Reincarnation in The Secret Doctrine

2019 ◽  
pp. 65-86
Author(s):  
Julie Chajes
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Solar Systems ◽  
Second Chance ◽  
Birth Death

Chapter 3 exposes the differences between Blavatsky’s earlier and later theories of rebirth through a close reading of her second major work, The Secret Doctrine (1888). The chapter begins by explaining the ‘macrocosmic’ aspects of Blavatsky’s reincarnation doctrine, that is, her cosmology, which describes the birth, death, and rebirth of planets, solar systems, and even universes. The chapter then explores the ‘microcosmic’ elements of the teaching, namely, Blavatsky’s statements on birth, death, and the revival of human life. The chapter concludes by analysing Blavatsky’s re-interpretation of the ‘second chance’ she believed would be given to those who died in exceptional occurrences. It also considers her claim in The Secret Doctrine that despite the usual acquisition of a new personality in each lifetime, it was possible for adepts to preserve their personal identity through repeated incarnations.

After All

differences ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Nell Wasserstrom
Keyword(s):  
Central Element ◽  
Singular Problem ◽  
Individual Psychology ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Deferred Action ◽  
The Individual

Through a close reading of Freud’s last major work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), this article considers the socio-political and literary stakes of a central element of Freud’s oeuvre, which reaches its fullest elaboration in the Moses text: belatedness. Belatedness, or deferred action (Nachträglichkeit), which structures the movement of repression and return in the individual psychology of Freud’s earlier work, is aggravated and intensified in this late modernist text. Now, it is an entire people (the Jews) and (Judeo-Christian) civilization founded upon the temporal predicament of trauma, latency, and the return of the repressed. What is most innovative about Moses—its fragmentary style, its rewriting of biblical origins, its daring conjectures and methods of recording history—gestures back, after all, to the singular problem that both Freudian psychoanalysis and modernism are destined to repeat: the constitutive belatedness of all experience.

Winch and Wittgenstein

1976 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. C. Almond
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Sexual Relations ◽  
Birth Death

In this paper, I shall be concerned to show: (1) that Winch believes that there can be different conceptions of ‘agreement with reality’; (2) that Wittgenstein agrees with this, but emphasizes the difficulty of understanding such conceptions; (3) that Winch realizes this difficulty, and yet still tries to gain understanding of primitive social institutions in terms of their sense of the significance of human life, in terms of the limiting notions of birth, death and sexual relations; (4) that such a notion of the significance of human life cannot be made sense of without an understanding of the concept of agreement with reality which undergirds it; (5) that Winch's position is internally incoherent.

scholarly journals On Philosophical Themes in Marcel Proust’s Works

2018 ◽  
pp. 78-95
Author(s):  
I. I. Blauberg
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Philosophical Psychology ◽  
Optical Instrument ◽  
The Past ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
The World ◽  
Lost Time

Marcel Proust’s works contain a lot of ideas consonant with the ideas that were actively discussed by philosophers of his time. Many philosophers focused on the issues of perception, memory, will, freedom, personal identity, etc., which constituted an important part of academic curriculum. Proust familiarized himself with the issues studying philosophy at the Lyceum (he was taught by Alphonse Darlu) and at the Sorbonne. In his novel In Search of Lost Time, Proust describes an existential experience of his character viewing these issues from a particular perspective, through the prism of the main character’s lifelong search of his calling. He gradually proceeds from philosophical psychology exploring the interaction of memories and impressions in a particular perception, to philosophy proper, to metaphysics aimed at understanding the truth, at going beyond time. The article traces some moments of this transition, shows that for Proust it is not just the work of memory that is important but the emphasis on those states of consciousness where the present and the past coincide, merge, and thereby we go beyond time, to eternity. The author analyzes some images and signs that accompanied the character of the novel on the way to the realization of his calling. Particular attention is paid to the Proustian interpretation of the role of art in changing and enriching the perception of the world, as well as the importance in human life of a habit in which positive and negative aspects are highlighted. Proust himself believed that a work of art is an optical instrument through which the readers begin to discern in themselves what they would otherwise fail to see. His own novel was such an instrument.

scholarly journals Uses of Genetic Engineering in Judicial Affairs

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 329-355
Author(s):  
Mahr Abdulsalam Khalil ◽  
Hassan Hussein Sediq ◽  
Yusef Abdulrahman Muhammad
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Structure ◽  
Genetic Engineering ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Genetic Material ◽  
Legal Cases ◽  
Judicial Affairs ◽  
Dna Analyses ◽  
Single Identity ◽  
The Subject

Genetic engineering represents the essence of modern scientific developments, rather, it is an essential branch in the contemporary biological revolution, which has become the subject of astonishment and hopes for human life. It plays an effective and influential role in all fields of life, such as science, agriculture, medicine, the environment, animals, and in the field of security and space as well, Therefore, the judiciary tried to benefit from it, And makes it within his service, especially in the field of judicial investigations, establishing lineage and revealing criminal files such as sexual rape, murder and kidnapping, which is done through the use of DNA analyses of human cells known as DNA tests of genetic material as a judicial presumption in order to use it in establishing clear legal, social and legal cases, this is due to the rare and explicit scientific characteristic possessed by the genetic structure of the DNA that is present on chromosomes, the genetic material of all cells of the human body, and it performs the function of inferring a single identity, the personal confidentiality of each individual, which is transmitted through heredity naturally and automatically from both parents for children and grandchildren, it expresses and represents, on its part, the biological characteristics and personal identity of each individual.

The Islamic Secular

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-62
Author(s):  
Humeira Iqtidar
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Empirical Thought

Professor Sherman A. Jackson, an authority on Islamic legal and intellectualhistory, has claimed in this article that a particular form of the secular is internalto Islam. For him, the secular is primarily a manifestation of the differentiationof spheres of human life. The Islamic secular, he argues, is revealedthrough a close reading of the boundaries that the Sharia self-imposes uponits jurisdiction and that implicitly operationalizes a type of differentiation. Hisargument rests upon a distinction between Sharia and the wider religion ofIslam. This allows him to claim that the Sharia’s self-limitation supported arecognition of other modes of reasoning and argumentation within Islam, andthat it is this space of non-Sharia reasoning that constitutes the space of thesecular within Islam. Arguing for such a relationship between Sharia and thesecular, then, leads him to point out that the distinction between the Islamicand the Western seculars lays not so much in the substance, but in their function.In other words, substantively both versions of the secular seem to supportrational, empirical thought; however, in the case of Islam, the function of thesecular is not to reduce of religion.

scholarly journals The Soul and Personal Identity. Derek Parfit’s Arguments in the Substance Dualist Perspective

Perichoresis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-23
Author(s):  
Dmytro Sepetyi
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
Psychological Profile ◽  
Temporal Continuity ◽  
Brain Theory ◽  
Body Theory ◽  
Humean Theory ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Humean View

AbstractThis paper re-evaluates Derek Parfit’s attack on the commonly held view that personal identity is necessarily determinate and that it is what matters. In the first part we first argue against the Humean view of personal identity; secondly, we classify the remaining alternatives into three kinds: the body theory and the brain theory, the quasi-Humean theory, and the soul theory, and thirdly we deploy Parfit’s arguments and related considerations to the point that none of the materialistic alternatives is consistent with the commonly held view. This leaves us with the alternative: either we accept the radical and highly implausible materialistic view Parfit calls ‘Reductionism’, or we accept the view that we are nonphysical indivisible entities—Cartesian egos, or souls. The second part of the paper discusses Parfit’s objections against the Cartesian view: that there is no reason to believe in the existence of such nonphysical entities; that if such entities exist, there is no evidence that they are enduring (to span a human life); that even if they exist and are enduring, they are irrelevant for the psychological profile and temporal continuity of a person; that experiments with ‘brain-splitted’ patients provide strong evidence against the Cartesian view. We argue that these objections are in part mistaken, and that the remaining (sound) part is not strong enough to make the Cartesian view less plausible than Reductionism.

scholarly journals The Threatened Identity: An Empirical Study

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elwira Brygoła
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Structural Model ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Abrupt Changes

The Threatened Identity: An Empirical Study This study explores the phenomenon of threatened identity that occurs because of significant, often abrupt changes in human life. As a result of a difficult experience, decision, change of cultural environment, loss of someone or something very important, an individual may feel he/she is someone different than before. Thus, establishing the continuity of one's personal identity may be a problem. In a report on this type of situation Glynis Breakwell (1986) proposes the term "threatened identity." She places it in the context of her structural model of identity. The present study is aimed at investigating possible images of threatened identity and characterizing them from the point of view of narrative sequences, the affective level and the ultimate - positive or negative - consequences of the individual's functioning. With regard to these aspects, five types of threatened identity have been distinguished from the empirical evidence: (1) the constructive re-evaluation, (2) the key experience, (3) the stable narrative sequence, (4) the seeking of power and autonomy and (5) the loss of part of oneself.

The dialogue with alterity: narratives and the dialectic of identity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Stanghellini
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Basic Form

This chapter introduces the notion of ‘alterity’. The ‘You’ may take several forms in human life that are essential for personal identity and becoming. We may collectively call ‘alterity’ these forms of the ‘You’. Experiencing oneself as a person involves more than a sense of self-sameness. Our identity as a human person is a narrative identity that stems from the dialectics between what we are and the alterity that we encounter in our life. It introduces the concept of ‘narrative identity’ as one basic form of dialogue with alterity. Mental health is the equilibrate dialectic and proportion between sedimentation and innovation, that is, between the alterity that comes manifest through the encounter with one’s un-chosen, ‘involuntary’ disposition or with an event, and the capacity of the person to cope with, modulate, appropriate, and make sense of them.

The Christology of Isaak Dorner Revisited

2003 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
Gordon Dicker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Special Aspect ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Capacity

Isaak Dorner was a major German theologian of the mid-nineteenth century. His major work was a history of the doctrine of the person of Christ, but his own constructive Christological proposals have largely been overlooked. Dorner postulates a universal human capacity for the divine and an eternal will of the Divine to become human through the Logos. He denies that the human nature is either abstract or general. Jesus is a special human being created by God, a Second Adam with a unique responsiveness to the Divine. The special aspect of Dorner's Christology is his contention that the incarnation must be progressive. As the human life of Christ developed there must have been also development of the God-humanity as the Logos continually appropriated new capacities generated by the human development. His Christology sought to protect the full humanity of Christ as expressed by the young Luther, yet also protect the changeless glory of the Divine as expressed in Reformed theology.

"Brain Death," Death, and Personal Identity

KronoScope ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Steineck
Keyword(s):  
Brain Death ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Social ◽  
Temporal Aspects ◽  
Whole Brain Death

AbstractThe issue of brain death touches directly on questions pertaining to our understanding of what it means to be human. Technological progress made possible the sustaining of signs of life in individuals who seem dead to the world. The concept of brain death was introduced to describe this phenomenon, and to answer some of the normative questions that were raised by it. In my article, I approach the problem of brain death with a focus on its temporal aspects. First I sketch out some general features of human life and death in terms of the theories of time of J. T. Fraser and G. Dux. Then I describe and analyze various definitions of brain death and criteria for its testing.The two most important variants are 'whole brain death' as the death of the organism, and 'cerebral death' as the death of the person. I discuss arguments in favor of, and against these concepts and analyze the framework and structuring of temporalities involved in each of them. I conclude that the extant theories in favor of 'brain death' are unsatisfactory, for factual and conceptual reasons. Most importantly, they neglect essential factors of personal identity. Because they employ a naturalistic concept of the human body, they fail to grasp its expressive quality and its function as a medium of communication. Furthermore, they fail to grasp the social dimension of personal identity. Because the concepts of 'brain death' as a criterion for the determination of death fail, we should regard brain-dead people as living human beings, and decide about their treatment accordingly.

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