Parapsychology—Its Contributions to the Study of Death

1974 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Scott Rogo
Keyword(s):  
Death And Dying ◽  
Physical Body ◽  
Body Experiences ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Deathbed Visions ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Psychological Inquiry

One topic with which parapsychology has historically associated itself has been whether or not psychical phenomena indicate that man survives death and might even communicate to the living. Parapsychology has investigated the following phenomena which relate to this problem: apparitions, alleged messages from the dead given through gifted subjects (mediums) via some sort of ESP channel; out-of-body experiences (where the mind seems to leave the physical body and functions independently of it); and deathbed visions. Although these phenomena have been verified, parapsychologists are in no general agreement over whether these phenomena do provide evidence that man survives death. Several alternate explanations have been proposed. Nevertheless, psychical phenomena occur so often related to death that any psychological inquiry into the nature of death and dying should take into consideration the data parapsychology has amassed on the subject.

Alessandro Gavazzi: a barnabite friar and the risorgimento (Presidential Address)

1975 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 303-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Basil Hall
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Memento Mori ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Mind

Think nowHistory has many cunning passages, contrived corridorsAnd issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,Guides us by vanities. Think nowShe gives when our attention is distractedAnd what she gives, gives with such supple confusionsThat the giving famishes the craving. Gives too lateWhat’s not believed in, or if still believed,In memory only, reconsidered passion.Historians no doubt have problems enough without setting before themselves that ‘memento mori’ from Eliot, who, though he was describing an old man seeking to understand his own past, leaves nevertheless an echo in the mind disturbing to those who practise the historian’s craft. We assume a confidence which in our heart of hearts we do not always, or should not always, possess. Eliot’s words not only demonstrate the difficulty of one man understanding his own past, but also the historian’s difficulty in understanding those whom they select for questioning from among the vast multitudes of the silent dead, whose deeds, artifacts, ideas, passions, hopes and memories have died with them. We dig into the past, obtain data from archives, brush off the objects found, collect statistics, annotate, arrange, describe, establish a chronology – but do we effectively understand the dead, especially since we are affected by our own beliefs, customs and ideologies? We are, of course, all aware of this: we silently scorn the lecturer who raises these diffident hesitations. For we know our duty: we examine all that we can, we describe our findings, we annotate them, we draw conclusions, or leave our demonstrations to speak for themselves. There are reasons, as I shall hope to show, that these considerations – Eliot’s ominous words and our determination not to be disquieted by them – bear upon the subject of this paper, the almost forgotten Alessandro Gavazzi.

Death and Dying

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Covington
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Death And Dying ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead

Beliefs and practices relating to death underwent profound transformations in the early modern period and continue to provoke the interest of widely disparate scholars. Once the purview of demographic, medical, and social historians, the subject of death and dying has also been given literary and art historical treatments as well as treatment from a range of other interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives. As Philippe Ariès once noted, if the historian (and one might add the student) “wishes to arrive at an understanding” of what death meant in the past, he or she must “widen his field of vision” to encompass different historical approaches and methodologies—and even then the subject still eludes. (Ariès 1981, p. 16–17; cited under Attitudes and Mentalities). No study of death’s history can escape the shadow of Ariès, even if his two works relating to the theme of death have been criticized for the selectivity of their sources and sweeping conclusions about collective beliefs. But as with many such ambitious and problematic works—Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias are others whose field-changing books come to mind—the influence has been enormous. Working from the perspective of social history and the Annales school of French historians, Ariès tended to focus primarily on the cultural and attitudinal aspects of death, with most of the books in this article reflecting this approach. But the biomedical and demographic aspects are also important, particularly in the context of an age that witnessed a revolution in professionalized medicine and, according to many scholars, resulted in the medicalization and eventually the “secularization” of death. Historians have also been influenced by the contributions of anthropologists, such as Jack Goody on ritual, Victor Turner on liminality, and Arnold Van Gennep on rites de passage (rituals marking the life cycle), all of whom have deepened understandings of the very different approaches to death that people held in the premodern past. Many practitioners of “historical anthropology” thus explored cultural practices and collectively held symbolic systems, each of which carried extensive implications for the study of funerary rites, burial customs, or rituals of remembrance. Indeed, the anthropologist Robert Hertz made such endeavors possible in his own work on funerary rituals and the psychological connections between the living and the dead or between the individual and the community. Such perspectives were also animated by a related turn in the study of memory, with such notable exponents as Pierre Nora and his “sites of memory”; as a result the use of tradition and commemorative ritual as well as an interest in epigraphs and tomb monuments has been applied to the memorializing of the dead with productive results. Most of the sections in this article select works that reflect these different theoretical approaches as they describe how death in the early modern world was an intimate fact of life and one that was confronted communally and with a common, consolatory language and set of rituals, all of which was a healthier way, perhaps, to face death than the medicalized isolation that often surrounds it in the early 21st century.

“Our Dead are the Ultimate Teachers of Life”. The Corpse as an Inter-mediator of Transcendence

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-240
Author(s):  
Antje Kahl
Keyword(s):  
Death And Dying ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Spiritual Experiences ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
Funeral Directors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Funeral Director ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship

Today in Germany, religion and the churches forfeit their sovereignty of interpretation and ritual concerning death and dying. The funeral director is the first point of contact when death occurs. Therefore he or she is able to influence the relationship between the living and the dead. In the course of this development, the dead body, often referred to as dirty and dangerous, is being sanitized by funeral directors. Funeral directors credit the dead body with a certain quality; they claim that facing the dead may lead to religious or spiritual experiences, and therefore they encourage the public viewing of the dead – a practice which was, and still is not very common in Germany. The new connotation of the dead body is an example for the dislimitation of religion in modern society. The religious framing of death-related practises no longer exclusively belongs to traditional religious institutions and actors, but can take place in commercial business companies as well.

Determinants of Abuse of the Bodies of the Dead

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-77
Author(s):  
Margarita Khomyakova
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Medical Institutions ◽  
Specific Object ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead ◽  
High Level

The author analyzes definitions of the concepts of determinants of crime given by various scientists and offers her definition. In this study, determinants of crime are understood as a set of its causes, the circumstances that contribute committing them, as well as the dynamics of crime. It is noted that the Russian legislator in Article 244 of the Criminal Code defines the object of this criminal assault as public morality. Despite the use of evaluative concepts both in the disposition of this norm and in determining the specific object of a given crime, the position of criminologists is unequivocal: crimes of this kind are immoral and are in irreconcilable conflict with generally accepted moral and legal norms. In the paper, some views are considered with regard to making value judgments which could hardly apply to legal norms. According to the author, the reasons for abuse of the bodies of the dead include economic problems of the subject of a crime, a low level of culture and legal awareness; this list is not exhaustive. The main circumstances that contribute committing abuse of the bodies of the dead and their burial places are the following: low income and unemployment, low level of criminological prevention, poor maintenance and protection of medical institutions and cemeteries due to underperformance of state and municipal bodies. The list of circumstances is also open-ended. Due to some factors, including a high level of latency, it is not possible to reflect the dynamics of such crimes objectively. At the same time, identification of the determinants of abuse of the bodies of the dead will reduce the number of such crimes.

A STUDY OF THE ATTITUDE OF COLLEGE STUDENTS OF PUNJAB TOWARDS YOGA

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (24) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anurag Asija
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Physical Health ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Body ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Physical Body ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Mind

In modern life, people generally try to accomplish too much in too little time, consequently they accumulate a lot of stress in their lives. In that time, yoga plays an important role to alleviate the stress and rejuvenate the body. In the times, yoga was a form of Bhakti. Rishi Patanjali, rightly called the father of yoga, who around 200 b.c. gave us the present literary form of yoga doctrine in his famous treaties Yoga Sutra. In modern times, the value of yoga is being increasingly recognized for general and it’s preventive and curative effects. Yoga does not conceive man having a physical body but on the contrary, it emphasizes the greater values of the mind which characterizes his personality, Thus, yoga leads to ultimate physical health and happiness together with the achieve of mental and patience.

Kant, Marginal Cases, and Moral Standing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. Korsgaard
Keyword(s):  
Life Stage ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Identity Problem ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Moral Difference

According to the marginal cases argument, there is no property that might justify making a moral difference between human beings and the other animals that is both uniquely and universally human. It is therefore “speciesist” to treat human beings differently just because we are human beings. While not challenging the conclusion, this chapter argues that the marginal cases argument is metaphysically misguided. It ignores the differences between a life stage and a kind, and between lacking a property and having it in a defective form. The chapter then argues for a view of moral standing that attributes it to the subject of a life conceived as an atemporal being, and shows how this view can resolve some familiar puzzles such as how death can be a loss to the person who has died, how we can wrong the dead, the “procreation asymmetry,” and the “non-identity problem.”

A Comparison of Mortality and Sickness in Relation to Geographical and Socio-Economic Factors

1971 ◽  
Vol 97 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. H. Daw
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Good Health ◽  
Acute Illness ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
External Agent ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Socio Economic Factors

‘Suppose a man becomes ill, gets worse and dies. His death is instantaneous but the cause of his death—deterioration of health—may have been progressing for some time. Death takes place because his health has deteriorated beyond a certain limit.’ So wrote C. D. Rich (1940) in introducing his ‘General theory of mortality’ which can also be regarded as a theory of sickness, although Rich does not develop this aspect of it. The point in the gradual deterioration of health at which death takes place is unmistakable but the point at which sickness begins is hazy and ill defined, as also is the point at which recovery from sickness takes place when health is improving. As Stocks (1949) says ‘The distinction between the living and the dead is clear cut, but no such frontier line between sickness and health can be said to exist except in the case of acute illness caused immediately and directly by an external agent. There is a zone between the two states in which the decision whether the subject is sick or not depends on definitions or standards of good health and also on who decides.’

scholarly journals I. The Croonian Lecture.—On the theory of the vertebrate skull

1859 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 381-457 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Biological Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Small Space ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Organic Structure ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
The Mind

The necessity of discussing so great a subject as the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull in the small space of time allotted by custom to a lecture, has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. As, on the present occasion, I shall suffer greatly from the disadvantages of the limitation, I will, with your permission, avail myself to the uttermost of its benefits. It will be necessary for me to assume much that I would rather demonstrate, to suppose known much that I would rather set forth and explain at length; but on the other hand, I may consider myself excused from entering largely either into the history of the subject, or into lengthy and controversial criticisms upon the views which are, or have been, held by others. The biological science of the last half-century is honourably distinguished from that of preceding epochs, by the constantly increasing prominence of the idea, that a community of plan is discernible amidst the manifold diversities of organic structure. That there is nothing really aberrant in nature; that the most widely different organisms are connected by a hidden bond; that an apparently new and isolated structure will prove, when its characters are thoroughly sifted, to be only a modification of something which existed before,—are propositions which are gradually assuming the position of articles of faith in the mind of the investigators of animated nature, and are directly, or by implication, admitted among the axioms of natural history.

Tendency of mass people to misunderstand (intentionally or not) the agony of the psychiatric patient and tormenting them as a subject of mockery with an emphasize on somatic-symptom disorder

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deep Bhattacharjee
Keyword(s):  
Somatic Symptom ◽  
Psychiatric Treatment ◽  
Somatic Symptom Disorder ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
The People ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Affected Subject

Psychiatric disorders’ or as emphasized in the paper in the form of somatic-symptom disorder, a sub-category of Schizophrenia has been from the ancient of the human civilization, when the medicinal approach and treatment of the subject hasn’t been developed yet, the notion of the affected subject to be under some spiritual subjugation has automatically been implied on the minds of the people which leads to immense torture and torment of the subject by the society. However, in the modern medical scenario, the situation has shifted from spiritual/evilness to the extreme derision where it has been already implied on the healthy societies brain that, the subject is intentionally acting like a patient or it’s a ‘disease of the mind’ with no associated physical pain which being attributed to the tendency of late diagnosis and recovery, makes the subject a sheer block of ‘sarcasm’ among the healthy society where they tries their best to make ‘the fun out of him’ as regards to his continuous pain and suffering. This generally amplified by the delay in the starting of the treatment for the difficulty of the doctors to diagnose the disease, as not so developed instruments are still in their infancy to detect and derelict the mental disorders, where in most of the time, the golden period of diagnosis is either over or even if psychiatric treatment is initiated can lead to a more defocused effects as doctors itself finds it difficult to approach the right medicine to the disordered person, where, in case, they have to go from one doctor to another in the risk of a trial and error effect.

Art. III.—On the Methods of Disposing of the Dead at Llassa, Thibet, etc.

1873 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-35
Author(s):  
Charles Horne
Keyword(s):  
The Subject ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
The Dead

In the year 1857 one of the travelling Llamas from Llassa came to Lahoul, in the Kûlû country on the Himalêh, and hearing of the mutiny was afraid to proceed. Major Hay, who was at that place in political employ, engaged this man to draw and describe for him many very interesting ceremonies in use in Llassa, amongst which was the method there employed in disposing of dead bodies. This so exactly confirms the accounts given by Straboand Cicero, and is, moreover, of itself so curious, that I have transcribed it, with as many passages relating to the subject as readily came to hand; and as the Llama was a very fair draughtsman, I have had facsimiles made of his drawings to illustrate this paper. I will first give the extracts, and then the account of the Llama.

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