Happiness, Rationality, and Individual Ideals

Happiness, Rationality, and Individual Ideals PDF Author: Lynne Ellen McFall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Happiness
Languages : en
Pages : 1589

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Book Description

Happiness, Rationality, and Individual Ideals

Happiness, Rationality, and Individual Ideals PDF Author: Lynne Ellen McFall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Happiness
Languages : en
Pages : 1589

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Book Description


Happiness

Happiness PDF Author: Pedro Alexis Tabensky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351931660
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
This book is about happiness and about how the supremely happy life - the life blessed with what Aristotle refers to as eudaimonia - is the life of an ethical individual living in a healthy community. Much ethical literature has drawn inspiration from Aristotle's outlook, but relatively little attention has been paid to the central concept of Aristotle's ethical system - the concept of eudaimonia. This book fills this important gap, focusing on Aristotle's central ethical concept and, among other things, using Davidson's account of mind and rationality to explain central Aristotelian claims relating to the structure of the psychological domain and to our radical interconnectedness. Starting with Aristotle, Tabensky shows how the ethical domain can best be understood in relation to our fundamental desire to live happy lives. Recapturing the Greek spirit, this book is an invitation to rethink the manner in which we understand our lives and the manner in which we conduct ourselves, and it is an invitation to do so in relation to an understanding of the sorts of creatures we are - creatures living for the sake of happiness.

Nicomachean Ethics

Nicomachean Ethics PDF Author: Aristotle
Publisher: SDE Classics
ISBN: 9781951570279
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Life's Values

Life's Values PDF Author: Alan H. Goldman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192565281
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
In Life's Values Alan H. Goldman seeks to explain what is of ultimate value in individual lives. The proposed candidates include pleasure, happiness, meaning, and well-being. Only the latter is the all-inclusive category of personal value, and it consists in the satisfaction of deep rational desires. Since individuals' rational desires differ, the book cannot dictate what will maximize your own well-being and what in particular you ought to pursue. However it can tell you to make your desires rational (that is, informed and coherent) and it can also explain the nature of these states that typically enter into well-being: pleasure, happiness, and meaning being typically partial causes as well as effects of well-being. All are by-products of satisfying rational desires and rarely successfully aimed at directly. Pleasure comes in sensory, intentional, and pure feeling forms, each with an opposite in pain or distress. Happiness in its primary sense is an emotion, not a constant state as some philosophers assume, and in secondary senses a mood (disposition to have an emotion) or temperament (disposition to be in a mood). Meaning in life is a matter of events in one's life fitting into intelligible narratives. Events in narratives are understood teleologically as well as causally, in terms of outcomes aimed at as well antecedent events. So, in the briefest terms, this book distinguishes and relates pleasure, happiness, well-being, and meaning, and relates each to motivation and value.

The Ayn Rand Lexicon

The Ayn Rand Lexicon PDF Author: Ayn Rand
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 110113724X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A prolific writer, bestselling novelist, and world-renowned philosopher, Ayn Rand defined a full system of thought--from epistemology to aesthetics. Her writing is so extensive and the range of issues she covers so enormous that those interested in finding her discussions of a given topic may have to search through many sources to locate the relevant passage. The Ayn Rand Lexicon brings together all the key ideas of her philosophy of Objectivism. Begun under Rand's supervision, this unique volume is an invaluable guide to her philosophy or reason, self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism--the philosophy so brilliantly dramatized in her novels The Fountainhead, We the Living, and Anthem.

Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction

Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction PDF Author: Deal Wyatt Hudson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847681402
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
In classical and medieval times, happiness was defined as 'well-being, ' a notion that included moral goodness. Today happiness is most often defined as 'well-feeling, ' and identified with subjective states such as satisfaction and peace of mind. Deal Hudson argues that the prevailing view is dangerous in politics as well as ethics, creating individuals with no other sense of obligation than finding personal satisfaction, regardless of the moral and spiritual cost to themselves and others. Hudson calls for a return to the classical tradition: no one should be called 'happy' who cannot also be called morally good. However, a contemporary version of happiness should also go beyond the classical notion by making room in the happy life for suffering and passion. Using the history of the idea of happiness as a backdrop to a critique of contemporary views, Hudson examines happiness from philosophical, religious, psychological, sociological, literary, and political points of view--for example, he shows how the tension between the two definitions of happiness is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. The result is an excellent overview of the history of an idea as well as a compelling argument for moral and political change in our time.

The Pursuit of Unhappiness

The Pursuit of Unhappiness PDF Author: Daniel M. Haybron
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199545987
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
"The pursuit of happiness is a defining theme of the modern era. But what if people aren't very good at it? This and related questions are explored in this book, the first comprehensive philosophical treatment of happiness in the contemporary psychological sense. In these pages, Dan Haybron argues that people are probably less effective at judging, and promoting, their own welfare than common belief has it. As a result, we may need to rethink traditional assumptions about human nature, the good life, and the good society. Thoroughly engaged with both philosophical and scientific work on happiness and well-being, this book will be a definitive resource for philosophers, social scientists, policymakers, and other students of human well-being."--BOOK JACKET.

Imagination and Ethical Ideals

Imagination and Ethical Ideals PDF Author: Nathan L. Tierney
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438422113
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Imagination and Ethical Ideals is an interdisciplinary work which investigates some of the links between moral philosophy and moral psychology, with implications for both personal ethics and social philosophy. Tierney begins with the argument that the widespread fascination with moral principles has led moral philosophers into a dead end, which is revealed both by their inability to deal with the problem of relativism, and by the felt irrelevancy of moral philosophy to the lives that people are actually striving to lead. He then offers an alternative account of the nature of ethical thought, grounded in a theory of imaginative ethical ideals. A psychological framework for ideals is then developed using the results of contemporary psychoanalysis and psychology, particularly the self psychology of Heinz Kohut.

The Ideal of a Rational Morality

The Ideal of a Rational Morality PDF Author: Marcus George Singer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198250210
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This is a collection of essays by moral philosopher Marcus George Singer in which the guiding theme is the concept of a morality based in reason, which is presupposed in ordinary moral contexts and provides an ideal for improving ordinary morality and correcting moral judgements.

Aristotle on the Human Good

Aristotle on the Human Good PDF Author: Richard Kraut
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691225125
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which equates the ultimate end of human life with happiness (eudaimonia), is thought by many readers to argue that this highest goal consists in the largest possible aggregate of intrinsic goods. Richard Kraut proposes instead that Aristotle identifies happiness with only one type of good: excellent activity of the rational soul. In defense of this reading, Kraut discusses Aristotle's attempt to organize all human goods into a single structure, so that each subordinate end is desirable for the sake of some higher goal. This book also emphasizes the philosopher's hierarchy of natural kinds, in which every type of creature achieves its good by imitating divine life. As Kraut argues, Aristotle's belief that thinking is the sole activity of the gods leads him to an intellectualist conception of the ethical virtues. Aristotle values these traits because, by subordinating emotion to reason, they enhance our ability to lead a life devoted to philosophy or politics.