Author: Paula Marantz Cohen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300258321
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare's greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways. Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat "the other." Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature's power to champion what is best in us.
Author: Ruwen Ogien
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023153924X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
Human Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants makes philosophy fun, tactile, and popular. Moral thinking is simple, Ruwen Ogien argues, and as inherent as the senses. In our daily experiences, in the situations we confront and in the scenes we witness, we develop an understanding of right and wrong as sophisticated as the moral outlook of the world's most gifted philosophers. By drawing on this knowledge to navigate life's most perplexing problems, ethics becomes second nature. Ogien explores, through experimental philosophy and other methods, the responses nineteen real-world conundrums provoke. Is a short, mediocre life better than no life at all? Is it acceptable to kill a healthy person so his organs can save five others? Would you swap a "natural" life filled with frustration, disappointment, and partial success for a world in which all of your needs are met, but through artificial and mechanical means? Ogien doesn't seek to show how difficult it is to determine right from wrong or how easy it is for humans to become monsters or react like saints. Helping us tap into the wisdom and feeling we already possess in our ethical "toolboxes," Ogien instead encourages readers to question moral presuppositions and rules; embrace an intuitive sense of dignity, virtue, and justice; and pursue a pluralist ethics suited to the principles of human kindness.
Author: Renée Hollis
Publisher: Exisle Publishing
ISBN: 1775594386
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
We have all felt fear, whether it’s our racing heart as we make a speech or the profound awareness of our own mortality as we await medical results. Of course, the flip-side of fear is courage: as Nelson Mandela famously said, ‘I learned that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it.’ The 25 true stories showcased here capture the full range of the fear and courage experience. At times humorous, often poignant, they shine a light on just what it means to be human.
Author: Jamil Zaki
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
ISBN: 0451499247
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
"A Stanford psychologist offers a bold new understanding of empathy, revealing it to be a skill, not a fixed trait, and showing, through science and stories, how we can all become more empathetic"--
Author: Bruce C. Hafen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781573455268
Category : Marriage
Languages : en
Pages : 14
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Book Description
Author: Reading Harbor
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781500391393
Category : Conduct of life
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Is karma real? "Seeking Human Kindness" is a compilation of 50 inspirational true short stories gathered from across the world. It explores the meaning of humanity. Each vignette focuses on a separate real life event told from perspective of those who experienced great and unexpected boons. Some received great acts of kindness in their moment of need or lent aid to one who needed it most. Their actions precipitated unforeseen events, even in some cases changing their life's direction. Authors were carefully chosen, based on those who had compelling stories to tell. They hail from multiple countries, diverse backgrounds, education, skillsets, life journeys, etc. They come together in this compilation to share their experiences in dealing with the life altering after effects of human kindness.
Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429957573
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 66
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Book Description
In this brilliant, epigrammatic book, the eminent psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the social historian Barbara Taylor examine the terrors of kindness and return to the reader the intense satisfactions of generosity and compassion. Kindness is the foundation of the world's great religions and most-enduring philosophies. Why, then, does being kind feel so dangerous? If we crave kindness with such intensity, why is it often the last pleasure we permit ourselves? And why—despite our longing—are we often suspicious when we are on the receiving end of it? Drawing on intellectual history, literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary social theory, this brief and essential book will return to its readers what Marcus Aurelius declared was mankind's "greatest delight": the intense satisfactions of generosity and compassion.
Author: Houston Kraft
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982183314
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
Kindness is essential in helping heal a world that is more divisive, lonely, and anxious than ever. Kraft believes it is time to reinvent how we talk about it, exercise, and bring kindness into our daily lives. Here he shares anecdotes and actions that can help bring change to our lives, our relationships, and the world.
Author: Rutger Bregman
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316418552
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The “lively” (The New Yorker), “convincing” (Forbes), and “riveting pick-me-up we all need right now” (People) that proves humanity thrives in a crisis and that our innate kindness and cooperation have been the greatest factors in our long-term success as a species. If there is one belief that has united the left and the right, psychologists and philosophers, ancient thinkers and modern ones, it is the tacit assumption that humans are bad. It's a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Pinker, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we're taught, are by nature selfish and governed primarily by self-interest. But what if it isn't true? International bestseller Rutger Bregman provides new perspective on the past 200,000 years of human history, setting out to prove that we are hardwired for kindness, geared toward cooperation rather than competition, and more inclined to trust rather than distrust one another. In fact this instinct has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens. From the real-life Lord of the Flies to the solidarity in the aftermath of the Blitz, the hidden flaws in the Stanford prison experiment to the true story of twin brothers on opposite sides who helped Mandela end apartheid, Bregman shows us that believing in human generosity and collaboration isn't merely optimistic—it's realistic. Moreover, it has huge implications for how society functions. When we think the worst of people, it brings out the worst in our politics and economics. But if we believe in the reality of humanity's kindness and altruism, it will form the foundation for achieving true change in society, a case that Bregman makes convincingly with his signature wit, refreshing frankness, and memorable storytelling. "The Sapiens of 2020." —The Guardian "Humankind made me see humanity from a fresh perspective." —Yuval Noah Harari, author of the #1 bestseller Sapiens Longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction One of the Washington Post's 50 Notable Nonfiction Works in 2020
Author: Tom Lutz
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609387880
Category : SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Once again, Tom Lutz takes us to seldom-traveled corners of the world—the small towns of western Madagascar, the terraced rice fields in northern Luzon, the scattered homesteads on the Mongolian steppe, the hilltop churches on Micronesian islands, the riverside docks of Dhaka, Ethiopian weddings in Gondar, funeral pyres in Nepal, traditionalist karaoke bars in Bhutan—to bring us random reports of human kindness. You may never visit these places, but Tom Lutz will do it for you. And while global media may serve up a steady diet of division, violence, oppression, hatred, and strife, The Kindness of Strangers shows that people the world over are much more likely to meet strangers with interest, empathy, welcome, and compassion.
