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In philosophy, metempsychosis (Ancient Greek: μετεμψύχωσις) is the transmigration of the soul, especially its reincarnation after death. The term is derived from ancient Greek philosophy, and has been recontextualized by modern philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, [1] Kurt Gödel, [2] Mircea Eliade, [3] and Magdalena Villaba; [4] otherwise, the word "transmigration" is more ...
Plato considered this essence to be an incorporeal, eternal occupant of a person's being. Plato said that even after death, the soul exists and is able to think. He believed that as bodies die, the soul is continually reborn (metempsychosis) in subsequent bodies.
Illustration of reincarnation in Hindu art In Jainism, a soul travels to any one of the four states of existence after death depending on its karmas.. Reincarnation, also known as rebirth or transmigration, is the philosophical or religious concept that the non-physical essence of a living being begins a new lifespan in a different physical form or body after biological death.
The teaching most securely identified with Pythagoras is the "transmigration of souls" or metempsychosis, which holds that every soul is immortal and, upon death, enters into a new body. He may have also devised the doctrine of musica universalis , which holds that the planets move according to mathematical equations and thus resonate to ...
Another nominal derivative from the same root is saṃsāra, referring to the same concept: a "passage through successive states of mundane existence", transmigration, metempsychosis, a circuit of living where one repeats previous states, from one body to another, a worldly life of constant change, that is rebirth, growth, decay and redeath.
Like Pythagoras, Empedocles believed in the transmigration of the soul or metempsychosis, that souls can be reincarnated between humans, animals and even plants. [ o ] According to him, all humans, or maybe only a selected few among them, [ 9 ] were originally long-lived daimons who dwelt in a state of bliss until committing an unspecified ...
Belief in metempsychosis was common to both currents, although it also seems to contain differences. Where the Orphics taught about a cycle of grievous embodiments that could be escaped through their rites, Pythagoras seemed to teach about an eternal, neutral metempsychosis against which personal actions would be irrelevant.
It is thus the equivalent of metempsychosis. The term has a narrower and more specific use in the system of Arthur Schopenhauer, who applied it to his doctrine that the will does not die but manifests itself afresh in new individuals. He thus modified the original metempsychosis doctrine which maintains the reincarnation of the particular soul.