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 259 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 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 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 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 Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 242 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 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 The Ancient Emotion of Disgust written by Donald Lateiner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 337 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 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 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 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 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.
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 The Politics of Disgust written by Ange-Marie Hancock and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2004-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hancock argues that beliefs about poor African American mothers were the foundation for the contentious 1996 welfare reform debate that effectively 'ended welfare as we know it.' She shows how stereotypes and misperceptions about race, class and gender were used to instigate a politics of disgust.
Download or read book The Revolting Self written by Paul G. Overton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the phenomenon of self-directed disgust and examines the role of self-disgust in relation to psychological experiences and potential ensuing psychopathology and to physical functioning such as disability, chronic physical health, and sexual dysfunction.
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 From Disgust to Humanity written by Martha C. Nussbaum and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-18 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago, a prolific writer and award-winning thinker, Martha Nussbaum stands as one of our foremost authorities on law, justice, freedom, morality, and emotion. In From Disgust to Humanity, Nussbaum aims her considerable intellectual firepower at the bulwark of opposition to gay equality: the politics of disgust. Nussbaum argues that disgust has long been among the fundamental motivations of those who are fighting for legal discrimination against lesbian and gay citizens. When confronted with same-sex acts and relationships, she writes, they experience "a deep aversion akin to that inspired by bodily wastes, slimy insects, and spoiled food--and then cite that very reaction to justify a range of legal restrictions, from sodomy laws to bans on same-sex marriage." Leon Kass, former head of President Bush's President's Council on Bioethics, even argues that this repugnance has an inherent "wisdom," steering us away from destructive choices. Nussbaum believes that the politics of disgust must be confronted directly, for it contradicts the basic principle of the equality of all citizens under the law. "It says that the mere fact that you happen to make me want to vomit is reason enough for me to treat you as a social pariah, denying you some of your most basic entitlements as a citizen." In its place she offers a "politics of humanity," based not merely on respect, but something akin to love, an uplifting imaginative engagement with others, an active effort to see the world from their perspectives, as fellow human beings. Combining rigorous analysis of the leading constitutional cases with philosophical reflection about underlying concepts of privacy, respect, discrimination, and liberty, Nussbaum discusses issues ranging from non-discrimination and same-sex marriage to "public sex." Recent landmark decisions suggest that the views of state and federal courts are shifting toward a humanity-centered vision, and Nussbaum's powerful arguments will undoubtedly advance that cause. Incisive, rigorous, and deeply humane, From Disgust to Humanity is a stunning contribution to Oxford's distinguished Inalienable Rights series.
Download or read book Objection written by Debra Lieberman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we consider incest wrong, even when it occurs between consenting adults unable to have children? Why are words that gross us out more likely to be deemed "obscene" and denied the protection of the First Amendment? In a world where a gruesome photograph can decisively influence a jury and homosexual behavior is still condemned by some as "unnatural," it is worth asking: is our legal system really governed by the power of reason? Or do we allow a primitive human emotion, disgust, to guide us in our lawmaking? In Objection, psychologists Debra Lieberman and Carlton Patrick examine disgust and its impact on the legal system to show why the things that we find stomach-turning so often become the things that we render unlawful. Shedding light on the evolutionary and psychological origins of disgust, the authors reveal how ancient human intuitions about what is safe to eat or touch, or who would make an advantageous mate, have become co-opted by moral systems designed to condemn behavior and identify groups of people ripe for marginalization. Over time these moral stances have made their way into legal codes, and disgust has thereby served as the impetus for laws against behaviors almost universally held to be "disgusting" (corpse desecration, bestiality) - and as the implicit justification for more controversial prohibitions (homosexuality, use of pornography). Written with a critical eye on current events, Lieberman and Patrick build a case for a more reasoned approach to lawmaking in a system that often confuses "gross" with "wrong."
