The Invention of Altruism PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Invention of Altruism PDF full book. Access full book title The Invention of Altruism by Thomas M. Dixon. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Thomas M. Dixon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191734816
Category : Altruism
Languages : en
Pages : 420
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume explores how Victorian philosophers, scientists clergymen, and novelists debated the meaning of the new term 'altruism'. Including a reappraisal of Charles Darwin's ideas and insights into the rise of popular socialism, this study is relevant to contemporary debates about altruism, evolution religion, and ethics.
Author: Thomas M. Dixon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191734816
Category : Altruism
Languages : en
Pages : 420
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume explores how Victorian philosophers, scientists clergymen, and novelists debated the meaning of the new term 'altruism'. Including a reappraisal of Charles Darwin's ideas and insights into the rise of popular socialism, this study is relevant to contemporary debates about altruism, evolution religion, and ethics.
Author: Thomas Dixon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume explores how Victorian philosophers, scientists, clergymen, and novelists debated the meaning of the new term 'altruism'. Including a reappraisal of Charles Darwin's ideas and insights into the rise of popular socialism, this study is highly relevant to contemporary debates about altruism, evolution, religion, and ethics.
Author: Niall Scott
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)
ISBN: 0335235263
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Get Book Here
Book Description
"A discussion of altruism, drawing on different disiplinary perspectives, could hardly be more timely, and this book is a thoughtful and insightful contribution to the debate." Ruth Chadwick - Distinguished Research Professor and Director, Cardiff University What motivates us to be altruistic? How did an altruistic trait evolve in humans, given that evolutionary theory assumes we are self-interested? What sorts of people are altruistic and in what circumstances? Is the welfare state a channel for altruism or does it crowd out people’s altruistic motivations? This accessible book is the first introduction to the idea of altruism. It explores how we have come to be altruistic, and considers why it is important to remain altruistic, not just for the sake of others, but in order maintain the fragile fabric of human society. The book surveys the history of the concept of altruism and examines it from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including moral philosophy, evolutionary biology, psychology, economics and political science. It then attempts to bring together the distinct issues and concerns of these disciplines to arrive at a unified understanding of altruism. The rational self-interested individual of economics is compared with the altruist who exhibits the virtues of empathy, compassion and benevolence. The book also discusses heroic altruism, such as that displayed by rescuers of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, and psychological experiments which seek to identify the altruistic trait. Scott and Seglow argue that altruism is easily extinguished and hard to nourish, but vital for a fundamentally human future. Academics and students in social sciences and philosophy will find Altruism of great interest. So too will professionals in the voluntary and charitable sectors and journalists involved in communicating social scientific and philosophical ideas to the public.
Author: Stephen G. Post
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195349443
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 532
Get Book Here
Book Description
The concept of altruism, or disinterested concern for another's welfare, has been discussed by everyone from theologians to psychologists to biologists. In this cutting edge book, evolutionary, neurological, developmental, psychological, social, cultural, and religious aspects of altruistic behavior are examined by renowned researchers. The result is a collaborative and provocative look at one of humanity's essential and defining characteristics.
Author: Otto A. Sinkie
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781258047696
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: William MacAskill
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698191102
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Get Book Here
Book Description
Most of us want to make a difference. We donate our time and money to charities and causes we deem worthy, choose careers we consider meaningful, and patronize businesses and buy products we believe make the world a better place. Unfortunately, we often base these decisions on assumptions and emotions rather than facts. As a result, even our best intentions often lead to ineffective—and sometimes downright harmful—outcomes. How can we do better? While a researcher at Oxford, trying to figure out which career would allow him to have the greatest impact, William MacAskill confronted this problem head on. He discovered that much of the potential for change was being squandered by lack of information, bad data, and our own prejudice. As an antidote, he and his colleagues developed effective altruism, a practical, data-driven approach that allows each of us to make a tremendous difference regardless of our resources. Effective altruists believe that it’s not enough to simply do good; we must do good better. At the core of this philosophy are five key questions that help guide our altruistic decisions: How many people benefit, and by how much? Is this the most effective thing I can do? Is this area neglected? What would have happened otherwise? What are the chances of success, and how good would success be? By applying these questions to real-life scenarios, MacAskill shows how many of our assumptions about doing good are misguided. For instance, he argues one can potentially save more lives by becoming a plastic surgeon rather than a heart surgeon; measuring overhead costs is an inaccurate gauge of a charity’s effectiveness; and, it generally doesn’t make sense for individuals to donate to disaster relief. MacAskill urges us to think differently, set aside biases, and use evidence and careful reasoning rather than act on impulse. When we do this—when we apply the head and the heart to each of our altruistic endeavors—we find that each of us has the power to do an astonishing amount of good.
Author: Emiliana Mangone
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1648021301
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Get Book Here
Book Description
The birth of the social sciences and specifically of sociology begets some open questions, among which the debate on altruism and the concept of social solidarity. The term altruism was firstly used by Auguste Comte. It is one of the few terms born within the scientific field that will enter the common language roughly maintaining the same meaning. For the positivist Comte, altruism represented the powerful impulse to the intellectual and moral development of humanity to which we must strive as a future state. The term commonly means all those actions whose benefits fall on others and not on the agent (actor). In short, for Comte, altruism means "to live for others" (vivre pour autrui). The centrality of altruism as part of the reflections of social sciences can be found in many classic authors. Durkheim, for example, explains the foundations of social solidarity in modern society precisely through the opposition between altruism and egoism and defines its implications in the book Le Suicide in 1897, also identifying what will later become the main typology of suicide by contrasting altruistic suicide with egoistic suicide. Likewise, both Weber and Marx, while not using the term altruism as such, refer to it indirectly. The former, when describing the ethics of love for the charismatic authority as opposed to legal and rational authority, the latter, when corroborating his polemics against Christian charity. The interest in altruism as an object of study of social sciences, however, is progressively waning - especially in Europe. From the second half of the last century, theoretical and empirical studies show the indifference of social scientists towards this object, except for the Russian-American sociologist Sorokin, who in 1949 founded the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism. In recent years, however, the topic seems to take renewed vigor, especially in the United States with the birth in 2012 of the section "Altruism, Morality & Social Solidarity" within the American Sociological Association. It considered these three aspects as a single field of disciplinary specialization, since they are significantly dependent on socio-cultural reality. This is the situation in the United States. In Europe, there is a renewed interest in studies on altruism, especially in French-language sociology, above all starting from the numerous contributions to reading and re-reading work on Marcel Mauss's on gift of 1925, and in following the anti-utilitarian movement and studies of the school of social representations of Moscovici, which leads to the definition of the elementary forms of altruism. The book aims to analyze the concept of altruism starting from classical philosophy up to the systems of ideas of contemporaneity, considering the approaches and authors of reference in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary way. The representations of altruism and egoism in contemporary society are constantly changing, following the transformations of society itself. Having abandoned the idea that the factors leading to altruism or egoism lay only in human nature, we find them in people’s conduct, freedom, relationships, their associative forms and society. The attention is thus turned to two elements of the daily life of individuals: culture and social relations. The book tries, therefore, through the meso-theories developed in recent decades, which study the relationships between life-world and social system, to describe the links between altruism, egoism, culture and social relations. We will pay particular attention to the relationality of individuals, in an attempt to overcome the dichotomy altruism/egoism by reading some aspects little considered by previous studies - or contemplated only indirectly or marginally. The ultimate goal is to highlight how positive actions are necessary for the contemporary society and how social sciences must go back and study positive socio-cultural actions and phenomena, not only negative, as a way to promote them for the well-being of the society.
Author: Ronald Dmitri Milo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 156
Get Book Here
Book Description
Hobbes, T. Self-love and society.--Butler, J. Upon the love of our neighbour.--Hume, D. Morality, self-love, and benevolence.--Kant, I. Morality and the duty of love toward other men.--Schlick, M. Hedonism and egoism.--Broad, C.D. Egoism as a theory of human motives.--Slote, M.A. An empirical basis for psychological egoism.--Aronfreed, J. Altruistic behavior.--Nagel, T. The possibility of altruism.--Bibliography (p. 131-133).
Author: Sarah Glendon Lyons
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351577069
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Get Book Here
Book Description
How did literary aestheticism emerge in Victorian Britain, with its competing models of religious doubt and visions of secularisation? For Lyons, the aestheticism developed and progressively revised by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) and Walter Pater (1839-1894) illuminates the contradictory impulses of modern secularism: on the one hand, a desire to cast itself as a form of neutrality or disinterestedness; on the other, a desire to affirm 'this world' as the place of human flourishing or even enchantment. The standard narrative of a 'crisis of faith' does not do justice to the fissured, uncertain quality of Victorian visions of secularisation. Precisely because it had the status of a confusing hypothesis rather than a self-evident reality, it provoked not only dread and melancholia, but also forms of fantasy. Within this context Lyons gives a fundamentally new account of the aims and nature of Victorian aestheticism, taking as a focus its deceptively simple claim that art is for art's sake first of all.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
