Download or read book Critique of Bored Reason on the Confinement of the Modern Condition written by Dmitri Nikulin and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this philosophical study, Dmitri Nikulin explores the concept's genealogy to argue that boredom is the mark of modernity. Considering such thinkers as Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, Kracauer, Heidegger, and Benjamin, Critique of Bored Reason places boredom on center stage in the philosophical critique of modernity.
Download or read book Critique of Bored Reason written by Dmitri Nikulin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the core concepts of the Western philosophical tradition originate in antiquity. Yet boredom is strikingly absent from classical thought. In this philosophical study, Dmitri Nikulin explores the concept’s genealogy to argue that boredom is the mark of modernity. Nikulin contends that boredom is a specifically modern phenomenon. He provides a critical reconstruction of the concept of the modern subject as universal, rational, autonomous, and self-sufficient. Understanding itself in this way, this subject is at once the protagonist, playwright, director, and spectator of the staged drama of human existence. It is therefore inevitably monological, lonely, and alone, and can neither escape its own presence nor get rid of it. In other words, it is bored—and this boredom is the fundamental expression and symptom of the modern condition. Considering such thinkers as Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, Kracauer, Heidegger, and Benjamin, Critique of Bored Reason places boredom on center stage in the philosophical critique of modernity. Nikulin also considers the alternative to the notion of the autonomous subject in the—nonbored and nonboring—dialogic and comic subject capable of shared existence with others.
Download or read book Beautiful Ugliness written by Mark William Roche and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2023-10-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book probes the intersection of the beautiful and the ugly, offering a systematic framework to understand, interpret, and evaluate how ugliness can contribute to beautiful art. Many great artworks include elements of ugliness: repugnant content, disproportionate forms, unresolved dissonance, and unintegrated parts. Mark William Roche’s authoritative monograph Beautiful Ugliness: Christianity, Modernity, and the Arts challenges current practices of the dominant aesthetic schools by exploring the role of ugliness in art and literature. Roche offers a comprehensive and unique framework that integrates philosophical and theological reflection, intellectual-historical analysis, and interpretations of a large number of works from the arts. The study is driven by the recognition that, though ugliness is usually understood as the opposite of beauty, ugliness nonetheless contributes significantly to the beauty of many artworks. Roche’s analysis unfolds in three parts. The first offers a refreshing conceptual analysis of ugliness in art. The second considers the history of ugliness in art and literature, with special attention to its role in Christian art and its central place in modern and contemporary art. The third synthesizes earlier material, offering a taxonomy of beautiful ugliness derived from Hegelian philosophical categories. Roche mesmerizes the reader with an extraordinary range of literary scholarship and expertise, with a particular focus on English, Latin, and German literature, and with a broad range of analyzed phenomena, including fine arts, architecture, and music. Including 63 color illustrations, Beautiful Ugliness will draw in readers from multiple disciplines as well as those from beyond the academy who wish to make sense of today’s complex art world.
Download or read book The Politics of Attention and the Promise of Mindfulness written by Lawrence Berger and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-27 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is evident from recent political campaigns, such as that of Donald Trump, that the deployment of attention is crucial for political outcomes. Indeed, Trump’s presidency came about in part due to realities that were produced by the media themselves, which required in turn the engagement of public attention. The implication is that the instability and capriciousness that is often associated with attention can be an important influence on the outcomes that are so produced. Drawing on the thought of Martin Heidegger, Lawrence Berger puts forward a new conception of attention as human presence, showing how its state determines the efficacy of public spaces in articulating and achieving visions of the common good. As politicians seek to amass power by capturing attention, citizens can engage in disciplines of attention such as mindfulness in producing a public power that is more appropriately oriented to the welfare of all. Berger argues that the practice of mindfulness can enable enhanced ontological bonds to form between individuals, which can be the basis for more stable and effective political realities. Such bonds are not given structures, but are rather contingent upon the state of attention, which comes about holistically by way of a hermeneutical circle of attention, language, and bodily understanding. This book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of philosophy of mind, political philosophy, phenomenology, and cognitive science.
Download or read book The Concept of History written by Dmitri Nikulin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Concept of History reflects on the presuppositions behind the contemporary understanding of history that often remain implicit and not spelled out. It is a critique of the modern understanding of history that presents it as universal and teleological, progressively moving forward to an end. Although few contemporary philosophers and historians maintain the view that there is strict universality and teleology in history, the remnants of these positions still affect our understanding of history. But if history is not universal and singular, evolving toward an objective universal end, it should be possible to admit of multiple histories, some of which we appropriate as our own. An another important aspect of this book is that if provides an account of history that is itself both historical and rooted in attempts to narrate and explain history from its inception in antiquity. The book seeks to establish features or constituents of history that might be found in any historical account and might themselves be considered historical invariants in history.
Download or read book The Other Plato written by Dmitri Nikulin and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a provocative alternative to the dominant approaches of Plato scholarship, the Tübingen School suggests that the dialogues do not tell the full story of Plato's philosophical teachings. Texts and fragments by his students and their followers—most famously Aristotle's Physics—point to an "unwritten doctrine" articulated by Plato at the Academy. These unwritten teachings had a more systematic character than those presented in the dialogues, which according to this interpretation were meant to be introductory. The Tübingen School reconstructs a historical, critical, and systematic account of Plato that takes into account testimony about these teachings as well as the dialogues themselves. The Other Plato collects seminal and more recent essays by leading proponents of this approach, providing a comprehensive overview of the Tübingen School for English readers.
Download or read book The Culture of Boredom written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture of Boredom is a collection of essays by well-known specialists reflecting from philosophical, literary, and artistic perspectives. The goal is to clarify the background of boredom, and to explore its representation through forgotten cross-cutting narratives.
Download or read book The Sense of an Ending written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
Download or read book Yawn written by Mary Mann and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The incisive and often hilarious story of one of our most interesting cultural phenomena: boredom It’s the feeling your grandma told you was only experienced by boring people. Some people say they’re dying of it; others claim to have killed because of it. It’s a key component of depression, creativity, and sex-toy advertisements. It’s boredom, the subject of Yawn, a delightful and at times moving take on the oft-derided emotion and how we deal with it. Deftly wrought from interviews, research, and personal experience, Yawn follows Mary Mann’s search through history for the truth about boredom, spanning the globe, introducing a varied cast of characters. The Desert Fathers—fourth-century Christian monks who made their homes far from civilization—offer the first recorded accounts of lethargy; Thomas Cook, grandfather of the tourism industry, provided escape from the mundane for England’s working class; and contemporarily, we meet couples who are disenchanted by monogamous sex, deployed soldiers who seek entertainment and connection in porn, and prisoners held in solitary confinement, for whom boredom is a punishment for crimes they may or may not have committed. With sharp wit and impressive historical acumen, Mann tells the unexpected story of the hunt for a deeper understanding of boredom, in all its absurd, irritating, and inspiring splendor.
Download or read book Boredom written by Peter Toohey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first book to argue for the benefits of boredom, Peter Toohey dispels the myth that it's simply a childish emotion or an existential malaise like Jean-Paul Sartre's nausea. He shows how boredom is, in fact, one of our most common and constructive emotions and is an essential part of the human experience. This informative and entertaining investigation of boredom--what it is and what it isn't, its uses and its dangers--spans more than 3,000 years of history and takes readers through fascinating neurological and psychological theories of emotion, as well as recent scientific investigations, to illustrate its role in our lives. There are Australian aboriginals and bored Romans, Jeffrey Archer and caged cockatoos, Camus and the early Christians, Durer and Degas. Toohey also explores the important role that boredom plays in popular and highbrow culture and how over the centuries it has proven to be a stimulus for art and literature. Toohey shows that boredom is a universal emotion experienced by humans throughout history and he explains its place, and value, in today's world. "Boredom: A Lively History "is vital reading for anyone interested in what goes on when supposedly nothing happens.
Download or read book Critique of Economic Reason written by Andre Gorz and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2011-01-10 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: André Gorz’s earlier books—from Ecology as Politics to Farewell to the Working Class and Paths to Paradise—have informed and inspired the most radical currents in Green movements in Europe and America over the last two decades. In Critique of Economic Reason, he offers his fullest account to date of the terminal crisis of a system where every activity and aspiration has been subjected to the rule of the market. By carefully delineating the existential and cultural limits of economic rationality, he emphasizes the urgent need to create a society which rejects the work ethic in favor of an emancipatory ethic of free time. At the heart of his alternative is an advocacy not of “full employment,” but of an equal distribution of the diminishing amount of necessary paid work. He presents a practical strategy for reducing the working week, and develops a radical version of a guaranteed wage for all. Above all, he argues that a utopian vision is now the only realistic proposal, and that “economic reason must be returned to its true—that is subordinate—place.”
Download or read book All that is Solid Melts Into Air written by Marshall Berman and published by Verso. This book was released on 1983 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.
Download or read book Couples written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”—Time One of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a book that, when it debuted, scandalized the public with prose pictures of the way people live, and that today provides an engrossing epitaph to the short, happy life of the “post-Pill paradise.” It chronicles the interactions of ten young married couples in a seaside New England community who make a cult of sex and of themselves. The group of acquaintances form a magical circle, complete with ritualistic games, religious substitutions, a priest (Freddy Thorne), and a scapegoat (Piet Hanema). As with most American utopias, this one’s existence is brief and unsustainable, but the “imaginative quest” that inspires its creation is eternal. Praise for Couples “Couples [is] John Updike’s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust.”—The New York Times Book Review “Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don’t see how sex can be written about at all.”—Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology written by Daniel O. Dahlstrom and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume identifies and develops how philosophy of mind and phenomenology interact in both conceptual and empirically-informed ways. The objective is to demonstrate that phenomenology, as the first-personal study of the contents and structures of our mentality, can provide us with insights into the understanding of the mind and can complement strictly analytical or empirically informed approaches to the study of the mind. Insofar as phenomenology, as the study or science of phenomena, allows the mind to appear, this collection shows how the mind can reappear through a constructive dialogue between different ways—phenomenological, analytical, and empirical—of understanding mentality.
Download or read book Science And Human Behavior written by B.F Skinner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The psychology classic—a detailed study of scientific theories of human nature and the possible ways in which human behavior can be predicted and controlled—from one of the most influential behaviorists of the twentieth century and the author of Walden Two. “This is an important book, exceptionally well written, and logically consistent with the basic premise of the unitary nature of science. Many students of society and culture would take violent issue with most of the things that Skinner has to say, but even those who disagree most will find this a stimulating book.” —Samuel M. Strong, The American Journal of Sociology “This is a remarkable book—remarkable in that it presents a strong, consistent, and all but exhaustive case for a natural science of human behavior…It ought to be…valuable for those whose preferences lie with, as well as those whose preferences stand against, a behavioristic approach to human activity.” —Harry Prosch, Ethics
Download or read book The Consolations of Philosophy written by Alain De Botton and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-01-23 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, a delightful, truly consoling work that proves that philosophy can be a supreme source of help for our most painful everyday problems. Perhaps only Alain de Botton could uncover practical wisdom in the writings of some of the greatest thinkers of all time. But uncover he does, and the result is an unexpected book of both solace and humor. Dividing his work into six sections -- each highlighting a different psychic ailment and the appropriate philosopher -- de Botton offers consolation for unpopularity from Socrates, for not having enough money from Epicurus, for frustration from Seneca, for inadequacy from Montaigne, and for a broken heart from Schopenhauer (the darkest of thinkers and yet, paradoxically, the most cheering). Consolation for envy -- and, of course, the final word on consolation -- comes from Nietzsche: "Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us." This wonderfully engaging book will, however, make us feel better in a good way, with equal measures of wit and wisdom.
Download or read book Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity written by Dmitri Nikulin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a philosophical study of two major thinkers who span the period of late antiquity. While Plotinus stands at the beginning of its philosophical tradition, setting the themes for debate and establishing strategies of argument and interpretation, Proclus falls closer to its end, developing a grand synthesis of late ancient thought. The book discusses many central topics of philosophy and science in Plotinus and Proclus, such as the one and the many, number and being, the individuation and constitution of the soul, imagination and cognition, the constitution of number and geometrical objects, indivisibility and continuity, intelligible and bodily matter, and evil. It shows that late ancient philosophy did not simply embrace and borrow from the major philosophical traditions of earlier antiquity--Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism--by providing marginal comments on widely-known philosophical texts. Rather, Neoplatonism offered a set of highly original and innovative insights into the nature of being and thought, which can be distinguished in much subsequent philosophical thought, up until modernity.
