Download or read book Pessimisms written by Eric Marcus and published by Robson. This book was released on 2005-10-24 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable" – Woody Allen Bad things happen to everyone, and this handy book provides just the right words of irreverent inspiration to help you laugh at all its nasty surprises. Inspired by the author’s profoundly pessimistic late grandmother Ethel, 'Pessimisms' offers witty and thoughtful observations on family, faith, men, love, life and health from politics, literature, the press, film and music and the likes of George Burns, Cher, Joan Crawford, Picasso and Goethe.
Download or read book Pessimisms written by Eric Marcus and published by CDS Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pessimism in International Relations written by Tim Stevens and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-29 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the past, present and future of pessimism in International Relations. It seeks to differentiate pessimism from cynicism and fatalism and assess its possibilities as a respectable perspective on national and international politics. The book traces the origins of pessimism in political thought from antiquity through to the present day, illuminating its role in key schools of International Relations and in the work of important international political theorists. The authors analyse the resurgence of pessimism in contemporary politics, such as in the new populism, attitudes to migration, indigenous politics, and the Anthropocene. This edited volume provides the first collection of scholarly work on pessimism in International Relations theory and practice and offers fresh perspectives on an intellectual position often considered as disreputable as it is venerable.
Download or read book Pessimism written by Joshua Foa Dienstag and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-17 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pessimism claims an impressive following--from Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to Freud, Camus, and Foucault. Yet "pessimist" remains a term of abuse--an accusation of a bad attitude--or the diagnosis of an unhappy psychological state. Pessimism is thought of as an exclusively negative stance that inevitably leads to resignation or despair. Even when pessimism looks like utter truth, we are told that it makes the worst of a bad situation. Bad for the individual, worse for the species--who would actually counsel pessimism? Joshua Foa Dienstag does. In Pessimism, he challenges the received wisdom about pessimism, arguing that there is an unrecognized yet coherent and vibrant pessimistic philosophical tradition. More than that, he argues that pessimistic thought may provide a critically needed alternative to the increasingly untenable progressivist ideas that have dominated thinking about politics throughout the modern period. Laying out powerful grounds for pessimism's claim that progress is not an enduring feature of human history, Dienstag argues that political theory must begin from this predicament. He persuasively shows that pessimism has been--and can again be--an energizing and even liberating philosophy, an ethic of radical possibility and not just a criticism of faith. The goal--of both the pessimistic spirit and of this fascinating account of pessimism--is not to depress us, but to edify us about our condition and to fortify us for life in a disordered and disenchanted universe.
Download or read book Spectres of Pessimism written by Mark Schmitt and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations. Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives—from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noé, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier.
Download or read book Nietzsche s Struggle Against Pessimism written by Patrick Hassan and published by . This book was released on 2023-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On what grounds could life be made worth living, given its abundant suffering? Friedrich Nietzsche was among many who attempted to answer this question. While always seeking to resist pessimism, Nietzsche's strategy for doing so, and the extent to which he was willing to concede conceptual grounds to pessimists, shifted dramatically over time. His reading of pessimists such as Eduard von Hartmann, Olga Plümacher, and Julius Bahnsen-as well as their critics, such as Eugen Dühring and James Sully-has been under-explored in the secondary literature, isolating him from his intellectual context. Patrick Hassan's book seeks to correct this. After closely mapping Nietzsche's philosophical development on to the relevant axiological and epistemological issues, it disentangles his various critiques of pessimism, elucidating how familiar Nietzschean themes (e.g. eternal recurrence, aesthetic justification, will to power, and his critique of Christianity) can and should be assessed against this philosophical backdrop.
Download or read book Pessimism Bailey written by Joe Bailey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1988. Pessimism is a peculiar idea. It is either seen as a psychological problem or as a metaphysical issue, but in neither sense is it treated as useful or illuminating or in any way relevant to our understanding of the world. It is the thesis of this book that pessimism and optimism are unavoidable kinds of social judgment of the future which we all display and act upon.
Download or read book Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy written by Antoine Panaïoti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the complex and interesting relations between Nietzsche's philosophical thought and the Buddhist philosophy which he admired and opposed. The volume will appeal to students and scholars interested in Nietzsche's philosophy, Buddhist thought and in the metaphysical, existential and ethical issues that emerge with the demise of theism.
Download or read book Affirmations for Pessimists written by Chris Reccardi and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2013-03-06 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you like ugly, silly drawings? Ever get annoyed by lame socially-acceptable sayings such as "...Don't take it personally" or "...You need to practice self-acceptance?" Ever feel guilty that you're just too lousy a person for real affirmations of love and kindness and prefer to just say something uncomfortably appropriate?With "Affirmations for Pessimists", you get all of the above, with award-winning cartoonist/fine artist Chris Reccardi's illustrated book of hideous drawings paired with delightful quotes that offer cynical (but true) alternatives to today's popular wisdom.Whether it's a cheerful outing to the DMV (without an appointment), being cornered at a "work" party or passenger in economy class, dealing with sub-standard friends, or just simply being fed up with faux 'niceness', there's bound to be a delightfully wretched verbal and pictorial truism somewhere in these pages just for you!
Download or read book Imagining the University written by Ronald Barnett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the world, what it is to be a university is a matter of much debate. The range of ideas of the university in public circulation is, however, exceedingly narrow and is dominated by the idea of the entrepreneurial university. As a consequence, the debate is hopelessly impoverished. Lurking in the literature, there is a broad and even imaginative array of ideas of the university, but those ideas are seldom heard. We need, consequently, not just more ideas of the university but better ideas. Imagining the University forensically examines this situation, critically interrogating many of the current ideas of the university. Imagining the University argues for imaginative ideas that are critical, sensitive to the deep structures underlying universities and are yet optimistic, in short feasible utopias of the university. The case is pressed for one such idea, that of the ecological university. The book concludes by offering a vision of the imagining university, a university that has the capacity continually to re-imagine itself.
Download or read book Pessimism is for Lightweights written by Salena Godden and published by Rough Trade Books. This book was released on 2020-06-01 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of 13 pieces of courage and resistance, this is work inspired by protests and rallies. Poems written for the women's march, for women's empowerment and amplification, poems that salute people fighting for justice, poems on sexism and racism, class discrimination, period poverty and homelessness, immigration and identity. This work reminds us that Courage is a Muscle, it also contains a letter from the spirit of Hope herself, because as the title suggests, Pessimism is for Lightweights.
Download or read book Bourgeois Equality written by Deirdre N. McCloskey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 830 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last 200 years have witnessed a 100-fold leap in well-being. Deirdre McCloskey argues that most people today are stunningly better off than their forbearers were in 1800, and that the rest of humanity will soon be. A purely materialist, incentivist view of economic change does not explain this leap. We have now the third in McCloskey's three-volume opus about how bourgeois values transformed Europe. Volume 3 nails the case for that transfiguration, telling us how aristocratic virtues of hierarchy were replaced by bourgeois virtues (more precisely, by attitudes toward virtues) that made it possible for ordinary folk with novel ideas to change the way people, farmed, manufactured, traveled, ruled themselves, and fought. It is a dramatic story, and joins a dramatic debate opened up by Thomas Piketty in his best-selling Capital in the 21st Century. McCloskey insists that economists are far too preoccupied by capital and saving, arguing against the position (of Piketty and most others) that capital induces a tendency to get more, that money reproduces itself, that riches are created from riches. Not so, our intrepid McCloskey shows. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, among the biggest wealth accumulators in our era, didn't get rich through the magic of compound interest on capital. They got rich through intellectual property, creating billions of dollars from virtually nothing. Capital was no more important an ingredient to the original Apple or Microsoft than cookies or cucumbers. The debate is between those who think riches are created from riches versus those who, with McCloskey, think riches are created from rags, between those who see profits as a generous return on capital, or profits coming from innovation that ultimately benefits us all.
Download or read book Explanatory Style written by Gregory McClell Buchanan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-23 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first work to condense the large literature on explanatory style -- one's tendency to offer similar sorts of explanations for different events. This cognitive variable has been related to psychopathology, physical health, achievement and success. Compiled by experts in the fields of depression, anxiety, psychoneuroimmunology and motivation, this volume details our current level of understanding, outlines gaps in our knowledge, and discusses the future directions of the field. Data from a vast number of studies are presented, including results from studies not previously reported. Coverage includes sections on cross-cultural comparisons, life-span and development issues, and gender differences; and an extensive description of the measurement of explanatory style offering questionnaire and content-analysis methods for children, college populations and adults. This work is thus a valuable tool for anyone involved in research on the etiology and treatment of depression, cognitive therapy, motivation and emotion, and the link between physical and psychological well-being.
Download or read book On the Verge of Nothing written by Gary Shipley and published by . This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gary Shipley's On the Verge of Nothing moves according to a patient logic, asking us to consider what follows when we begin from pessimism, rather than arriving at it. Through Shipley's ciphers - Nietzsche, Pessoa, Lispector, contemporary performance art - pessimism is illuminated as at once unliveable and unconsolable, and yet unavoidable. Reading On the Verge of Nothing, the primordial philosophical question of "how to live" now takes on contours that are colder, more detached, and yet, somehow, deeply engaged. --Eugene Thacker, author of Infinite Resignation "Beginning insistently with the end of thought, this panegyric of the pointless offers a withering post-pessimistic ethics and aesthetics of diversionary tactics for life in the void. Territories traversed include dreams and delusions, the limits and purpose of self-consciousness, human animality, and the paradox of feeling-thinking. Gary J Shipley's lucid, often pitiless diagnoses; rigorous, informed, and tight arguments; bons mots and essential apercus - larded with a rich compost of quotation (Pessoa, Lispector, Cioran, Kafka, etc.) - pursue a relentless thrashing of thought, sketching both a Bartlett's and a Baedeker of our inevitable doom. These essays, aphorisms, fragments, and quotations have been shored not against but amidst ruin. Experimental, exploratory soundings and performances, a fantasia for the end of the world: this word horde is an essential drug for addicts of the impossible."-- Stuart Kendall, author of Georges Bataille
Download or read book There s No Free Lunch written by David L. Bahnsen and published by Post Hill Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The verdict is in: Free enterprise has lifted billions of people out of abject poverty all over the world and provided a higher quality of life than has ever been thought possible. But a growing case is forming in public opinion against free markets, and for a significantly larger command & control management of the economy. Whether you call it socialism or progressive leftism, more and more people are turning away from the forces of freedom and social cooperation that made the last two hundred years of prosperity possible, and embracing a system that deprives human beings of their dignity, impoverishing whole societies both financially and spiritually. What David Bahnsen does here is pull from the masters—the great economic voices of the past and the present—to remind readers of the basic economic truths that must serve as our foundation in understanding the challenges of today. In 250 vital points, he combines pearls of wisdom from economic legends with his own careful commentary to provide readers the perspective, information, and reaffirmation they need in order to see economics for what it is. It will empower you and equip you with the truth—250 truths—that are crucially needed to keep the lights on in civilization and advance the cause of human flourishing.
Download or read book Actual Consciousness written by Ted Honderich and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it for you to be conscious? There is no consensus in philosophy or science: it has remained a mystery. Ted Honderich develops a brand new theory of consciousness, according to which perceptual consciousness is external to the perceiver. It exists in a subjective physical world dependent on both you and the objective physical world.
Download or read book A Feeling of Wrongness written by Joseph Packer and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated cartoons to speculative fiction. Packer and Stoneman explore how narratives such as True Detective, Rick and Morty, Final Fantasy VII, Lovecraftian weird fiction, and the pop ideology of transhumanism are better suited to communicate pessimistic affect to their fans than most carefully argued philosophical treatises and polemics. They show how these popular nondiscursive texts successfully circumvent the typical defenses against pessimism identified by Peter Wessel Zapffe as distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. They twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism. While philosophers and polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with the inherently optimistic structures of expressive thought or rhetoric, Packer and Stoneman show how popular texts are able to communicate their pessimism in ways that are paradoxically freed from the restrictive tools of optimism. A Feeling of Wrongness thus presents uncharted rhetorical possibilities for narrative, making visible the rhetorical efficacy of alternate ways and means of persuasion.
