Pleasure, Knowledge, and Being

Pleasure, Knowledge, and Being PDF Author: Cynthia Hampton
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438405634
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hampton illumines the overall structure of the Philebus. Taking the interrelations of pleasure, knowledge, and being as the keys to understanding the unity of the dialogue, she focuses on the central point. The analysis of both pleasure and knowledge can be understood fully only if placed within the context of the more general and fundamental question of how human life fits into the overall structure of reality. What guides the discussion of the good life throughout the dialogue is the conviction that we can only realize our human good by shaping our lives so that they are true to the universal Good which unites all things. It is around this crucial point that the dialogue is structured. Thus, according to Hampton's interpretation, the Philebus shows what it says: that if we delve deeply enough, we shall discover that behind the appearance of disorder lies beauty, proportion, and truth.

Pleasure, Knowledge, and Being

Pleasure, Knowledge, and Being PDF Author: Cynthia Hampton
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438405634
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hampton illumines the overall structure of the Philebus. Taking the interrelations of pleasure, knowledge, and being as the keys to understanding the unity of the dialogue, she focuses on the central point. The analysis of both pleasure and knowledge can be understood fully only if placed within the context of the more general and fundamental question of how human life fits into the overall structure of reality. What guides the discussion of the good life throughout the dialogue is the conviction that we can only realize our human good by shaping our lives so that they are true to the universal Good which unites all things. It is around this crucial point that the dialogue is structured. Thus, according to Hampton's interpretation, the Philebus shows what it says: that if we delve deeply enough, we shall discover that behind the appearance of disorder lies beauty, proportion, and truth.

The Best Things in Life

The Best Things in Life PDF Author: Thomas Hurka
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199752613
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
For centuries, philosophers, theologians, moralists, and ordinary people have asked: How should we live? What makes for a good life? In The Best Things in Life, distinguished philosopher Thomas Hurka takes a fresh look at these perennial questions as they arise for us now in the 21st century. Should we value family over career? How do we balance self-interest and serving others? What activities bring us the most joy? While religion, literature, popular psychology, and everyday wisdom all grapple with these questions, philosophy more than anything else uses the tools of reason to make important distinctions, cut away irrelevancies, and distill these issues down to their essentials. Hurka argues that if we are to live a good life, one thing we need to know is which activities and experiences will most likely lead us to happiness and which will keep us from it, while also reminding us that happiness isn't the only thing that makes life good. Hurka explores many topics: four types of good feeling (and the limits of good feeling); how we can improve our baseline level of happiness (making more money, it turns out, isn't the answer); which kinds of knowledge are most worth having; the importance of achieving worthwhile goals; the value of love and friendship; and much more. Unlike many philosophers, he stresses that there isn't just one good in life but many: pleasure, as Epicurus argued, is indeed one, but knowledge, as Socrates contended, is another, as is achievement. And while the great philosophers can help us understand what matters most in life, Hurka shows that we must ultimately decide for ourselves. This delightfully accessible book offers timely guidance on answering the most important question any of us will ever ask: How do we live a good life?

Gender, Pleasure, and Violence

Gender, Pleasure, and Violence PDF Author: Agnieszka Kościańska
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253053102
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Behind the Iron Curtain, the politics of sexuality and gender were, in many ways, more progressive than the West. While Polish citizens undoubtedly suffered under the oppressive totalitarianism of socialism, abortion was legal, clear laws protected victims of rape, and it was relatively easy to legally change one's gender. In Gender, Pleasure, and Violence, Agnieszka Kościańska reveals that sexologists—experts such as physicians, therapists, and educators—not only treated patients but also held sex education classes at school, published regular columns in the press, and authored highly popular sex manuals that sold millions of copies. Yet strict gender roles within the home meant that true equality was never fully within reach. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, Kościańska shares how professions like sexologists defined the notions of sexual pleasure and sexual violence under these sweeping cultural changes. By tracing the study of sexual human behavior as it was developed and professionalized in Poland since the 1960s, Gender, Pleasure, and Violence explores how the collapse of socialism brought both restrictions in gender rights and new opportunities.

Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life

Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life PDF Author: Daniel Russell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199282846
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
Daniel Russell examines Plato's subtle and insightful analysis of pleasure and explores its intimate connections with his discussions of value and human psychology. Russell offers a fresh perspective on how good things bear on happiness in Plato's ethics, and shows that, for Plato, pleasure cannot determine happiness because pleasure lacks a direction of its own. Plato presents wisdom as a skill of living that determines happiness by directing one's life as a whole, bringing aboutgoodness in all areas of one's life, as a skill brings about order in its materials. The 'materials' of the skill of living are, in the first instance, not things like money or health, but one's attitudes, emotions, and desires where things like money and health are concerned. Plato recognizes thatthese 'materials' of the psyche are inchoate, ethically speaking, and in need of direction from wisdom. Among them is pleasure, which Plato treats not as a sensation but as an attitude with which one ascribes value to its object. However, Plato also views pleasure, once shaped and directed by wisdom, as a crucial part of a virtuous character as a whole. Consequently, Plato rejects all forms of hedonism, which allows happiness to be determined by a part of the psyche that does not direct one'slife but is among the materials to be directed. At the same time, Plato is also able to hold both that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and that pleasure is necessary for happiness, not as an addition to one's virtue, but as a constituent of one's whole virtuous character itself. Plato thereforeoffers an illuminating role for pleasure in ethics and psychology, one to which we may be unaccustomed: pleasure emerges not as a sensation or even a mode of activity, but as an attitude - one of the ways in which we construe our world - and as such, a central part of every character.

Philebus

Philebus PDF Author: Plato
Publisher: Aeterna Press
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 142

Get Book Here

Book Description
THE Philebus appears to be one of the later writings of Plato, in which the style has begun to alter, and the dramatic and poetical element has become subordinate to the speculative and philosophical. In the development of abstract thought great advances have been made on the Protagoras or the Phaedrus, and even on the Republic. But there is a corresponding diminution of artistic skill, a want of character in the persons, a laboured march in the dialogue, and a degree of confusion and incompleteness in the general design. As in the speeches of Thucydides, the multiplication of ideas seems to interfere with the power of expression. Instead of the equally diffused grace and ease of the earlier dialogues there occur two or three highly-wrought passages (pp. 15, 16, 63); instead of the ever-flowing play of humour, now appearing, now concealed, but always present, are inserted a good many bad jests, as we may venture to term them (cp. 17 E, 23 B, D, 28 C, 29 B, 30 E, 34 D, 36 B, 43 A, 46 A, 62 B). Aeterna Press

Plato's Philebus

Plato's Philebus PDF Author: Panagiotis Dimas
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198803389
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the inaugural volume of the Plato Dialogue Project: it offers the first collective study of the Philebus - a high point of philosophical ethics, containing some of Plato's most sophisticated discussions of human happiness. The contributors work through the text, discussing pleasure, knowledge, philosophical method, and the human good.

A Study of Origins: Or, the Problems of Knowledge, of Being, and of Duty

A Study of Origins: Or, the Problems of Knowledge, of Being, and of Duty PDF Author: Edmond de Pressensé
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3385104246
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 554

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

Tomorrowland

Tomorrowland PDF Author: Steven Kotler
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544456211
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
A selection of Kotler's previously published writings, updated, on pivotal and controversial advances in science and technology.--

The Birth of Pleasure

The Birth of Pleasure PDF Author: Carol Gilligan
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679759433
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
The author of the classic In a Different Voice offers a brilliant, provocative book about love that has powerful implications for the way we live and love today. “Compelling ... A thrilling new paradigm.” —The Times Literary Supplement Carol Gilligan, whose In a Different Voice revolutionized the study of human psychology, now asks: Why is love so often associated with tragedy? Why are our experiences of pleasure so often shadowed by loss? And can we change these patterns? Gilligan observes children at play and adult couples in therapy and discovers that the roots of a more hopeful view of love are all around us. She finds evidence in new psychological research and traces a path leading from the myth of Psyche and Cupid through Shakespeare’s plays and Freud’s case histories, to Anne Frank’s diaries and contemporary novels.

The Westminster Review

The Westminster Review PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 624

Get Book Here

Book Description