I Am

In the Old Testament, Jehovah answers Moses' inquiry about his identity with the words "I am who am."

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Id

In Freud's three-part conception of the human mind (id, ego, super-ego), the irrational, libido-driven animalistic aspect.

 

 

 

 

 

 

idealism

Any philosophical approach which emphasizes the primacy of ideas in the creation of reality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Iliad

Epic poem, usually attributed to Homer, composed somewhere around the 8th century B.C., dealing with the final year of the Trojan War.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagism

School of 20th Century poetry, primarily in the US and UK, practiced by Amy Lowell, H. D., Ezra Pound, and others, emphasizing the primacy of the poetic image.

 

 

 

 

 

 

imaginal

Term suggested by Henry Corbin, James Hillman, and others as a possible, less connotatively-loaded, replacement for "imaginative."

 

 

 

 

 

 

imago

Term used in psychoanalysis for a significant image bearing psychological meaning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Indo-European

"[D]esignating or of a family of languages that includes most of those spoken in Europe and many of those spoken in southwestern Asia and India' [New World Dictionary].

 

 

 

 

 

 

indwelling

"We make sense of the world by dwelling in its particulars and attending from those particulars to the whole pattern which includes them as their sense . . ." ("Polanyi: Tacit Knowing and the Ecological Crisis"). This "making sense" is what Michael Polanyi calls "indwelling."

 

 

 

 

 

 

inscape

Gerard Manley Hopkins' unique term for the intinsic uniqueness of any natural phenomenon. In a journal, Hopkins writes the following:

There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

instress

Gerard Manley Hopkins' term, closely related to "inscape."  It means (according to Glenn Everett on The Victorian Web) "either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder."

 

 

 

 

 

 

inter alia

"among other things"

 

 

 

 

 

 

I/Thou

In Martin Buber's philosophy, the proper relationship between the self and things (the opposite of and I/It relationship).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ithaca

Greek city, home of its king Odysseus. Homer's The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus' long ordeal in seeking to return there after The Trojan War.