Joseph Loizzo (Nalanda Institute)
"Personal Agency Across Generations:
Evolutionary Psychology or Religious Belief?"
Although the authors of modern scientific psychology agreed on precious little, Sigmund Freud and Carl 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 patterns of personal agency across multiple lives.
Dr. Joseph Loizzo (MD, PhD) believes there is a role in contemporary philosophy and psychology for an "intergenerational" theory of human development and personal agency that is informed by the Buddhist theory of karma. In this lecture Loizzo applies both a scientific reading of karma and a Buddhist approach to some of the metaphysical and metapsychological problems caused by the divergence of modern science and religion in the West.
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