Download or read book The Meaning of Disgust written by Colin McGinn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disgust has a strong claim to be a distinctively human emotion. But what is it to be disgusting? What unifies the class of disgusting things? Colin McGinn sets out to analyze the content of disgust, arguing that life and death are implicit in its meaning. Disgust is a kind of philosophical emotion, reflecting the human attitude to the biological world. Yet it is an emotion we strive to repress. It may have initially arisen as a method of curbing voracious human desire, which itself results from our powerful imagination. Because we feel disgust towards ourselves as a species, we are placed in a fraught emotional predicament: we admire ourselves for our achievements, but we also experience revulsion at our necessary organic nature. We are subject to an affective split. Death involves the disgusting, in the shape of the rotting corpse, and our complex attitudes towards death feed into our feelings of disgust. We are beings with a "disgust consciousness", unlike animals and gods-and we cannot shake our self-ambivalence. Existentialism and psychoanalysis sought a general theory of human emotion; this book seeks to replace them with a theory in which our primary mode of feeling centers around disgust. The Meaning of Disgust is an original study of a fascinating but neglected subject, which attempts to tell the disturbing truth about the human condition.
Download or read book The Anatomy of Disgust written by William Ian MILLER and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes; eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division.
Download or read book The Moral Psychology of Disgust written by Nina Strohminger and published by Moral Psychology of the Emotions. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an introduction to the major findings, challenges and debates regarding disgust as a moral emotion, and brings together scholarship from multiple disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, anthropology and law.
Download or read book Yuck written by Daniel Kelly and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-06-10 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the character and evolution of disgust and the role this emotion plays in our social and moral lives. People can be disgusted by the concrete and by the abstract—by an object they find physically repellent or by an ideology or value system they find morally abhorrent. Different things will disgust different people, depending on individual sensibilities or cultural backgrounds. In Yuck!, Daniel Kelly investigates the character and evolution of disgust, with an emphasis on understanding the role this emotion has come to play in our social and moral lives. Disgust has recently been riding a swell of scholarly attention, especially from those in the cognitive sciences and those in the humanities in the midst of the "affective turn." Kelly proposes a cognitive model that can accommodate what we now know about disgust. He offers a new account of the evolution of disgust that builds on the model and argues that expressions of disgust are part of a sophisticated but largely automatic signaling system that humans use to transmit information about what to avoid in the local environment. He shows that many of the puzzling features of moral repugnance tinged with disgust are by-products of the imperfect fit between a cognitive system that evolved to protect against poisons and parasites and the social and moral issues on which it has been brought to bear. Kelly's account of this emotion provides a powerful argument against invoking disgust in the service of moral justification.
Download or read book The Handbook of Disgust Research written by Philip A. Powell and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together the world's leading experts on disgust to fully explore this understudied behavior. Disgust is unique among emotions. It is, at once, perhaps the most “basic” and visceral of feelings while also being profoundly shaped by learning and culture. Evident from the earliest months of life, disgust influences individual behavior and shapes societies across political, social, economic, legal, ecological, and health contexts. As an emotion that evolved to prevent our eating contaminated foods, disgust is now known to motivate wider behaviors, social processes, and customs. On a global scale, disgust finds a place in population health initiatives, from hand hygiene to tobacco warning labels, and may underlie aversions to globalization and other progressive agendas, such as those regarding sustainable consumption and gay marriage. This comprehensive work provides cutting‐edge, timely, and succinct theoretical and empirical contributions illustrating the breadth, rigor, relevance, and increasing maturity of disgust research to modern life. It is relevant to a wide range of psychological research and is particularly important to behavior viewed through an evolutionary lens, As such, it will stimulate further research and clinical applications that allow for a broader conceptualization of human behavior. The reader will find: Succinct and accessible summaries of key perspectives Highlights of new scientific developments A rich blend of theoretical and empirical chapters
Download or read book Disgust written by Stephanie Grant and published by . This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When, in my twenties, I came out to my parents as a lesbian, I became an object of their disgust." In this hybrid memoir, novelist Stephanie Grant works to make sense of three generations of female self-disgust in her family while considering how it challenges both the American ideal of equality and our real-life experiences of intimacy. Disgust: A Memoir is funny, tender, and rigorous in its exploration of how the most difficult emotion functions both in our private lives and our collective imaginations.
Download or read book The Politics of Disgust written by Ange-Marie Hancock and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2004-12-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2006 Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Organized Section Best First Book Award from the American Political Science Association Winner of the 2006 W.E.B. DuBois Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists Ange-Marie Hancock argues that longstanding beliefs about poor African American mothers were the foundation for the contentious 1996 welfare reform debate that effectively "ended welfare as we know it." By examining the public identity of the so-called welfare queen and its role in hindering democratic deliberation, The Politics of Disgust shows how stereotypes and politically motivated misperceptions about race, class and gender were effectively used to instigate a politics of disgust. The ongoing role of the politics of disgust in welfare policy is revealed here by using content analyses of the news media, the 1996 congressional floor debates, historical evidence and interviews with welfare recipients themselves. Hancock's incisive analysis is both compelling and disturbing, suggesting the great limits of today's democracy in guaranteeing not just fair and equitable policy outcomes, but even a fair chance for marginalized citizens to participate in the process.
Download or read book Savoring Disgust written by Carolyn Korsmeyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disgust is among the strongest of aversions, characterized by involuntary physical recoil and even nausea. Yet paradoxically, disgusting objects can sometimes exert a grisly allure, and this emotion can constitute a positive, appreciative aesthetic response when exploited by works of art -- a phenomenon labelled here "aesthetic disgust." While the reactive, visceral quality of disgust contributes to its misleading reputation as a relatively "primitive" response mechanism, it is this feature that also gives it a particular aesthetic power when manifest in art. Most treatments of disgust mistakenly interpret it as only an extreme response, thereby neglecting the many subtle ways that it operates aesthetically. This study calls attention to the diversity and depth of its uses, analyzing the emotion in detail and considering the enormous variety of aesthetic forms it can assume in works of art and --unexpectedly-- even in foods. In the process of articulating a positive role for disgust, this book examines the nature of aesthetic apprehension and argues for the distinctive mode of cognition that disgust affords -- an intimate apprehension of physical mortality. Despite some commonalities attached to the meaning of disgust, this emotion assumes many aesthetic forms: it can be funny, profound, witty, ironic, unsettling, sorrowful, or gross. To demonstrate this diversity, several chapters review examples of disgust as it is aroused by art. The book ends by investigating to what extent disgust can be discovered in art that is also considered beautiful.
Download or read book Disgust written by Winfried Menninghaus and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disgust (Ekel, dégoût) is a state of high alert. It acutely says "no" to a variety of phenomena that seemingly threaten the integrity of the self, if not its very existence. A counterpart to the feelings of appetite, desire, and love, it allows at the same time for an acting out of hidden impulses and libidinal drives. In Disgust, Winfried Menninghaus provides a comprehensive account of the significance of this forceful emotion in philosophy, aesthetics, literature, the arts, psychoanalysis, and theory of culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics addressed include the role of disgust as both a cognitive and moral organon in Kant and Nietzsche; the history of the imagination of the rotting corpse; the counter-cathexis of the disgusting in Romantic poetics and its modernist appeal ever since; the affinities of disgust and laughter and the analogies of vomiting and writing; the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis in a theory of disgusting pleasures and practices; the association of disgusting "otherness" with truth and the trans-symbolic "real" in Bataille, Sartre, and Kristeva; Kafka's self-representation as an "Angel" of disgusting smells and acts, concealed in a writerly stance of uncompromising "purity"; and recent debates on "Abject Art."
Download or read book Disgust written by Susan Miller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Miller, author of two foundational works on shame (The Shame Experience [TAP, 1985/1993pbk]; Shame in Context [TAP, 1996]), now turns to disgust, an intriguing emotion that has received little attention in the professional literature. For Miller, the psychological study of disgust revolves around boundary issues: We tend to feel disgusted about things (from bodily processes to decaying organic matter to ethnic attributes of "foreign" people) that lie on the border between our sense of self and nonself or between our sense of "good self" and "bad self." Miller's clinical and everyday examples of disgust lead her to explore the developmental grounding of the capacity to disgust, and this topic opens to consideration of the relation of the various sensory modalities to disgust reactions. Why, Miller asks, do we see disgusting images and smell disgusting smells but not hear disgusting sounds? And further, what makes sensory impressions or objects "disgusting" to certain people but not to others? Why do the images and smells of disease so frequently elicit disgust? And what is the relation of disgust to sex, procreation, and human intimacy? Laced with developmental insights and vivid illustrations of disgust-related syndromes, Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion incorporates cultural analysis that links disgust to images of illness and health, to family life, to group identity, and to artistic and scientific creativity. For Miller, the central disgust dialectic - the self's need to safeguard itself against noxious intrusions from without and simultaneously to nourish itself through contact with "otherness" - obtains whether the discourse concerns nature, nations, or noses. With her typically graceful and gracious prose, Miller puts disgust on the psychological map and thereby adds a chapter to our understanding of the role of emotion in therapy and in everyday life.
Download or read book Dramatic Disgust written by Sarah J. Ablett and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2020-07-31 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetic disgust is a key component of most classic works of drama because it has much more potential than to simply shock the audience. This first extensive study on dramatic disgust places this sensation among pity and fear as one of the core emotions that can achieve katharsis in drama. The book sets out in antiquity and traces the history of dramatic disgust through Kant, Freud, and Kristeva to Sarah Kane's in-yer-face theatre. It establishes a framework to analyze forms and functions of disgust in drama by investigating its different cognates (miasma, abjection, etc.). Providing a concise argument against critics who have discredited aesthetic disgust as juvenile attention-grabbing, Sarah J. Ablett explains how this repulsive emotion allows theatre to dig deeper into what it means to be human.
Download or read book That s Disgusting Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion written by Rachel Herz and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-01-23 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disgust originated to prevent humans from eating poisonous food, but this simple safety mechanism has since evolved into a uniquely human emotion that dictates how people treat others, shapes cultural norms, and even has implications for mental and physical health. This book illuminates the science behind disgust, tackling such colorful topics as cannibalism, humor, and pornography to address larger questions including why sources of disgust vary among people and societies and how disgust influences individual personalities, daily lives, and values. It turns out that disgust underlies more than we realize, from political ideologies to the lure of horror movies.
Download or read book The Ancient Emotion of Disgust written by Donald Lateiner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of emotions and emotional displays has achieved a deserved prominence in recent classical scholarship. The emotions of the classical world can be plumbed to provide a valuable heuristic tool. Emotions can help us understand key issues of ancient ethics, ideological assumptions, and normative behaviors, but, more frequently than not, classical scholars have turned their attention to "social emotions" requiring practical decisions and ethical judgments in public and private gatherings. The emotion of disgust has been unwarrantedly neglected, even though it figures saliently in many literary genres, such as iambic poetry and comedy, historiography, and even tragedy and philosophy. This collection of seventeen essays by fifteen authors features the emotion of disgust as one cutting edge of the study of Greek and Roman antiquity. Individual contributions explore a wide range of topics. These include the semantics of the emotion both in Greek and Latin literature, its social uses as a means of marginalizing individuals or groups of individuals, such as politicians judged deviant or witches, its role in determining aesthetic judgments, and its potentialities as an elicitor of aesthetic pleasure. The papers also discuss the vocabulary and uses of disgust in life (Galli, actors, witches, homosexuals) and in many literary genres: ancient theater, oratory, satire, poetry, medicine, historiography, Hellenistic didactic and fable, and the Roman novel. The Introduction addresses key methodological issues concerning the nature of the emotion, its cognitive structure, and modern approaches to it. It also outlines the differences between ancient and modern disgust and emphasizes the appropriateness of "projective or second-level disgust" (vilification) as a means of marginalizing unwanted types of behavior and stigmatizing morally condemnable categories of individuals. The volume is addressed first to scholars who work in the field of classics, but, since texts involving disgust also exhibit significant cultural variation, the essays will attract the attention of scholars who work in a wide spectrum of disciplines, including history, social psychology, philosophy, anthropology, comparative literature, and cross-cultural studies.
Download or read book On Disgust written by Aurel Kolnai and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kolnai made a breakthrough in the phenomenology of aversion when he showed the "double intentionality" of emotions like fear, focusing on both the object of fear and the subjects' concern for his own well-being, this being one of the ways in which fear differs from disgust. In a surprising yet persuasive move, Kolnai argues that disgust is never related to inorganic or non-biological matter, and that its arousal by moral objects has an underlying similarity with its arousal by organic material: a particular combination of life and death. Kolnai gives an analytic list of various kinds of disgusting objects (which should not be read just before lunch) and shows how disgust relates to the five senses.
Download or read book Hiding from Humanity written by Martha C. Nussbaum and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should laws about sex and pornography be based on social conventions about what is disgusting? Should felons be required to display bumper stickers or wear T-shirts that announce their crimes? This powerful and elegantly written book, by one of America's most influential philosophers, presents a critique of the role that shame and disgust play in our individual and social lives and, in particular, in the law. Martha Nussbaum argues that we should be wary of these emotions because they are associated in troubling ways with a desire to hide from our humanity, embodying an unrealistic and sometimes pathological wish to be invulnerable. Nussbaum argues that the thought-content of disgust embodies "magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity that are just not in line with human life as we know it." She argues that disgust should never be the basis for criminalizing an act, or play either the aggravating or the mitigating role in criminal law it currently does. She writes that we should be similarly suspicious of what she calls "primitive shame," a shame "at the very fact of human imperfection," and she is harshly critical of the role that such shame plays in certain punishments. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich variety of philosophical, psychological, and historical references--from Aristotle and Freud to Nazi ideas about purity--and on legal examples as diverse as the trials of Oscar Wilde and the Martha Stewart insider trading case, this is a major work of legal and moral philosophy.
Download or read book A Politics of Disgust written by Eleonora Joensuu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-03 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the intersubjective nature of disgust, the fascination that often accompanies it—along with repulsion—and the ethical implications of the experience. With attention to what emotions do rather than what they necessarily are, it examines the ways in which disgust works to create structures of meaning about selfhood, interpersonal relationships, and the worlds we inhabit. Offering a critique of existing approaches to disgust, the author advances a feminist intersubjective perspective, drawing on the work of Jessica Benjamin to understand the relational aspects of disgust encounters. Thus, the focus is not on defining disgust definitively, nor debating what objects invoke disgust, nor on whether it is a universal experience, but on the effects of disgust once invoked, what the experience does and the impact it has. Through a case study of incarceration and death by self-inflicted strangulation—a death that was later ruled a homicide—this volume sheds light on the nature of the ethical demands of disgust and its nature as an active struggle for recognition. As such, A Politics of Disgust will appeal to scholars of gender studies, social theory and philosophy with interests in the emotions and intersubjectivity.
Download or read book Disgust and Its Disorders written by Bunmi O. Olatunji and published by American Psychological Association (APA). This book was released on 2009 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Disgust and Its Disorders: Theory, Assessment, and Treatment Implications thoughtfully examines the role of disgust in psychopathology by highlighting important theoretical and methodological developments and discussing recent research on behavioral patterns that can be provoked by disgust. Contributors demonstrate that disgust plays an important role in a wide range of psychopathology, including sexual dysfunction, eating disorders, animal phobias, and obsessive - compulsive disorder. Disgust is shown to be a multidimensional construct that centers on the unifying theme of potential contamination of the body, soul, and broad social order. Editors Bunmi O. Olatunji and Dean McKay thoroughly review the available research on disgust and shed light on how its interpretation will, in turn, facilitate the development of better treatment of disgust-related avoidance."--BOOK JACKET.
