ABŪ NAṢR AL-FĀRĀBĪ ON THE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE SOUL

This article discusses the views of J. Assman on the essence of cultural memory and the identity formed on its basis. Identity can be viewed as the result of reflection on the unconscious self-image. J. Assman established a connection between personal and collective identity. Individual consciousness can be defined as sociogenic, not only because it arises in the process of socialization, but also because it creates a community and is the bearer of a collective self-image. J. Assman highlights the difference between individual and personal identity. Both aspects of self-identity are sociogenic and culturally determined, they arise in the mind, formed by the language, values and norms of a particular culture. Identity is a product of social construction and therefore always acts as a cultural identity. The difference between a collective identity and a different one is that the second one is symbolic. Collective identities belong to the realm of the social imagination. Collective identity also exists only to the extent that individuals recognize it as their own. Societies need the past for their self-determination. Awareness and recognition of belonging to a particular culture is a cultural identity. Personal identity is achieved through communication and interaction with other people, through living with them in a common symbolic world of meaning. Culture becomes the second nature of man, man adapts to the symbolic world of meanings. Culture creates a space suitable for human existence and is a prerequisite for the formation of personal and individual identity. The semantic horizons shared by people become a symbolic expression of we-identity. Of great importance is speech and the general system of symbols – the main means of forming groups. The complex of community transmitted in symbols is a cultural formation – something through which a collective identity is created and preserved in the change of generations. The sense of community is generated by the circulation of common meaning.

Individuals construct their own identity, but they do not construct their identity just as they please; they do not construct it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances encountered, given and transmitted from the past. (Darity, Mason, and Stewart 2006, 290) Identity can’t be compartmentalized. You can’t divide it up into halves or thirds or any other separate segments. I haven’t got several identities: I’ve got just one, made up of many components in a mixture that is unique of me, just as other people’s identity is unique to them as individuals. (Maalouf 1998 [2000], 2) The Economics of Identity What is the “economics of identity?” In fact, the meaning of that expression is ambiguous and contested (Kirman and Teschl 2004; Fine 2009). Many nonetheless associate it with Akerlof and Kranton’s (2000) proposal to introduce the concept of social identity into economics by expanding the traditional Homo economicus utility function to include a set of self-images associated with the individual’s different social identities. On that view, people gain or lose utility according to how their social identity self-images are affected by their interaction with others. However, this does not explain the role that individuals have in determining which social identities they wish to have. That would entail having some account of how individuals choose certain social identities and also some explanation of the extent to which they are influential in determining what social identities they have. That is, it would entail having some understanding of the relationship between who they are, or what their personal identity involves, and their many social identities. Akerlof and Kranton, though they do not refer to personal identity, implicitly equate it with the individual’s utility function. However, because the utility function only tells us how people are affected by their social identities, it does not allow us to say how they influence their determination, thus making it the choice of the economic modeler to say what social identities individuals have. That is, with no real account of personal identity, they are unable to explain the relationship between personal identity and social identity. I argued in the previous chapter that on a capabilities conception of the individual people’s development of their capabilities goes hand in hand with their development of a special personal identity capability that allows them to keep narrative accounts of themselves. If one capability they develop, then, is of being able to elect particular social identities, how they keep narrative accounts of themselves constitutes a way of explaining the relationship between personal identity and social identity. Yet it would be a mistake to say that their doing this gives people complete freedom to determine what social identities they will have. Recall from Chapter 3, then, that in contrast to the psychology’s social identity approach and Turner’s self-categorization theory (Turner 1985) that Akerlof and Kranton draw on, the sociological approach to identity assumes that individuals and social groups mutually influence one another. On this view, the personal and social identities of individuals and also the identities of social groups are all mutually determined. On the one hand, the social construction and assignment of social categories to individuals influences what social groups they belong to and thus what social identities they elect. This in turn influences their personal identities. On the other hand, the social groups individuals belong to and the social identities they elect influences the formation of social groups and the construction of social categories used to represent those social groups. This frames the evolutionary-relational side of the individual conception developed previously in much broader terms that allow us to begin to capture the more indirect social influences that operate on individuality. In effect, what we try to do here, then, is locate that individual conception in an “identity dynamics” (Potts 2008) that operates across individuals and groups.

A totalizing and privileging of ethnicity, to the exclusion of other sources of identification, in American historiography has created a tendency to conflate group identity and individual identity in historical subjects. While ethnic group identities are ultimately rooted in cultural representations and ideologies, individual (or personal) identity is the ongoing effort to maintain a sense of continuity. Personal identity assures us we remain the same person that we have been previously. The letters of a Scottish immigrant to the United States are examined to suggest the role of ethnicity in personal identity.

Background:The 11th International Classification of Diseases introduces the diagnosis of Complex PTSD (CPTSD); characterized by traditional PTSD symptomology plus Disturbances in Self Organisation. Part of this construct involves feeling socially disconnected from others, suggesting that aspects of group and individual identity may be associated with this disorder.Aims:The current study seeks to contribute to better understanding the association of individual social and personal identity in development of this disorder in post-conflict contexts.Methodology:This study analysed survey data collected as part a case-control investigation of psychological risk and resilience in a trauma-exposed sample in Colombia (N = 541). Identity orientations, that is, the level of importance ascribed to one’s social and personal identity, was assessed using the Social and Personal Identities Scale (SIPI) and was assessed as predictor of probable CPTSD diagnosis using multinomial logistic regression.Results:Analyses indicated that trauma experiences were associated with both diagnostic categories, however Social and Personal identity orientation were significant predictors of probable CPTSD diagnosis, but not probable PTSD diagnosis. Greater Personal identity orientation, that is, viewing oneself as individualistic, was associated with increased likelihood of CPTSD. In contrast, greater Social Identity orientation, that is, stronger group membership identification, was associated with reduced odds of CPTSD diagnosis. Identifying as a victim of the conflict was not significantly associated with risk for PTSD or CPTSD outcomes.Conclusion:Greater sense of Social Identity and cohesion is suggested to be protective against CPTSD development, whereas greater personal identity orientation is a risk factor. Theoretical perspectives considering the role of social and personal identity may be valuable in understanding individual risk for CPTSD in post-conflict societies.

This paper offers an account of how individuals act as agents when we employ a narrative approach to explaining their personal identities. It applies Korsgaard's idea of a “reflective structure of consciousness” to provide foundations for a richer account of the individual economic agent, and uses this to explain and distinguish the concepts of personal identity, individual identity, and social identity. The paper argues that individuals’ personal identities may be in conflict with their socially constructed individual identities. Individuals’ social identities are represented as a link between personal identity, and individual identity. The overall framework is proposed as an alternative to the atomistic individual conception and a contribution to the socially embedded individual conception.

This paper offers an account of how individuals act as agents when we employ a narrative approach to explaining their personal identities. It applies Korsgaard's idea of a reflective structure of consciousness to provide foundations for a richer account of the individual economic agent, and uses this to explain and distinguish the concepts of personal identity, individual identity, and social identity. The paper argues that individuals' personal identities may be in conflict with their socially constructed individual identities. Individuals' social identities are represented as a link between personal identity and individual identity. The overall framework is proposed as an alternative to the atomistic individual conception and a contribution to the socially embedded individual conception.

Reviewed by: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature by Carol A. Newsom Davida Charney Carol A. Newsom. Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 130. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. 382 pp. ISBN 978-3-16-157723-9. In Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, Carol A. Newsom has collected eighteen of her essays that appeared between 1989 and 2016 and one previously unpublished essay. Unlike many volumes of this sort, the whole greatly exceeds the sum of its parts. Apart from its usefulness as a survey to scholars and students, the book advances Newsom’s scholarly agenda. Newsom works with texts circulating in and around Jerusalem during the late Second Temple period. This was a time of intellectual ferment: proto-gnostic sects proliferated; established religious practices were being challenged, defended, and modified. Newsom argues persuasively that these groups were led by sophisticated readers and rhetors. The leaders grasped that the Hebrew Bible, still undergoing canonization, is polyphonic and intertextual. Further, the texts that they created deployed polyphony, enargeia, and other rhetorical techniques to shape communal identity, attract adherents, and help individuals cope with the precarity of their status. These arguments are advanced in each of the book’s four topical sections. First are six essays that explain and apply Newsom’s methods of rhetorical criticism. Second are four essays illustrating how the Qumran community—responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls—shaped communal and individual identity. Third are three essays that lay out an ethno-psychological model for mapping conceptions of self and agency across cultures. The essays apply the model to the Hebrew Bible and a variety of Second Temple texts. Last are six reception studies that examine how narratives of the period are taken up and transformed both in antiquity and in modern times. Newsom, a chaired emerita professor of theology at Emory University, has published on so many aspects of Second Temple literature over her career that she has plenty of essays on method, theory, and application to choose from. As a result, even without additional commentary, the sections build coherent arguments. Each section opens with introductory issues of [End Page 322] theory, method, and scope and develops with close textual analysis and suggestive implications. The first section on methods reveals what Newsom means by rhetorical criticism and what theorists she relies on most. Like many biblical scholars, her immediate rhetorical touchstone is George Kennedy. But he does not inspire her to read widely in the Greco-Roman tradition. She is not concerned to trace possible cross-influences during the Hellenistic period. Instead Newsom turns to Bakhtin and Burke and the more literary strand of twentieth-century rhetorical criticism. For Newsom, rhetorical strategies in scripture reflect the identities and ontologies of their compositors and shape those of readers and writers to come. Accordingly, this section accomplishes two tasks for Newsom. First, the section launches Newsom’s larger claims that Second Temple communities deployed rhetorical strategies to shape individual and communal identities with case studies of Job (chapter 2), Proverbs 1—9 (chapter 3), Jewish apocalyptic texts (chapter 5), and texts from Qumran (chapter 6). Second, for biblicists new to rhetorical approaches, it introduces concepts and methods of rhetorical criticism, including Bakhtinian polyphony and dialogism (chapters 1 and 3), genre studies (chapters 2 and 4), and a variety of basic rhetorical concepts (chapters 5 and 6) such as epideictics, arrangement, enargeia, and kairos, though she doesn’t always employ these terms. While displaying nuanced rhetorical sensibilities, Newsom would clearly benefit from additional reading in rhetorical scholarship, particularly Carolyn Miller’s classic “Genre as Social Action”1 and William FitzGerald’s Spiritual Modalities for its use of Burke’s religious terministic screen to draw Burkean implications for prayer and religious practice.2 In Section Two, Newsom argues that the Qumran community—a break-away Jewish sect that deliberately positioned itself against the practices in the Second Temple—was “intentional and explicit in the formation of the subjectivity of its members” (159). First, she argues that the Dead Sea Scrolls served as a library for the community (chapter 7), based...

A central theme of social philosophy is that man and society are interrelated. Humans are physiologically and psychologically adapted to live and interact with others in groups and in society. In other words, humans have both an individual identity and a social identity. Personal identity can change according to the perceptions and stimuli of the environment. In other words, it can be said that individual identity is influenced by social identity to adapt to the environment. In fact, social identity or group identity has a stronger influence than individual identity. A person may take some actions that do not fit his individual identity in order to be recognized in the society. There are significant interrelationships between individual identity and social identity. People who develop a collective identity as a member of a group can change and redefine their personality when they act in certain situations. Toni Morrison 's novel A Mercy (2008), which is the subject of this paper, deals with the conflict between individual identity and social identity and the social processes that influence individuals' decision making. The novel is also about the helplessness of the individual in the face of society. A Mercy uses the characters in the novel to illustrate the influence of society and social interactions, i.e. a dominant power over the individual, on the process of identity formation and how one is shaped by social forces.

The research subject refers to the theoretical perspectives of the identity of several authors – N. Sekulic, Z. Golubovic, B. Anderson, N. Djukic, E. Goffman, M. Castells, R. Watson, G. Small, Z. Bauman, S. Hall, V. Jerotic, R. Jenkins and A. Benoist. The search is for an answer to the question: Could priority be given to personal or social identity, according to importance? A noticeable research problem is the pluralism of conceptions that attach more importance to either individual or collective identity. The main hypothesis is that there is a false problem of non-complementarity of collective and personal identity, as well as an experiential connection (scientific law) between the political construction of collective identity and totalitarianism. The scientific goals are: 1) to describe the identity and the process of its creation; 2) to classify and explain the difference between personal and collective identity, with an emphasis on the integrative point of view of Golubovic and Jenkins on the complementarity between them; 3) to anticipate the experiential connection between the political construction of collective identity and totalitarianism due to the exclusion of Others from the constructed identity pattern, in order to establish complete state-political (party) control over all dimensions of everyday life beyond States. The methods of (descriptive and comparative) analysis, deduction, synthesis, induction, case studies and content analysis of identity conceptions based on a simple classification (significant - less significant type of identity) (Kukic & Markic, 2006: 217) and desk research will be used. The results of qualitative research are knowledge about identity, its types, its construction and the consequences of identity engineering, which were obtained through secondary, qualitative data (Kothari, 2004; Dale, Wathan & Higgins, 2008) during 'research in the library' (Kuba & Koking, 2004: 90) on bibliographic units from an abstracted sample.

Take a Letter… Daniel Soyer (bio) David A. Gerber. Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2006. x + 423 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $55.00. Although David Gerber engages some of the traditional themes of immigration history in Authors of Their Lives, this book is not a conventional work in the field. Sure, it deals with questions of identity, including its loss, resistance to its loss, and its reconstruction. But while most immigration historians think of identity in terms of ethnicity and community, Gerber argues that such a focus misses issues related to the personal and individual identity that was in fact more salient in the lives of most immigrants (and indeed most others as well). Moreover, the book barely mentions two other themes that have dominated most recent historical writing on immigration. Like most social historians of the last several decades, Gerber wants to recover the inner world of the immigrants and other "ordinary" people. He wants to let their voices be heard, and so he turns to the letters they wrote to each other. It turns out that these intimate sources have little to say about race and politics, the preoccupations of many recent historians. Not that Gerber has nothing to say about ethnicity. His subjects made up the third largest immigrant group of the nineteenth century, behind the Catholic Irish and the Germans. But these "invisible immigrants" blended easily into the American cultural and racial mainstream. Coming from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, they were English-speaking, Protestant, and relatively skilled. Some of them even arrived with a little bit of capital to invest in farms and businesses. Judging from their letters, British communal life simply was not that important to the writers. There are few references to societies, and none to the churches, newspapers, or dense neighborhoods that provided the framework of other ethnic groups. Rather, aside from an occasional ceremonial occasion, the British immigrants joined with their American neighbors in these kinds of communal endeavor. Moreover, the immigrants' anti-Catholicism helped them to bond with the Americans. Some even joined the nativist movement. [End Page 32] Informally, however, British immigrants did differentiate themselves from Americans, whom they often criticized harshly for their commercialism. The immigrants at least sometimes made a conscious effort to maintain their dialects, and even to pass them on. They had a preference for British friends and expressed nostalgia for the old country and its customs. But the aspect of British culture that Gerber finds most interesting did not push the immigrants toward a distinct ethnic identity and certainly not toward a cohesive communal life. Indeed, it was something that the British immigrants shared with Anglo-Americans, namely a well-developed awareness of self and of the individual's separation from others. This sense of individuation nurtured a vocabulary in the English language that the letter writers could use to construct coherent narratives of their own lives and experiences, distinct from, but in relation to, those of their correspondents. If one of the main points of corresponding in the first place was for the immigrants to "author their own lives," as the book's title suggests, then a sense of self as both author and subject, along with the necessary vocabulary, were preconditions for doing so. A sense of self is also important because Gerber is more interested in how individuals elaborated a personal identity than how they coalesced into groups. The weak ethnic communal life of the British immigrants underscores the point, but Gerber contends that personal identity is more basic and more pervasive in all people's lives than are their group affiliations. Most of what immigration historians have written about as "identity" was really, Gerber argues, "identification"—defined as "voluntary and particularistic, and . . . episodically experienced and episodically brought to consciousness" (p. 65). Identity, by contrast, "encompasses" much more "broadly" a person's understanding of self. Implicitly, it is not episodic, less externally oriented (though it is always defined in relation to others), and, perhaps, not as conscious. It is the core of the individual's psychological being. Necessarily, Gerber cites social psychologists...

Evaluation of the effect of orthodontic treatment on the reliability of facial recognition by using three-dimensional model superimposition technique

Food in history and culture Once upon a time, not all that long ago, human identity was generally viewed rather simply. It was assumed that identity achieved its final form in the course of childhood and adolescence, culminating in the famous Eriksonian “identity crisis,” the successful resolution of which ushered in a competent adulthood. While experts disputed just when and how the larger aspects of individual identity congealed – gender identity for instance – and argued as well about the relationship between individual and group identity, identity was not seen as something adults actively worked on or typically experienced conflict over. In recent years, prodded by feminist and queer theorists, students of identity have radically changed their views. Increasingly they see human identity as a continual work in progress, constructed and altered by the totality of life experience. While much of the work in support of this belief concentrates on the larger aspects of identity – especially gender, ethnicity, and sexual preference – in fact human identity involves many other categories. Identity is constructed in complex ways, more or less consciously and overtly. Some aspects of identity, in particular those listed above, are applicable both to individual identity and a person's identification as a member of a cohesive and coherent group. Other aspects of individual identity are more subtle, perhaps less prone to being problematized, and not linked to group membership in any obvious way.

The Man with No Name:Identity in French Arthurian Verse Romance Sarah E. Gordon (bio) Incognito participation in tournaments reveals the fluidity of notions of identity as the success of the no-name knight calls into question the importance of naming conventions and notions of reputation in romance. (SEG) Who is who? What does identity mean in the chivalric world, and what does it tell us? And how do we know how to determine and evaluate it?' asks Norris J. Lacy in a recent essay focusing on armor and its relation to knightly identification in Chrétien's romances, the Merveilles de Rigomer, and the Prose Tristan.1 Lacy devotes his study to knights who appear with multiple shields or swords or who appear unarmed. The present article offers further consideration of identity, or rather the lack of identity, by investigating how incognito tournaments paradoxically construct identity and reputation while presenting an opposition to the romance conventions of naming and reputation. Questions of identity and changing identities are fundamental to character development in the romance genre.2 Through the actions of the incognito hero in romance tournaments, identity is transformed, the familiar becomes strange, the known unknown. When a knight fights incognito at a tournament or changes the color of his armor, he alters his identity in the public eye, or his 'perceived identity,' to use Lacy's term.3 Disguises or refusals to give one's name may in one sense question chivalric roles, courtly hierarchies, and fixed identities. The tournament in which the incognito hero appears has a dual purpose: to test the hero and to test the court's conventions. Protagonists don short-term disguises and conceal their names to test the court and courtly conventions, just as the chivalric contests test knightly prouesse. Following Chrétien de Troyes, later romancers respond to this ironic two-fold function of the anonymous hero in tournaments: the incognito scenes represent unconventional behavior within the context of a complex intertextual dialogue between the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume le Clerc, and Raoul de Houdenc.4 Giving one's name, formal introductions, and public reputations are commonplaces of Arthurian romance. When knights become temporarily anonymous, the lack of naming is conspicuous by its absence and raises [End Page 69] questions about the very nature of knightly identity. Knights go incognito in some way in all five of Chrétien de Troyes's romances. The theme of anonymity assumes a variety of forms in verse and prose Arthurian romances after Chrétien, including refusals to reveal names; failures to recognize friends or family; misidentification; requests to remain unnamed; anonymous encounters and battles with friends and strangers alike; the deliberate hiding of one's identity; and the earning of new names, epithets, and reputation. Anonymity and incognito are used by Chrétien's heroes both to prove their worth and to test others. Many heroes throughout the Arthurian verse and prose romance traditions appear as young unknowns who must prove themselves through quests and combats under the auspices of the Arthurian court. In Chrétien's Conte du Graal, for instance, Perceval does not know his own name when he leaves home for Arthur's court; his adventures lead him to discover his identity, cementing the court's acceptance of him and lending meaning to the use of his name. Elsewhere, knights disguise themselves as fools, as women, and, most commonly, as nameless knights. By appearing incognito in Chrétien's romances, Perceval, Cligés, Yvain, and Lancelot show they are worthy fighters and lovers independent of the court's spectatorship and construction of their identity. On one level, it may be said that romances are about the construction or performance of both individual and group identities. Individual identities in romance may be developed over the course of a quest or constructed by the gaze of tournament spectators. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister, whose theories on subjectivity and identity are often applied in literary criticism on identity, generalizes that often in the Middle Ages: People were differentiated mainly by certain roles—family, rank, occupation… The public self dominated. The medieval person's identity was defined by a society within a firm network...

The article deals with the collective and individual identity problem in the context of changing world and socio-political conditions in hypothetical reality. World literature is an ever-living source for understanding a variety of possible options for development of civilization, the role and place of the individual in the future society. The authors examine representation of individual and collective identification in the dystopian novels by modern writers: V. Veselka “Zazen” (2011) and A. Morales “The Rag Doll Plagues” (1992). The object of the study is the socio-political discourse of the future, outlined in fiction form. The subject of the research is the process of individual and collective identification in the context of the predicted future reality. The purpose of the study is to analyze Veselka and Morales’ dystopian novels for outlining factors influencing the process of individual and collective identification in the hypothetical future. The research methodology is based on the principles of semiotic-communicative and cultural-historical approaches. The discourse of the future is considered as a political discourse, a set of verbal signs that performs a certain function in political communication and conveys information about social processes, norms and values in a given socio-political situation. Within the framework of the cultural-historical approach, the literary text is studied as a product of social life in specific cultural-historical conditions. Individual and collective identity is forming in the conditions of an unfavorable, “negative” version of the future civilization. Veselka and Morales project in their works nowadays socio-political problems in a hypertrophied form: terrorism, epidemics and pandemics, environmental disasters, dehumanization, consumerism, etc. The analysis of dystopias clearly indicates that main factors in individual and collective identification are ethnopolitical, ethnocultural and psychological ones. Ethnopolitical and ethnocultural factors affect deeply the process of social identification, while psychological factors have a major impact on the search for individual identity

Sen has emphasized the importance of subjecting one's choices of actions, objectives, values, and priorities to reasoned scrutiny. But how does one go about doing this? Two matters are foremost in his view: individuals do not do this in isolation and yet a reasoned scrutiny of one's actions, objectives, values, and priorities involves self-scrutiny. We seek to explain this combination in terms of the relationship between individual and social reasoning, and frame this in terms of the relationship between identity and democracy. We characterize democracy as a process of social or public reasoning that combines the individual reasoning of all citizens. We explain identity in terms of three identity concepts: personal identity, social identity, and individual identity. We then argue that democracy in combining the individual reasoning of all citizens responds to individuals' different personal identity concerns and needs, reflects their shared social identity interests and goals, and accords them rights and responsibilities associated with their many different individual identities. We argue that this framework makes it possible to address the issue of what ought to be included in a list of 'essential' capabilities in terms of different ways specific democratic contexts address the various identities of individuals. Further, we treat personal identity as a key human capability, and argue that individuals' other capabilities are organized around it.