Bernadette asked:

What is your philosophy regarding the topic "reincarnation"? Who are the other philosophers included
in our history have discussed about this topic? In what period in philosophy does this topic is given
emphasis? What religions believe in reincarnation?

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The idea of reincarnation is not all that important in the western philosophical tradition, although one
can find traces of the notion here and there. It was present in the writings of the church father Origen
for example, but the emperor Justinas banished talk of reincarnation from Christianity in the 6th
century. Origen thought his view in accordance with the pre-Socratic philosophers Pythagoras and
Empedocles (c.500 — 450 BCE) and also with Plato in thinking that the soul enters the body
influenced by past deeds.

The idea is that because of the changeable nature of the body, the soul eventually moves on to a new
one. In De PrincipalisOrigen held that the place of the soul in the world is determined by its past
virtues and shortcomings. In the modern period, Descartes, Berkeley and Kant are three very
different philosophers who believed in the immortality of the soul if not in rebirth as such. Locke even
has a thought experiment in which a poor cobbler 'wakes up in the body of a prince' — the idea being
that you could change your material identity without a change in your personal identity.

The idea is also found in ancient eastern philosophy, most notably in the Upanishadsand belongs to
an outlook very different from our own (and probably that of ancient Greece too). Hindus believe that
the wisdom of the Upanishadsis as old as time itself, but the texts were written some time between
the 8th and 4th centuries BCE.

"This vast universe is a wheel. Upon it are all creatures that are subject to birth death and rebirth.
Round and round it turns...as long as the individual self thinks it is separate from Brahman, it revolves
upon the wheel of bondage to the laws of birth death and rebirth. But when through the grace of
Brahman it realises its identity with him, it revolves upon the wheel no longer" (Svetasvatara
Upanishad118).

So the idea is that "a mortal ripens like corn, and like corn is born again" (Katha UpanishadI.1.6).

A number of things are unclear; what do the 'laws' of birth, death and rebirth consist in? Are they
physical laws or transcendent laws? We do not know of any physical laws governing rebirth. And any
transcendent world must be wholly 'other', so it is unclear that it makes much sense to speak of laws
at all. If there were transcendental laws we wouldn't be able to say or know anything about them. So
talk of laws loses some of its force.

In what sense is it possible for a person or a self to exist separately from a body? Believers in
reincarnation seem fundamentally committed to a kind of substance dualism between self and body
that just seems wrong to a modern (Western) understanding of the self. And if there is no such thing
as self — if self is illusory as the Upanishadshold — then what is it that is reborn? Philosophers
today often think that the persistence of a self is simply the persistence of a body or material object
and that this fulfills all the identity conditions at issue. If this is true, then there is nothing to be reborn.

Finally, the way I am to be reborn is governed by the meritoriousness of my actions, but to state this
so baldly simply begs the question.

In the 19th century, Schopenhauer was influenced by this Eastern idea that each individual 'will' is
illusory and is really part of a cosmic will. There is nothing but blind struggle. Scarcely less gloomily,
Nietzsche had a doctrine of 'eternal recurrence' in which he imagined the history of the universe
repeating itself ad infinitum, exactly the same each time. I'm not sure whether he thought this was
literally true, but he exhorted men to make their lives such as they could happily re-live these lives
time and again; one might be tempted to think that there is a kinship between the belief in the
immortal soul that characterises some Western thought and the Eastern ideas about rebirth and the
self. But this is more an issue for anthropology than philosophy.

Adam Gatward