical, not only Brightman's empirical self differs from Hume and his advocate's empirical self, but also he believes that their viewpoint has basic difficulties. For Brightman, the empirical self is "person". In his view, person is moral self and it has ethical implications. Of course, Brightman's viewpoint has the disadvantages resulting from his notion of experience; these disadvantages are lack of adherence to logical implications of his conception of experience, its incompatibility with accepted principles of phenomenology, violating the characteristic of communication as one of important features of experience and person, providing context for experience error, skepticism, abstractionism and limiting ethics to subjective ethics.