scholarly journals When time becomes personal. Aging and personal identity

Author(s):  
Christian Sternad

AbstractAging is an integral part of human existence. The problem of aging addresses the most fundamental coordinates of our lives but also the ones of the phenomenological method: time, embodiment, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and even the social norms that grow into the very notion of aging as such. In my article, I delineate a phenomenological analysis of aging and show how such an analysis connects with the debate concerning personal identity: I claim that aging is not merely a physical process, but is far more significantly also a spiritual one as the process of aging consists in our awareness of and conscious relation to our aging. This spiritual process takes place on an individual and on a social level, whereas the latter is the more primordial layer of this experience. This complicates the question of personal identity since it will raise the question in two ways, namely who I am for myself and who I am for the others, and in a further step how the latter experience shapes the former. However, we can state that aging is neither only physical nor only spiritual. It concerns my bodily processes as it concerns the complex reflexive structure that relates my former self with my present and even future self.

Author(s):  
Emilio J. C. Lobato ◽  
Corinne Zimmerman

We review findings from the psychology of science that are relevant to understanding or explaining peoples’ tendencies to believe both scientific and pseudoscientific claims. We discuss relevant theoretical frameworks and empirical findings to support the proposal that pseudoscientific beliefs arise in much the same way as other scientific and non-scientific beliefs do. In particular, we focus on (a) cognitive and metacognitive factors at the individual level; (b) trust in testimony and judgments of expertise at the social level; and (c) personal identity and the public’s relationship with the scientific community at a cultural level.


1951 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-513
Author(s):  
Jean Danielou

For Marxism history is the process by which man transforms himself by transforming the economic conditions of his existence through work. The expression of this process on the social level is the class struggle through which the rising class, corresponding to the economic infrastructure of the future, tends to substitute itself for the exploiting class which is the expression of the outworn infrastructure. To exist is to engage in this conflict and thus participate in the movement of history. Now very often Christians, in order to oppose Marxism, remain on the Marxist plane. They are satisfied to set up one social doctrine against the other. We propose to show in this article that while it is true that there is a Christian social doctrine, and one superior to that of Marxism, the true superiority of Christianity does not lie in this. Its superiority consists, on the contrary, in the fact that it has not only a social doctrine but very different dimensions as well and is thereby capable of giving an integral interpretation of human existence while Marxism only touches the surface of it.


Psicoespacios ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (15) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Beatriz Elena Grajales Zapata ◽  
Carlos Humberto Ossa Henao ◽  
Olena Klimenko ◽  
José Luis Alvares Posada

Perceptions of some people of homosexual orientation on the recognition of the LGBT community at the social level in ColombiaResumenEl articulo presenta resultados de una investigación orientada a indagar por la percepción de algunos residentes del Municipio de Itagüí que se identifican con la orientación homosexual, al respecto del reconocimiento de la comunidad LGTBI a nivel social en Colombia”. El estudio realizado fue de enfoque cualitativo, nivel descriptivo y método fenomenológico. La muestra de participantes fue intencional según el muestreo tipo bola de nieve, y se empelo una entrevista semistrecturada diseñada para el presente estudio. Los participantes consideran que han avanzado en su propósito de ser una población más visible, sin discriminación o sin ser señalados o juzgados por otros y tener más equidad en relación con sus derechos, pero son conscientes que aún falta mucho más por avanzar, pero siguen adelante en esa tarea, con tal de obtener los resultados que buscan, sin verlo como un capricho, sino como una forma de ser incluidos socialmente. Palabras clave: homosexualidad, percepción social, inclusión, igualdad de derechos. Abstract The article presents results of a strategy to investigate the perception of some residents of the Municipality of Itagüí who identify with the homosexual orientation, about the recognition of the LGBTI community social level in Colombia "research. The study was qualitative approach and phenomenological method descriptive level. The sample of participants was intentional as the snow ball sampling type and a interview designed for this study. Participants believe they have advanced in its efforts to be a more visible, without discrimination or being marked or judged by others and have more equity in relation to their rights population, but are aware that there is still much more to move, but move on in this task, provided you get the results they want, without seeing it as a fad, but a way of being socially included Key words: homosexuality, social perception, inclusion, equal rights.


In their debate over Dreyfus’s interpretation of Heidegger’s account of das Man in Being and Time, Frederick Olafson and Taylor Carman agree that Heidegger’s various characterizations of das Man are inconsistent. Olafson champions an existentialist/ontic account of das Man as a distorted mode of being-with. Carman defends a Wittgensteinian/ontological account of das Man as Heidegger’s name for the social norms that make possible everyday intelligibility. For Olafson, then, das Man is a privative mode of Dasein, while for Carman it makes up an important aspect of Dasein’s positive constitution. Neither interpreter takes seriously the other’s account, though both acknowledge that both readings are possible. How should one choose between these two interpretations? Dreyfus suggests that we choose the interpretation that identifies the phenomenon that the work is examining, gives the most internally consistent account of that phenomenon, and shows the compatibility of this account with the rest of the work.


Author(s):  
Steven Gunn

This chapter investigates the experience of preparation for and participation in warfare. People often owned weapons appropriate to their social status, and kept them all over their houses. Modernization was slow, but guns, useful for hunting and home security, spread steadily. Archery practice was widespread and training with other weapons was developing by the 1560s. Exhortations to manly valour, reinforced by peer pressure and self-preservation, egged soldiers on to fight, but captains’ handbooks show the difficulties in turning raw recruits into effective troops, all the more so as the social level of those enlisted relentlessly declined. While standing forces were small, English mercenaries fought in continental wars. Mutiny and desertion, massacre and panic were recurrent phenomena, but death rates were very variable, and more died of disease than from enemy action.


Author(s):  
Lexi Eikelboom

This book argues that, as a pervasive dimension of human existence with theological implications, rhythm ought to be considered a category of theological significance. Philosophers and theologians have drawn on rhythm—patterned movements of repetition and variation—to describe reality, however, the ways in which rhythm is used and understood differ based on a variety of metaphysical commitments with varying theological implications. This book brings those implications into the open, using resources from phenomenology, prosody, and the social sciences to analyse and evaluate uses of rhythm in metaphysical and theological accounts of reality. The analysis relies on a distinction from prosody between a synchronic approach to rhythm—observing the whole at once and considering how various dimensions of a rhythm hold together harmoniously—and a diachronic approach—focusing on the ways in which time unfolds as the subject experiences it. The text engages with the twentieth-century Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara alongside thinkers as diverse as Augustine and the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and proposes an approach to rhythm that serves the concerns of theological conversation. It demonstrates the difference that including rhythm in theological conversation makes to how we think about questions such as “what is creation?” and “what is the nature of the God–creature relationship?” from the perspective of rhythm. As a theoretical category, capable of expressing metaphysical commitments, yet shaped by the cultural rhythms in which those expressing such commitments are embedded, rhythm is particularly significant for theology as a phenomenon through which culture and embodied experience influence doctrine.


Author(s):  
Sharon D. Welch

Assaults on truth and divisions about the nature of wise governance are not momentary political challenges, unique to particular moments in history. Rather, they demonstrate fundamental weaknesses in human reasoning and core dangers in ways of construing both individual freedom and cohesive communities. It will remain an ongoing challenge to learn to deal rationally with what is an intrinsic irrationality in human cognition and with what is an intrinsic tendency toward domination and violence in human collectivities. In times of intense social divisions, it is vital to consider the ways in which humanism might function as the social norm by, paradoxically, functioning in a way different from other social norms. Humanism is not the declaration that a certain set of values or norms are universally valid. At its best and most creative, humanism is not limited to a particular set of norms, but is, rather, the commitment to a certain process in which norms are continuously created, critically evaluated, implemented, sustained or revised. Humanism is a process of connection, perception, implementation, and critique, and it applies this process as much to itself as to other traditions.


Author(s):  
Jakub Čapek ◽  
Sophie Loidolt

AbstractThis special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question (as suggested by thinkers such as MacIntyre, Ricœur and Taylor). These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: (a) debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; (b) questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and (c) the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective.


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