Personal Agency across Generations: Evolutionary Psychology or Religious Belief?
Although the authors of modern scientific psychology agreed on precious little, Freud and Jung both insisted that any complete science of psychology requires some way to explain the intergenerational inheritance of character traits or personal habits of mind and action. Yet neither they nor their he...
| Publicado en: | Sophia Vol. 50; no. 3; pp. 429 - 453 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Springer Nature
Sep2011
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=65300065&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 65300065 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00381527 3OR0 jtl: Sophia issn: 00381527 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Sep2011 vid: 50 iid: 3 pid: 237 pub: Springer Nature artinfo: ui: 65300065 10.1007/s11841-011-0231-y ppf: 429 ppct: 24 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: P size: 281KB tig: atl: Personal Agency across Generations: Evolutionary Psychology or Religious Belief? aug: au: Loizzo, Joseph sug: keyword: Agency Bioethics Chandrakirti Evolutionary psychology Intergenerational transmission Karma Nagarjuna Ordinary language philosophy Reincarnation Wittgenstein ab: Although the authors of modern scientific psychology agreed on precious little, Freud and Jung both insisted that any complete science of psychology requires some way to explain the intergenerational inheritance of character traits or personal habits of mind and action. Yet neither they nor their heirs in contemporary philosophy, psychology or cognitive science have been able to provide a plausible conceptual framework, much less a mechanism to account for the conservation of forms of personal agency across multiple lives. Is there a role in contemporary philosophy and psychology for an intergenerational theory of human agency informed by the Buddhist theory of karma? This paper argues the affirmative case, offering both a current scientific reading of karma and a Buddhist scientific approach to the metaphysical and metapsychological problems caused by the divergence of modern science and religion in the West. The model of intergenerational agency I present here is based on a comparative study of ordinary language philosophy in ancient India and the contemporary West. Its premise is that most theories of moral development and psychological agency are limited by the insistence on a substantial or essential ground for the designation of a person or self. Ordinary language philosophy offers greater conceptual freedom because it accepts a distinctively human theory of self as a linguistic construction that refers to mind/body systems and elements in which there is no substantial or essential self. This conceptual freedom permits a model of human agency as an open system of linguistic reference that can be transmitted across generations in the course of language acquisition. Such a system is not merely discursive in that language serves to guide the social construction not just of discursive thinking but also of learned patterns of perception and action mastered together with language in the course of neuropsychological development. This model has implications for both Buddhist and Western worldview, popular and scientific, as well as for bioethics and the practice of psychotherapy. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Sophia is a copyright of Springer, 2011. All Rights Reserved. item: Sophia holder: Springer Nature dt: @attributes: year: 2011 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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