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.

Author: Zena Hitz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691229198
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us. Reminding us of who we once were and who we might become, Lost in Thought is a moving account of why renewing our inner lives is fundamental to preserving our humanity.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 846

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 518

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 844

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: Henry Richard Fox Bourne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1104

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: Henry Richard Fox Bourne
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3385496128
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 510

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.

Author: Gaius Glenn Atkins
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Congregational churches
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: Gerd Van Riel
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004117976
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume concentrates on a hedonistic argument that enters the philosophical debate, when philosophers argue that what they present as the good life is the truly pleasurable life. The book investigates more precisely how this point was made by Plato and his successors.

Author: Peter King King
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Get Book Here

Book Description