Philosophical discussions on the ways that death makes life meaningful and sacred.

According to Socrates, as he is described in Plato?s Phaedo, the definition of a true philosopher is a wise man who is continuously practicing dying and being dead. Already in this life, the philosopher tries to free his soul from the body in order to acquire true knowledge as the soul is progressively becoming detached from the body. Centuries after it was written, Plato?s Phaedo continued to play a role for some early Christian authors, and this article focuses on three (...) instances where Christian women mirror Socrates and/or his definition of philosophy. We find these instances in hagiographical literature from the fourth and fifth centuries at different locations in the Roman Empire - in the Lives of Macrina, Marcella and Syncletica. These texts are all to varying degrees impacted by Platonic philosophy and by the ideal of the male philosopher Socrates. As women mastering philosophy, they widened common cultural expectations for women, revealing how Christian authors in certain contexts ascribed authority to female figures. (shrink)

In Ethics 4, Spinoza argues that “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death” (E4p67). Spinoza’s argument for this claim depends on his view of imagination, reason, and scientia intuitiva and on his notion of conatus. I explicate Spinoza’s view of life in terms of power (potentia) and show that Spinozan death amounts to reconfiguration rather than absolute annihilation. I then show that E4p67 (...) reflects Spinoza’s well-known account of the three kinds of knowing. Thinking of death is quintessentially imaginative and passive. The free person of E4p67 is in contrast a rational person. To reason, and as becomes especially clear E5, to experience scientia intuitiva, moreover is to think of things “without any relation to time, but [rather] sub specie aeternatitis”(E2p44c2) and to experience activity To the extent, then, that we are rational, free, and active, death is a non-issue. Indeed, to the extent that we are able to meditate on life sub specie aeternitatis, we actually experience joy, love (E5p20s, p32c), eternity (Sp23s), and “the greatest satisfaction of the Mind” (E5p27). (shrink)

The author of the article: Munkholt Christensen, Maria,?Meditatio mor?tis. Meditating on Death, Philosophy and Gender in Late Antique Hagioraphy?, Philosophy and Society 32 : 177-193 has informed the Editorial Office of an error in the title of the article. The correct title of the article is:?Meditatio mor?tis. Meditating on Death, Philosophy and Gender in Late Antique Hagiography?. The author has requested for this error to be corrected. Therefore, the journal is publishing this Corrigendum. _ Link to the corrected (...) article 10.2298/FID2102177M _. (shrink)

In this brilliant analysis of mind-body problems Edward Pols adds new dimen­sions to the discussion of basic issues. The prisoner is Socrates, who, in a se­ries of actions involving moral decisions, finds himself under sentence of death, and who has now decided to undergo the sentence rather than accept the opportuni­ty to escape provided by powerful friends. Pols takes as his point of departure Socrates’ nai;ve statement of the contrast be­tween a scientific analysis of a moral action and the (...) point of view taken by the agent himself, and his rejection of the adequacy of the scientific analysis. (shrink)

In ancient China, a revered Taoist sage named Zhuangzi told many parables. In Existential Psychology and the Way of the Tao, a selection of these parables will be featured. Following each parable, an eminent existential psychologist will share a personal and scholarly reflection on the meaning and relevance of the parable for psychotherapy and contemporary life. The major tenets of Zhuangzi's philosophy are featured. Taoist concepts of emptiness, stillness, Wu Wei (i.e. intentional non-intentionality), epistemology, dreams and the nature of reality, (...) character building in the midst of pain, meaning and the centrality of relationships, authenticity, self-care, the freedom that can come from one's willingness to confront death, spiritual freedom, and gradations of therapeutic care are topics highlighted in this book. (shrink)

Stone has many symbolic resonances that suit it for use in commemorations of the dead, and many cultures make use of it for this purpose. In an effort to make sense of this phenomenon, Kathleen Higgins, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, considers some of the roles stones play in other aspects of human experience and the associations that arise from them. These associations give stone a certain aptness in connection with four projects that are involved (...) in commemorations of the dead: defying death, preserving the deceased in memory, establishing boundaries with respect to the deceased, and symbolically restoring the deceased to life. In helping to accomplish multiple projects and fulfill associated psychological needs, stone memorials are a specific case of a broader phenomenon: the use of aesthetic means to cope with the disorientation that comes with bereavement. (shrink)

Literary Nonfiction. Philosophy. Winner of the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award. Translated from the German by Michael Eskin. In this penetrating, thought-provoking, and deeply personal philosophical meditation on the death of the beloved other and the turmoil into which it throws those who were close to him, philosopher Kathrin Stengel opens hitherto unseen vistas onto one of the most painful human experiences. The author's ruthless clarity of observation, coupled with razor-sharp philosophical intuition and unflinching honesty of judgment, allows (...) her to pinpoint the personal and social complexities of life after death in a way that cannot but make us doubt some of our common practices in dealing with death and survival. Kathrin Stengel, Ph.D., is a philosopher residing in New York City with her husband and their three sons. Also available from SPD is the German language edition of this text, NOVEMBER-ROSE: EINE REDE UEBER DEN TOD. (shrink)

Saṃvega is a morally motivating state of shock that -- according to Buddhaghosa -- should be evoked by meditating on death. What kind of mental state it is exactly, and how it is morally motivating is unclear, however. This article presents a theory of saṃvega -- what it is and how it works -- based on recent insights in psychology. According to dual process theories there are two kinds of mental processes organized in two" systems" : the experiential, automatic (...) system 1, and the rational, controlled system 2. In normal circumstances, system 1 does not believe in its own mortality. Saṃvega occurs when system 1 suddenly realizes that the "subjective self" will inevitably die (while system 2 is already disposed to affirm the subject's mortality). This results in a state of shock that is morally motivating under certain conditions. Saṃvega increases mortality salience and produces insight in suffering, and in combination with a strengthened sense of loving-kindness or empathic concern both mortality salience and insight in suffering produce moral motivation. (shrink)

The study deals with some of the central issues concerning the notion of death as discussed in Theravāda (Pāli Buddhism) as well as Mahāyāna Buddhism. What is the sense that death is regarded as an instance of duḥkha (Sanskrit) or dukkha (Pāli)? The research claims that here, firstly, the word duḥkha/dukkha is used as an adjective (which means ‘unsatisfactory’) rather than a noun (which means 'pain' or 'suffering'). Secondly, by death, the Buddha did not mean the act (...) of dying but the experience of someone's death or the idea of death. The Buddha also talked about deathlessness as the goal. Here, deathlessness does not amount to accepting something eternal but developing a proper perspective towards death by meditations such as that on impurity ( аśubhabhāvanā ) and contemplation on death ( maraṇānussati ). If the cessation of the cycle of rebirths and re-deaths ( punarmṛtyu ) is the ultimate goal that the arhat (Sanskrit), or arahant (Pāli), achieves, then the same should apply to Tathāgata. In that case, the problem suggests itself: how could the question of Tathāgata’s existence after death be accounted for as an unanswerable ( avyākṛta )? The study opines that the reason behind this is the profound, immeasurable, unfathomable nature attributed to Tathāgata. The research also discusses the basic difference between the attitudes on death in Śrāvakayāna and Mahāyāna. Lastly, it deals with the question of whether termination of one’s own life is permissible in Buddhism under certain conditions. (shrink)

Few concepts are more central to ethics than love, but none is more subject to false consolation. This 1999 book explores several theological, philosophical and literary accounts of love, focusing on how it relates to matters such as self-interest and self-sacrifice, and invulnerability and immortality. Timothy Jackson first considers key aspects of what the Bible says about love, then he further examines the meaning of love and sacrifice through a close reading of novels by Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Lastly, he evaluates (...) how love constrains, and is constrained by, other traditional moral concepts. Throughout, Jackson defends the moral priority of what the Christian tradition calls 'agape'. He argues that a proper understanding of agapic love rejects both moral relativism and the comfort of believing that good people cannot be harmed, or that God causally necessitates every historical action and event. When love is thus disconsoled, it neither fears death nor despises life. (shrink)

This article discusses the theological implications of Adorno’s writings on Beckett by specifically examining their constellative motifs of death, reconciliation and redemption. It addresses not only their content but also their form, suggesting a mutually stimulating relationship between the two as based both on a negative-dialectical approach and an inverse-theological trajectory. Focusing on Adorno’s discussion of Beckett’s oeuvre as a “metaphysical entity,” I argue that Adorno’s reading of Beckett is peculiar because it is inextricably tied to his own critical-theological (...) venture. The essay claims that Adorno’s reflections on Beckett contour, at their most basic level, meditations on theology in the age of its impossibility. (shrink)

This article explores the affinities between film and philosophy by returning to a shared meditation on death and the nature of time. Death has been considered the muse of philosophy and can also be considered the muse of film-philosophy. But what does it mean to say that to film-philosophise is to learn to die, or a kind of training for dying? Film is an artistic object that reminds us of death’s inevitability; it is a meditation (...) on the transient and finite nature of time. Films as diverse as Mizoguchi’s Tales of Ugetsu, Resnais’s Hiroshima mon Amour, and Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light take an uncanny approach to the subject, expressing the paradoxical coexistence of life and death and of different temporal dimensions. This article explores the philosophical concept of the death-image and time through a Deleuzian approach to cinema, meditating on the flashback, the coexistence of the present and the past, and the emergence of a new type of Lazarean character – one who returns from the dead. The article aims to clarify not simply death’s unquestionable omnipresence in film but also cinema’s role as a contemporary version of the trope of memento mori. (shrink)

This article announces the discovery of a Sinhalese version of the traditional meditation ( borān yogāvacara kammaṭṭhāna ) text in which the Consciousness or Mind, personified as a Princess living in a five-branched tree (the body), must understand the nature of death and seek the four gems that are the four noble truths. To do this she must overcome the cravings of the five senses, represented as five birds in the tree. Only in this way will she permanently (...) avoid the attentions of Death, Māra, and his three female servants, Birth, Sickness and Old Age. In this version of the text, when the Princess manages not to succumb to these three, Māra comes and snatches her from her tree and rapes her. The Buddha then appears to her to explain the path to liberation. The text provides a commentary, padārtha , which explains the details of the symbolism of the fruit in terms of rebirth and being born, the tree in terms of the body, etc. The text also offers interpretations of signs of impending death and prognostications regarding the next rebirth. Previously the existence of Khmer and Lānnā versions of this text have been recorded by Francois Bizot and Francois Lagirarde, the former publishing the text as Le Figuier a cinq branches (Le figuier à cinq branches, 1976). The Sinhalese version was redacted for one of the wives of King Kīrti Śrī Rājasiṅha of Kandy by the monk Varañāṇa Mahāthera of Ayutthayā. This confirms earlier speculation that this form of borān/dhammakāya meditation was brought to Sri Lanka with the introduction of the Siyam Nikāya in the mid-eighteenth century. It also shows that in Sri Lanka, as in Ayutthayā, this form of meditation—which in the modern period was to be rejected as ‘unorthodox’—was promoted at the highest levels of court and Saṅgha. (shrink)

Can we conceive of a mind without body? Does, for example, the idea of the soul's immortality make sense? Certain versions of materialism deny such questions; I shall try to prove that these versions of materialism cannot be right. They fail because they cannot account for the mental vocabulary from the language of brains in the vat. Envatted expressions such as "I think", "I believe", etc., do not have to be reinterpreted when we translate them to our language; they are (...) semantically stable. By contrast, physical expressions from the vat language are semantically instable; due to Putnam's externalism they cannot be transported to our language without change. This contrast opens the way to a new understanding of what the immortality of the soul might be like: A brain in a vat (and its mental life) might survive what the brain calls "my physical body's death". (shrink)

What is God? What does it mean to believe in God? What happens to God after the death of God? This book examines “the death of God” from a philosophical standpoint. It focuses on monotheism, polytheism, and nature, and it discusses the renewed importance of spirituality—and the “spiritual but not religious”—in response to the death of God. In recent years, religious belief has been in decline, but secularism cannot satisfy our spiritual needs. We are now living in (...) a “post-secular” age in which the relationship between philosophy, spirituality, and religion must be re-examined. As an exploratory essay, this book engages the reader at a profound level, and considers a variety of modern thinkers, including Nietzsche, Hegel, Freud, Levinas, Assmann, and Buber. It offers a sustained meditation on the origin of God, the death of God, and the future of “God” as a guiding ideal. (shrink)

From Pulitzer Prize-finalist Steven Nadler, an engaging guide to what Spinoza can teach us about life’s big questions In 1656, after being excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds,” the young Baruch Spinoza abandoned his family’s import business to dedicate his life to philosophy. He quickly became notorious across Europe for his views on God, the Bible, and miracles, as well as for his uncompromising defense of free thought. Yet the radicalism of Spinoza’s views has long (...) obscured that his primary reason for turning to philosophy was to answer one of humanity’s most urgent questions: How can we lead a good life and enjoy happiness in a world without a providential God? In Think Least of Death, Pulitzer Prize–finalist Steven Nadler connects Spinoza’s ideas with his life and times to offer a compelling account of how the philosopher can provide a guide to living one’s best life. In the Ethics, Spinoza presents his vision of the ideal human being, the “free person” who, motivated by reason, lives a life of joy devoted to what is most important—improving oneself and others. Untroubled by passions such as hate, greed, and envy, free people treat others with benevolence, justice, and charity. Focusing on the rewards of goodness, they enjoy the pleasures of this world, but in moderation. “The free person thinks least of all of death,” Spinoza writes, “and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life." An unmatched introduction to Spinoza’s moral philosophy, Think Least of Death shows how his ideas still provide valuable insights about how to live today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Till Death Do Us Part”? Buddhist Insights on Christian MarriageWioleta PolinskaHigh divorce rates and declining marriage rates in Western societies draw the attention of many scholars to the fragility of contemporary marriages.1 Rampant individualism, permissive divorce law, and softening stance on divorce by mainstream Christian denominations are all listed as culprits responsible for the current marriage crisis.2 These conventional accounts, however, overlook important insights gathered by historians of (...) marriage, insights that point to a dramatic shift in the concept of marriage that occurred more than two hundred years ago. According to Stephanie Coontz, “the invention of the historically unprecedented idea that marriage should be based on love and mutual affection” 3 is responsible for greater fragility, but also for creating good, satisfying marriages that bring much happiness to people’s lives.4 Thus, the very source of fragility (the search for love and mutual affection) is also a source of deep connections and lasting relationships. While the fragility accompanying contemporary marriage is here to stay, our efforts to build strong unions need to be carefully evaluated. In what follows, I will address Christian and Buddhist approaches that aim at protecting the stability of marriage. To strengthen marriage, Christianity, from early on, focused on the permanence of marriage whether understood as a sacrament or, later on, as a covenant. Christian wedding vows that promise love, care, and enduring partnership “till death do us part” capture well the prevailing theology of Christian marriage. In contrast, Buddhism employs a concept of impermanence that implies an ever-changing reality that warrants no finality. Recent studies in psychology of mindfulness meditation show that such Buddhist concepts can translate well into effective skills for those in loving relationships. I will suggest that Christian theology might become more successful at preserving the stability of marriage by becoming less focused on the finality of couples’ bonds, and instead attending to the present reality of couples’ relationships.It is well documented that before the seventeenth century marriages were arranged by parents and fulfilled primarily political, economic, and social functions rather than individual needs. Marriage was seen as a means of enlarging one’s economic enterprise, acquiring powerful in-laws, strengthening military alliances, or (for the less [End Page 29] privileged) enlarging the family’s labor force.5 This is not to say that the notion of romantic love was unknown until the seventeenth century, but that it was not closely associated with marriage.6 In aristocratic courts of southern France, for example, romantic love appeared between an unmarried man and a married woman, and it should have been either unconsummated or adulterous.7 As late as the eighteenth century, a “sudden falling head over heels in love, although a familiar enough psychological phenomenon, was thought of as, a mild form of insanity” and an unreasonable basis for marriage.8 Romantic love became widely accepted only in the nineteenth century under the influence of Enlightenment thought, ideals of the French and American Revolutions and of the romantic movement.9Romantic love as an expression of an individual’s desire for fulfillment has its dark side, as it can unleash selfish concerns. Thus, Robert A. Johnson, a Christian theologian, defines romantic love as “airy, fantasy, projections, and an evanescent high. It is fundamentally egotistical—fixated on its own wants and whims. It can never lay the foundation for personal commitments.” 10 The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh (b. 1926) states that love can become a kind of sickness when it forms an attachment, similar to drug dependency. When we are under its spell, we are preoccupied with the object of our love and we desire to control and possess the other. To Ven. Hạnh, this is not true love since “it is only the willingness to make use of the other person in order to satisfy our own needs.” 11 Both Johnson and Ven. Hạnh while criticizing romanticized concepts of love are not giving up on possibility of intimate love. Johnson calls this intimate connection with another person a “human love,” a love that affirms and appreciates another person as she or he actually is, in their totality. Instead of prizing... (shrink)

On the basis of many years of personal experience the paper describes Buddhist meditation as a mystical practice. After a short discussion of the role of some central concepts in Buddhism, William James’ concept of religious experience is used to explain the goal of meditators as the achievement of a special kind of an experience of this kind. Systematically, its main point is to explain the difference between a craving for pleasant ‘mental events’ in the sense of short-term moods, (...) and the long-term project of achieving a deep change in one’s attitude to life as a whole, a change that allows the acceptance of suffering and death. The last part argues that there is no reason to call the discussed practice irrational in a negative sense. Changes of attitude of the discussed kind cannot be brought about by argument alone. Therefore, a considered use of age-old practices like meditation should be seen as an addition, not as an undermining of reason. (shrink)

Exemplified especially by Heidegger and Levinas, the phenomenology of death expresses first, the impossibility of the death experience, second, the authenticity of Dasein starting from the horizon opened by the possibility of death, and third, the relevance of the death of the other to the discovery of one’s own death. This article tries to take a step further, showing the link between the authenticity of Dasein and the desire for immortality manifested in this authenticity. By (...) overturning Heidegger’s theses and by affirming both the necessity of an authentication of death itself—in accord with Socrates’s death example—and the legitimacy of the meditation on death, this text links the need for immortality, which is phenomenologically visible, with the Christian faith in the resurrection, which is visible only for theology. (shrink)

Despite what its title might suggest, Death and Desire is a meditation on life. Using the texts of Hegel, Heidegger, and Deleuze, the author argues that philosophy has been dominated by a form of thought that focuses exclusively on death. The importance of Death and Desire lies in its refusal of the morbidity of much contemporary philosophy. Its uniqueness lies in placing Hegel, Heidegger, and Deleuze in conversation. Its usefulness lies in the clarity with which it (...) articulates and compares these very diverse thinkers. (shrink)

Recent EEG studies on the early postmortem interval that suggest the persistence of electrophysiological coherence and connectivity in the brain of animals and humans reinforce the need for further investigation of the relationship between the brain’s activity and the dying process. Neuroscience is now in a position to empirically evaluate the extended process of dying and, more specifically, to investigate the possibility of brain activity following the cessation of cardiac and respiratory function. Under the direction of the Center for Healthy (...) Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, research was conducted in India on a postmortem meditative state cultivated by some Tibetan Buddhist practitioners in which decomposition is putatively delayed. For all healthy baseline and postmortem subjects presented here, we collected resting state electroencephalographic data, mismatch negativity, and auditory brainstem response. In this study, we present HB data to demonstrate the feasibility of a sparse electrode EEG configuration to capture well-defined ERP waveforms from living subjects under very challenging field conditions. While living subjects displayed well-defined MMN and ABR responses, no recognizable EEG waveforms were discernable in any of the tukdam cases. (shrink)

Very Little... Almost Nothing puts the question of the meaning of life back at the centre of intellectual debate. Its central concern is how we can find a meaning to human finitude without recourse to anything that transcends that finitude. A profound but secular meditation on the theme of death, Critchley traces the idea of nihilism through Blanchot, Levinas, Jena Romanticism and Cavell, culminating in a reading of Beckett, in many ways the hero of the book. In this (...) second edition, Simon Critchley has added a revealing and extended new preface, and a new chapter on Wallace Stevens which reflects on the idea of poetry as philosophy. (shrink)

In the summer of 1886, shortly before his fifty-eighth birthday, Leo Tolstoy was seriously injured while working in the fields of his estate. Bedridden for over two months, Tolstoy began writing a meditation on death and dying that soon developed into a philosophical treatise on life, death, love, and the overcoming of pessimism. Although begun as an account of how one man encounters and laments his death and makes this death his own, the final work, (...) On Life, describes the optimal life in which we can all be happy despite our mortality. After its completion, On Life was suppressed by the tsars, attacked by the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church, and then censored by the Stalinist regime. This critical edition is the first accurate translation of this unsung classic of Russian thought into English, based on a study of manuscript pages of Tolstoy's drafts, and the first scholarly edition of this work in any language. It includes a detailed introduction and annotations, as well as historical material, such as early drafts, documents related to the presentation of an early version at the Moscow Psychological Society, and responses to the work by philosophers, religious leaders, journalists, and ordinary readers of Tolstoy's day. (shrink)

During Advent we prayerfully consider how Jesus was born to save us from death through his incarnation, death, and resurrection. Remembering this in light of your own death can change your life. Mememto mori or "remember your death" is a phrase long associated with the practice of remembering the unpredictable and inevitable end of one's life. This book is the latest in a series of books by Sr. Theresa Alethia Noble, FSP, that explores the traditional Christian (...) practice of meditation on death in light of Christ. This book will help you to connsider the four Last Things: death, judgment, hell, and heaven in the context of Advent. -- Adapted from back cover. (shrink)

The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, The Gift of (...) class='Hi'>Death resonates with much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation. This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s Literature in Secret. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s Letter to His Father and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty. “An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion... [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—Booklist, on the first edition. (shrink)

War lays bare death and our relation to it. And in the wars—or more precisely the memories of war—of the twentieth century, images of the deaths of countless faceless or nameless others eclipse the singularity of each victim’s death as well as the end of the world as such that each death signifies. Marc Crépon’s _The Thought of Death and the Memory of War_ is a call to resist such images in which death is no (...) longer actual death since it happens to anonymous others, and to seek instead a world in which mourning the other whose mortality we always already share points us toward a cosmopolitics. Crépon pursues this path toward a cosmopolitics of mourning through readings of works by Freud, Heidegger, Sartre, Patocka, Levinas, Derrida, and Ricœur, and others. The movement among these writers, Crépon shows, marks a way through—and against—twentieth-century interpretation to argue that no war, genocide, or neglect of people is possible without suspending how one relates to the death of another human being. A history of a critical strain in contemporary thought, this book is, as Rodolphe Gasché says in the Foreword, “a profound meditation on what constitutes evil and a rigorous and illuminating reflection on death, community, and world.” The translation of this work received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (shrink)

_The Gift of Death_, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book _Given Time_ about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s _Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History _and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, _The Gift of Death_ resonates (...) with much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation. This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s _Literature in Secret_. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s _Letter to His Father_ and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty. “An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion... [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—_Booklist_, on the first edition. (shrink)

A moral philosopher’s meditations on some of life’s most important questions We’ve all had to puzzle over such profound matters as birth, death, regret, free will, agency, and love. How might philosophy help us think through these vital concerns? In On Being Me, renowned moral philosopher J. David Velleman presents a concise, accessible, and intimate exploration into subjects that we care deeply about, offering compelling insights into what it means to be human. Each of Velleman’s short, personal chapters begins (...) with a theme: “Being Glad I Was Born,” “Wanting to Go On,” “Fearing the End,” “Regretting What Might Have Been,” “Aspiring to Authorship,” “Making Things Happen,” and “Wanting to Be Loved.” Reflecting on how daily life presents us with thorny riddles that need working out, Velleman arrives at unexpected conclusions about survival and personal identity, the self and its future, time and morality, the rationality of regret, free will and personal efficacy, and goodness and love. He shows that we can rely on our own powers of thought to arrive at a better understanding of the most fundamental parts of ourselves—and that the methods of philosophy can help get us there. Beautifully illustrated by New Yorker contributing artist Emily Bernstein, On Being Me invites us to approach life philosophically. (shrink)

At the time of his death in 2005, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur was regarded as one of the great thinkers of his generation. In more than half a century of writing about the essential questions of human life, Ricoeur’s thought encompassed a vast range of wisdom and experience, and he made landmark contributions that would go on to influence later scholars in such areas as phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and theology. Toward the end of his life, Ricoeur began to focus (...) directly on ethical questions that he feared had been overshadowed by his other work; the result was a two-volume collection of essays on justice and the law. The University of Chicago Press published the English translation of the first volume, The Just, to great acclaim in 2000. Now this translation of the second volume, Reflections on the Just, completes the set and makes available to readers the whole of Ricoeur’s meditations on the concept. Consisting of fifteen thematically organized essays, Reflections on the Just continues and expands on the work Ricoeur began in with his “little ethics” in Oneself as Another and The Just. In the preface, he considers what revisions he would make were he to start over and how that is reflected in these essays. The opening part brings phenomenology to bear on ethics; the second group of essays comprises shorter, occasional pieces considering the concept of justice in the works of other philosophers, including Max Weber and Charles Taylor. The final part turns to the specific domains of medicine and the law, examining how concepts of right and justice operate in those realms. Cogent, deeply considered, and fully engaged with the realities of the contemporary world, Reflections on the Just is an essential work for understanding the development of Ricoeur’s thought in his final years. (shrink)

Before publishing his landmark _Meditations_ in 1641, Rene Descartes sent his manuscript to many leading thinkers to solicit their objections to his arguments. He included these objections, along with his own detailed replies, as part of the first edition. This unusual strategy gave Descartes a chance to address criticisms in advance and to demonstrate his willingness to consider diverse viewpoints—critical in an age when radical ideas could result in condemnation by church and state, or even death. _Descartes and his (...) Contemporaries_ recreates the tumultuous intellectual community of seventeenth-century Europe and provides a detailed, modern analysis of the _Meditations_ in its historical context. The book's chapters examine the arguments and positions of each of the objectors—Hobbes, Gassendi, Arnauld, Morin, Caterus, Bourdin, and others whose views were compiled by Mersenne. They illuminate Descartes' relationships to the scholastics and particularly the Jesuits, to Mersenne's circle with its debates about the natural sciences, to the Epicurean movements of his day, and to the Augustinian tradition. Providing a glimpse of the interactions among leading 17th-century intellectuals as they grappled with major philosophical issues, this book sheds light on how Descartes' thought developed and was articulated in opposition to the ideas of his contemporaries. (shrink)

This is a meditation on death and life after death which employs current scientific thinking as a metaphor for immortality. The author examines the possibility that consciousness may survive death, and explores the many interpretations of death that exist - the scientific, the philosophical, the pyschological and the religious/spiritual. He addresses the ultimate question: do human beings have a spirit or soul which can exist independently from their physical brain?

In this beautifully written, personal meditation on life and living, Raymond Tallis reflects on the fundamental fact of existence: that it is finite. Inspired by E. M. Forster’s thought that “Death destroys a man but the idea of it saves him,” Tallis invites readers to look back upon their lives from a unique standpoint: one’s own future corpse. From this perspective, he shows, the world now vacated can be seen most clearly in all its richness and complexity. Tallis (...) blends lyrical reflection, humor, and the occasional philosophical argument as he explores his own postmortem recollections. He considers the biological processes and the senses that opened up his late world and the million-nooked space in which he passed his life. His inert, dispossessed body highlights his ceaseless activity in life, the mind-boggling inventory of his possessions, and the togetherness and apartness that characterized his relationships in the material and social worlds. Tallis also touches on the idea of a posthumous life in the memories of those who outlive him. Readers who accompany Tallis as he considers his life through death will appreciate with new intensity the precariousness and preciousness of life, for here he succeeds in his endeavor to make “the shining hour” shine more brightly. (shrink)

Stirring reflections on the human condition from a warrior and emperor provide a fascinating glimpse into the mind and personality of a highly principled Roman of the 2nd century. Recognizing that suffering is at the core of life, he counsels stoic detachment in the face of inevitable pain, loss and death.

The Sickness unto Death is commonly regarded as one of Kierkegaard's most important works – but also as one of his most difficult texts to understand. It is a meditation on Christian existentialist themes including sin, despair, religious faith and its redemptive power, and the relation and difference between physical and spiritual death. This volume of new essays guides readers through the philosophical and theological significance of the work, while clarifying the complicated ideas that Kierkegaard develops. Some (...) of the essays focus closely on particular themes, others attempt to elucidate the text as a whole, and yet others examine it in relation to other philosophical views. Bringing together these diverse approaches, the volume offers a comprehensive understanding of this pivotal work. It will be of interest to those studying Kierkegaard as well as existentialism, religious philosophy, and moral psychology. (shrink)

At the time of his death in 2005, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur was regarded as one of the great thinkers of his generation. In more than half a century of writing about the essential questions of human life, Ricoeur’s thought encompassed a vast range of wisdom and experience, and he made landmark contributions that would go on to influence later scholars in such areas as phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and theology. Toward the end of his life, Ricoeur began to focus (...) directly on ethical questions that he feared had been overshadowed by his other work; the result was a two-volume collection of essays on justice and the law. The University of Chicago Press published the English translation of the first volume, _The Just_, to great acclaim in 2000. Now this translation of the second volume, _Reflections on the Just_, completes the set and makes available to readers the whole of Ricoeur’s meditations on the concept. Consisting of fifteen thematically organized essays, _Reflections on the Just_ continues and expands on the work Ricoeur began in with his “little ethics” in _Oneself as Another_ and _The Just_. In the preface, he considers what revisions he would make were he to start over and how that is reflected in these essays. The opening part brings phenomenology to bear on ethics; the second group of essays comprises shorter, occasional pieces considering the concept of justice in the works of other philosophers, including Max Weber and Charles Taylor. The final part turns to the specific domains of medicine and the law, examining how concepts of right and justice operate in those realms. Cogent, deeply considered, and fully engaged with the realities of the contemporary world, _Reflections on the Just_ is an essential work for understanding the development of Ricoeur’s thought in his final years. (shrink)

As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely expressed in speeches and interviews, remains virtually unknown to even his most loyal readers. This book brings together previously unpublished transcripts of oral presentations in which Foucault speaks at length about literature and its links to some of his principal themes: madness, language (...) and criticism, and truth and desire.The associations between madness and language--and madness and silence--preoccupy Foucault in two 1963 radio broadcasts, presented here, in which he ranges among literary examples from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Diderot, before taking up questions about Artaud's literary correspondence, lettres de cachet, and the materiality of language. In his lectures on the relations among language, the literary work, and literature, he discusses Joyce, Proust, Chateaubriand, Racine, and Corneille, as well as the linguist Roman Jakobson. What we know as literature, Foucault contends, begins with the Marquis de Sade, to whose writing--particularly La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette--he devotes a full two-part lecture series focusing on notions of literary self-consciousness.Following his meditations on history in the recently published Speech Begins after Death, this current volume makes clear the importance of literature to Foucault's thought and intellectual development. (shrink)

The bare bones of the story of Bodhidharma, that strange, bearded, wide-eyed fellow who brought the meditation school of Buddhism that we know as Zen to China, are well known. He sailed from India to Canton and then proceeded to the court of Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty, who asked the Patriarch how much merit he had accumulated from sponsoring the building of temples, the copying of Buddhist scriptures, and the ordination of monks. When Bodhidharma replied, "None," the (...) emperor didn't understand, so Bodhidharma went north, crossed the Yangtse River on a reed, and spent nine years gazing at a wall at Shao-lin Monastery. (shrink)

A moving meditation on the hidden, sometimes difficult topics we must consider to live an authentic life, from the New York Times bestselling author of To Shake the Sleeping Self. We aren't born into a self. It is created without our consent, built on top of our circumstances, the off-handed comments we hear from others, and the moments that scared us most when we were young. But in the busyness of our daily life, we rarely get the chance to (...) think clearly about the questions that matter most. Who am I? Where do I belong? How much of who I am and what I do boils down to avoiding the things that make me feel small? We tuck these questions into the corner of our minds, but they drive our behavior far more than we give them credit for, even after we become adults. Writing with the passion and clarity that made his debut, To Shake the Sleeping Self, a national bestseller, Jenkins makes space to explore the seven topics we must think about in order to live a deeply considered life: ego, family, work, love, nature, death, and the soul. He considers the experiences that shape us into who we are, whether they're as heart-pounding as a rafting trip through the whitewater of the Grand Canyon, or as ordinary as the moment when we look in the mirror each morning. Through it all, Jenkins leads readers on a wide-ranging conversation about finding fulfillment in the people and places around us, and discovering the courage to show our deepest selves to the world. Like Streams to the Ocean is a profound reflection from one of our most original writers, a necessary read for anyone seeking a companion on the road to understanding. (shrink)

This study was designed as an action research aimed to help students to elaborate their feelings of traumatic grief, due to a car accident and a suicide of two of their classmates, in an Italian high school. A death education project was realized in order to prevent the Werther effect. The intervention was based on psychodramatic techniques and meditation with Tibetan bells to encourage reflection on the suffering of traumatic loss, the sense of life, and their future. A (...) total of 89 students from four classes participated in the study, among which 82 completed the pre- and post-test survey. The intervention consisted of eight 2-h meetings, during which the themes of death and loss were dealt with through theoretical discussions, dramatization, and meditation. Two other classes which participated in the assessment as a control group did not attend the activities. The following instruments were used: Death Attitude Profile-Revised, which measures individual attitudes toward death; Psychological Well-being Scale, which measures a person’s psychological well-being; Resilience Scale for Adolescents, which measures the construct of resilience in adolescents; Self-Transcendence Scale, which measures self-transcendence; and Testoni Death Representation Scale, which measures the ontological representations of death. The results demonstrated that in the experimental group, there was a reduction in the fear of death and its avoidance, and that the students normalized the representation of death as something natural, thus improving their well-being. It is consequently possible to say that well-being is not simply the absence of suffering and worries, but rather, is rooted in the possibility of thinking of creative solutions to the trauma. (shrink)

The book attempts to conceptualize the “ancient” issues of human death and human mortality in connection to the timely and vital subject of euthanasia. This subject forces the meditation to actually consider those ideological, ethical, deontological, legal, and metaphysical frameworks which guide from the very beginning any kind of approach to this question. This conception – in dialogue with Heideggerian fundamental ontology and existential analytics – reveals that, on the one hand, the concepts and ethics of death (...) are originally determined by the ontology of death, and, on the other hand, that, on this account, the question of euthanasia can only be authentically discussed in the horizon of this ontology. It is only this that may reveal to whom dying – our dying – pertains, while it also reveals our relationship to euthanasia as a determined human potentiality or final possibility. Thus euthanasia is outlined in the analysis as the possibility of becoming a mortal on the one hand, while on the other hand it appears in relation to the particularities of its existential structure, which essentially differ from the existential and ontological structure of any other possibility of dying. This is why it should not be mixed up with, or mistaken for, any of these. (shrink)

_A trenchant analysis of sacrifice as the foundation of the modern, as well as the ancient, social order_ The modern conception of sacrifice is at once cast as a victory of self-discipline over desire and condescended to as destructive and archaic abnegation. But even in the Old Testament, the dual natures of sacrifice, embodying both ritual slaughter and moral rectitude, were at odds. In this analysis, Terry Eagleton makes a compelling argument that the idea of sacrifice has long been misunderstood. (...) Pursuing the complex lineage of sacrifice in a lyrical discourse, Eagleton focuses on the Old and New Testaments, offering a virtuosic analysis of the crucifixion, while drawing together a host of philosophers, theologians, and texts—from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida to the _Aeneid _and _The Wings of the Dove_. Brilliant meditations on death and _eros_, Shakespeare and St. Paul, irony and hybridity explore the meaning of sacrifice in modernity, casting off misperceptions of barbarity to reconnect the radical idea to politics and revolution. (shrink)

Jewish and Christian philosophy existed side by side in the Middle Ages. Both sought the same goal: the explanation of God and His universe. Both utilized the same sources; yet each attained different philosophical and theological systems. The Meditation of the Sad Soul illustrates this divergence between Christian and Jewish thought. Furthermore, since it stands midway between Neo-platonic and Aristotelian Judaism, it underlines the development of key philosophical concepts common to both Judaism and Christianity. Abraham Bar Hayya lived in (...) eleventh century Barcelona, an intellectual center for both Jews and Arabs. The major points of his philosophy blend rabbinical, Neo-platonic and Aristotelian ideas, yet maintain a unique independence of their own. For instance, Abraham cut through the rabbinical and Aristotelian proofs of God, demanding instead a primary positive faith in God's existence. Caught up in the theology of light, he rejected the Platonic idea that darkness was merely an absence of light. Rather, darkness had a force equal to light. Most important, darkness and light were opposites, as were good and evil. God created both. Abraham insists that each had an independent existence in the world. Abraham's thought shows a more "rational" strain which appears later in Christian and even Jewish "heresies." Since good and evil exist as positive forces, man can freely choose his path to salvation. Abraham never gets caught in the Augustinian dilemma of will, grace, and predestination. Further examples of Abraham's independent position crop up in his ideas of creation and time. Creation ex nihilo, of course, but creation in time. Time must have a beginning and, consequently, an end. But man does not have to await passively the Messiah's rectification of sin. Man must repent here on earth and actively lead a good life. He cannot repent after death. How influential was Abraham's tract? The editor calls it a "minor classic" yet does not indicate that it formed a basis for later Christian theology. Maimonides knew it and rejected some of its basic tenets. Still, the book is important since it indicates a striking combination of traditional philosophy subjected to a new critical rationalism, an it foreshadows some of the questions raised by deviant Christian and Jewish theologians.--J. K. B. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: How Common Are Serial Killings? What is a Serial Killer? I Think Therefore I Kill: The Philosophical Musings of Serial Killers Can You Blame Them? Ethics, Evil, and Serial Killing Dangerous Infatuations: The Public Fascination with Serial Killers A Eulogy for Emotion: The Lack of Empathy and the Urge to Kill Creepy Cognition: Talking and Thinking about Serial Killers Psycho‐ology: Killer Mindsets and Meditations on Murder A Solemn Afterword: A Message from the Victim's Network A (...) Timeline of Serial Killers Notes. (shrink)

In her essay collection First, Second, and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity, well-known scholar of ancient philosophy Jennifer Whiting gathers her previously published essays taking Aristotle's theories on friendship as a springboard to engage with contemporary philosophical work on personal identity and moral psychology. Whiting examines three themes throughout the collection, the first being psychic contingency, or the belief that the psychological structures characteristic of human beings may in fact vary, not just from one cultural context to (...) another, but also from one individual to another. The second theme is the belief that friendship informs an understanding of the nature of the self, an idea that springs from Whiting's uncommon reading of Aristotle's writings on friendship. Specifically, Whiting explains a scenario in which a "virtuous agent" adopts a kind of impersonal attitude both towards herself and towards her "character" friends, loving both because they are virtuous; this scenario ties in with an examination of the Aristotelian concept of the ideal friend as an "other self," or a friendship that evolves from character rather than ego, as well as Whiting's meditation on whether or not a virtuous individual should have a "special" sort of concern for her own future self, distinct in kind from the concern that she has for others. The third theme is that of rational egoism, a concept that Whiting critiques, especially in the context of Aristotle's eudaimonism. The central tenet of the collection is the message that taking "ethocentric" attitudes both towards ourselves and towards our friends sheds light on the nature of personal identity and helps to combat ethnocentric and other objectionable forms of bias, a message that is becoming increasingly urgent in light of the recent deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. (shrink)

Timeless wisdom on death and dying from the celebrated Stoic philosopher Seneca "It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die," wrote the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca. He counseled readers to "study death always," and took his own advice, returning to the subject again and again in all his writings, yet he never treated it in a complete work. How to Die gathers in one volume, for the first time, Seneca's remarkable meditations on death and dying. (...) Edited and translated by James S. Romm, How to Die reveals a provocative thinker and dazzling writer who speaks with a startling frankness about the need to accept death or even, under certain conditions, to seek it out. Seneca believed that life is only a journey toward death and that one must rehearse for death throughout life. Here, he tells us how to practice for death, how to die well, and how to understand the role of a good death in a good life. He stresses the universality of death, its importance as life's final rite of passage, and its ability to liberate us from pain, slavery, or political oppression. Featuring beautifully rendered new translations, How to Die also includes an enlightening introduction, notes, the original Latin texts, and an epilogue presenting Tacitus's description of Seneca's grim suicide. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 71-98MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Hospitality after the Death of GodTracy McNultyPierre Klossowski's fiction has been only sporadically published in English, and largely dismissed as perverse erotica or soft-core porn. When his 1965 trilogy Les lois de l'hospitalité was partially translated in English (under the title Roberte, ce soir & The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes), its Library of Congress classification characterized it simply as (...) "erotic fiction—French." Even in France, Klossowski has become the very signifier of perversion. His artwork graces the cover of Serge André's L'imposture perverse and of numerous erotic novels, he has been "diagnosed" as a pervert by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and unironic readers of his Sade mon prochain hail him as Sade's disciple and heir.1Admittedly, the larger stakes of Klossowski's work are easily obscured by its free adaptation of the stock themes of libertine literature. His fictional works, like his visual compositions (essentially representations of rape scenes, often on historical themes—Diana and Actaeon, the Rape of Lucretia), explore the conflict between a woman's chaste moral attitude and her gradual surrender to an assailant's advances. The Laws of Hospitality concerns the erotic awakening of "hospitality" in a woman, which exposes a contradiction within her moral character and reveals her symbolic identity to be without foundation. Its protagonist Octave, who bears more than a passing resemblance to his creator, is a collector of artworks that eroticize the moment of moral hesitation experienced by women submitting to the sexual advances of a chance stranger—or even a "spiritual" apparition. His "laws of hospitality" are the fruit of his desire to experience this operation firsthand; they name a practice wherein the master of the house "offers" his wife to fortuitous guests, in order to savor the moment of her surrender.However, the stakes of Klossowski's "perverse" meditations are very different from the Sadeian project of uprooting religious morality. Sade challenges the patriarchal and religious authorities of his day by demonstrating that the paternal signifier on which their laws are based is without foundation. In proving that the law cannot hold [End Page 71] up against the repeated assaults of libertinage, he mounts a systematic deconstruction of the symbolic order of language by the real of jouissance. But although Klossowski may share Sade's perverse drive to "humiliate the law with the object,"2 his target is not the signifier as such, but rather the imaginary consistency afforded by what he calls the "grammatical fiction of the 'I,'" the illusion of autonomous personhood. The "object" he confronts it with is not the natural "truth" of jouissance, but rather the feminine object who disrupts the identity of the "master" who offers her.Klossowski's reflections on the special status of femininity in Enlightenment culture—at once marginal and singularly "extimate"—have never been fully appreciated, despite their enormous interest for the study of culture. In a way unique among contemporary authors, Klossowski sheds light on Jacques Lacan's enigmatic insight that the cultural importance of the feminine object consists in its sublimated status as an "object raised to the dignity of the Thing" [Lacan 112]. His fiction underscores the close ties between the feminine and what Freud called das Ding, the Thing uncannily internal to subjectivity that Lacan later identified with the function of the Nebenmensch, as the apotheosis of the Christian idea of the prochain, or neighbor [Lacan 151–52].Although Klossowski's erotic scenario invites comparisons with Sade's and Fourier's utopian calls to dissolve the privative boundaries between subjects, what he understands by "hospitality" is not the abolition of personal identity, but rather the staging of its internal contradiction.Hospitality, at the Limits of the LawThe act of hospitality—whose theological and philosophical origins this former Dominican novice and Latin scholar was intimately acquainted with—concerns a very particular tension. Etymologically, the host is the "master," the one who "eminently personifies" identity: not only his own identity, but also that of the group in whose... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Plato's Doctrine of the Psyche as a Self-Moving Motion RAPHAEL DEMOS I WILLXSXTHEREADERto ignore for the time being what he has gleaned about the soul from the reading of the Phaedo and the Republic. In these dialogues Plato speaks of the soul sometimes as wholly rational, as having three parts, and so forth. But in these dialogues he is t~lklng of the human soul, which is a special case, (...) whereas in this essay I am de~Hng with the wider role and the concept of the soul as the efficient cause of motion, change, and all becoming everywhere in the cosmos. My cardinal texts in this exposition are the Sophist (246a-249d), the Phaedrus (245c, d), and a considerable portion of Laws, X. Consider the Phaedo, a dialogue with at least four motifs: it is a dramatic evocation of the last day in the life of Socrates, it is an argument for the immortality of the soul and for the reality of the world of ideas, it is a myth of the nether world, and finally, it is a theory of the cosmos as ruled by purpose--all in all, one of the great pieces of literature of the Western world. For the reader, it is an evocation of an attitude to life, based on Plato's conception of the soul--an attitude expressed in the famous phrase that the wise man spends his life meditating on death. As contrasted with what may be called his existential concern with the soul, in the other dialogues on which I will comment, Plato approaches the topic of the soul as part of his explanation of the cosmos. In these his attitude is objective and quasi-scientific. It is to this side of Plato's thought that I wish to call attention in this essay, where the establishment of the immortality of the soul is incidental to the more basic doctrine that the soul is an arche, a primary factor and an ontological principle. In the,Sophist, we find Plato playing the music of his philosophy in a new key. He refers to the "friends of the forms" as though he, himself, were an outsider looking in; then, too, he asserts that motion is really real in contrast to his derogatory references to motion in the Cratylus, the Phaedo, and the Republic.I In these (and other) dialogues, Plato contrasts change and changing things with the timeless forms in respect of reality: the former are said, at best, to be semi-real; only the latter are really real. But in the Sophist he changes his tune, arguing that total reality (~o ~v, to' ~a~rE~ By) includes both motion and rest (248e 8; 249d 3-4). What does he mean by these two words? That by 'rest' he means the realm of ideas is indicated (if not proved) by his references to the forms in the same context (247b 1But in the Theaeteius,he classifiesmotions in a semi-scientific fashion, leaving the impression on the reader that he regards motion as a reality. [133] 134 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 1-2; 249b, 10, c 1).2 As for motion, Plato makes it clear that the term covers not only (a) physical motion but also (b) life, (c) psyche, and (d) phronesis or naus (249b 5). All these are said to be forms of kinesis; how this is so--how life, soul, mason may be described as motions or changes--is a matter for later comment. What is more to the point is Plato's insistence that motion and what is moved are onta (beings, 249b 2, d 3). Plato uses change (metabol$) interchangeably with kinesis; anticipating the Phaedrus, I will include activity under change. And anticipating the Laws, I will characterize some of this activity as mental; indeed the Sophist, includes within change nous, phronesis, and episteme; that is to say, understanding (in the sense of an activity, 249a, b, c).s Plato offers various reasons in support of his contention that change is real. He may also be offering a special demonstration as follows. The philosopher who denies that change is real is engaged in a mental activity, in short... (shrink)

The deeper teachings of yoga state that "We are a soul, and have a body," but how do yogis respond when confronted with death-with their own time of passing? In Transitioning in Grace (based on the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda, author of the classic Autobiography of a Yogi), Nalini Graeber presents true accounts of how longtime yogis and meditators have left their bodies. Some struggled with pain or illness. Others passed suddenly or unexpectedly. Most of these accounts are inspiring; (...) all have something to teach about the transitioning experience. More than just a collection of uplifting stories, this work can serve as a handbook for individuals helping family or friends to leave this world-for those soon to make the transition themselves-and for all thoughtful souls who recognize the wisdom of gaining important insights into early preparation for "Life's Final Exam." Included in these pages: How to prepare for death. A yogic "astral ascension" ceremony (funeral/memorial service) that can be adapted for your particular needs. A description, by a great master of yoga, of what we experience during the moments when we leave our bodies. A simple meditation technique that can help greatly to bring calmness to the event. Stories, descriptions, and poems that offer helpful insights and inspiration. (shrink)