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In this note I have limited myself to describing some convergent and divergent developments arising from the innovative concepts present in The Ego and the Id. It could be argued that a part of the psychoanalytic movement wished to emphasize the function of the Ego (Anna Freud, Hartmann, Rapaport), while another part (Melanie Klein and her followers) delved into the dynamics of the Superego and the Id in primitive and pathological states of mind. I will examine three themes presents in The Ego and the Id: the assertion that a part of the Ego is unconscious; the idea that the death drive becomes part of the dynamics of melancholia and its Superego; the concept of fusion and defusion of the life and death instinct. Freud's writing represents a forge of new ideas that have made psychoanalysis ever more creative and capable of understanding the complexity and mysteriousness of the human mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'religion/secular' frame should be retired as a way of characterizing contemporary northern European cultures. The concepts of 'secularity' and 'religion' are both falsifying and question begging. They invisibly and unhelpfully predetermine the conversation about who and where we are now. Further, they are terms which increasingly lack salience in these cultures. If we seek to locate and articulate, in order to reflectively engage, the horizons within which contemporary northern Europeans generally live, the goods that orient people's lives, the ideas and values that move and motivate them, we need to talk not about 'religion' and the lack of it, but about the idea of the human. Within the concept of the human is nested today the sense of orientation, meaning, goodness and importance that notions of 'religion' used to express. This is the conceptual territory on which arguments about 'what really matters' are now conducted. If one wishes to have salience in contemporary culture, one needs to speak to this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the new linguistic treatment which is formulated for the first time in Neoplatonism, when Ammonius of Hermeias tries to compromise the linguistic views of Plato and Aristotle in his commentary on Aristotle's On Interpretation. Ammonius integrates doctrines of Plato, Aristotle and Proclus, who was his teacher in Athens. According to Ammonius, Aristotle does not contradict Plato, who believes in the 'divine name-giver', the one that attributed the original names to beings; on the contrary, Aristotle confirms what Socrates says in the Cratylus, where he reproaches both his interlocutors for their extreme views. Ammonius examines several aspects of language, capturing Aristotle's non-adherence to such an extremity. As he wishes to exempt Aristotle from Proclus' censure, his position does not rest on assumptions, but he goes so far as to investigate Aristotle's own linguistic behavior. Ammonius manifestly opts for reasoning the reconciliation between Plato and Aristotle, but he is thus led to put the concept of a 'specialist name-giver' in Aristotle's mouth, without clarifying that he is talking about mankind, excluding the divine, although Aristotle never talks about a 'specialist', but just about the need to create names, based on the agreement between the members of a linguistic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]