Download or read book A Brief History of Happiness written by Nicholas P. White and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-06-09 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brief history, philosopher Nicholas White reviews 2,500 years of philosophical thought about happiness. Addresses key questions such as: What is happiness? Should happiness play such a dominant role in our lives? How can we deal with conflicts between the various things that make us happy? Considers the ways in which major thinkers from antiquity to the modern day have treated happiness: from Plato’s notion of the harmony of the soul, through to Nietzsche’s championing of conflict over harmony. Relates questions about happiness to ethics and to practical philosophy.
Download or read book Happiness written by Darrin M. McMahon and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intellectual history of man's most elusive yet coveted goal. Today, we think of happiness as a natural right, but people haven't always felt this way. Historian McMahon argues that our modern belief in happiness is a recent development, the product of a revolution in human expectations carried out since the eighteenth century. He investigates that fundamental transformation by synthesizing two thousand years of politics, culture, and thought. In ancient Greek tragedy, happiness was considered a gift of the gods. During the Enlightenment men and women were first introduced to the novel prospect that they could--in fact should--be happy in this life as opposed to the hereafter. This recognition of happiness as a motivating ideal led to its consecration in the Declaration of Independence. McMahon then shows how our modern search continues to generate new forms of pleasure, but also, paradoxically, new forms of pain.--From publisher description.
Download or read book Happiness in World History written by Peter N. Stearns and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Happiness in World History traces ideas and experiences of happiness from early stages in human history, to the maturation of agricultural societies and their religious and philosophical systems, to the changes and diversities in the approach to happiness in the modern societies that began to emerge in the 18th century. In this thorough overview, Peter N. Stearns explores the interaction between psychological and historical findings about happiness, the relationship between ideas and popular experience, and the opportunity to use historical analysis to assess strengths and weaknesses of dominant contemporary notions of happiness. Starting with the advent of agriculture, the book assesses major transitions in history for patterns in happiness, including the impact of the great religions, the unprecedented Enlightenment interest in secular happiness and cheerfulness, and industrialization and imperialism. The final, contemporary section covers fascist and communist efforts to define alternatives to Western ideas of happiness, the increasing connections with consumerism, and growing global interests in defining and promoting well-being. Touching on the experiences in the major regions of Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America, the text offers an expansive introduction to a new field of study. This book will be of interest to students of world history and the history of emotions.
Download or read book The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era written by Carli N. Conklin and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2019-03-20 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have long debated the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, yet have tended to define it narrowly, focusing on a single intellectual tradition, and on the use of the term within a single text, the Declaration of Independence. In this insightful volume, Carli Conklin considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety of intellectual traditions, and explores its usage in two key legal texts of the Founding Era, the Declaration and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. For Blackstone, the pursuit of happiness was a science of jurisprudence, by which his students could know, and then rightly apply, the first principles of the Common Law. For the founders, the pursuit of happiness was the individual right to pursue a life lived in harmony with the law of nature and a public duty to govern in accordance with that law. Both applications suggest we consider anew how the phrase, and its underlying legal philosophies, were understood in the founding era. With this work, Conklin makes important contributions to the fields of early American intellectual and legal history.
Download or read book A Private History of Happiness 99 Moments of Joy from Around the World written by George Myerson and published by Anima. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bliss of lingering in a warm bed on a winter morning, to a bracing springtime walk by the seaside, A Private History of Happinessoffers the reader a wealth of delightfully fresh perceptions of where and how happiness may be found. These 99 moments of happiness are arranged by theme - Morning, Friendship, Garden, Family, Leisure, Nature, Food and Drink, Well-being, Creativity, Love and Evening - and each is followed by a brief description and commentary that sets the extract in context and encourages further reflection. Drawing on a wide and international range of literary sources - from Ptolemy to Tolstoy - George Myerson reveals that small, unpretentious joys have been shared by human beings across cultures and over thousands of years. He invites us to discover the happiness in our own lives that can be found here and now.
Download or read book The Mansion of Happiness written by Jill Lepore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-03-26 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has written a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave. How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can do is ask,” Lepore writes. “That’s why any history of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history of curiosity.” Lepore starts that history with the story of a seventeenth-century Englishman who had the idea that all life begins with an egg, and ends it with an American who, in the 1970s, began freezing the dead. In between, life got longer, the stages of life multiplied, and matters of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences. Lately, debates about life and death have determined the course of American politics. Each of these debates has a history. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life—from board games to breast pumps—Lepore argues that the age of discovery, Darwin, and the Space Age turned ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy. “New worlds were found,” she writes, and “old paradises were lost.” As much a meditation on the present as an excavation of the past, The Mansion of Happiness is delightful, learned, and altogether beguiling.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Happiness written by Lorraine L. Besser and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging research on the subject of happiness—in psychology, economics, and public policy—reawakens and breathes new life into long-standing philosophical questions about happiness (e.g., What is it? Can it really be measured or pursued? What is its relationship to morality?). By analyzing this research from a philosophical perspective, Lorraine L. Besser is able to weave together the contributions of other disciplines, and the result is a robust, deeply contoured understanding of happiness made accessible for nonspecialists. This book is the first to thoroughly investigate the fundamental theoretical issues at play in all the major contemporary debates about happiness, and it stands out especially in its critical analysis of empirical research. The book’s coverage of the material is comprehensive without being overwhelming. Its structure and pedagogical features will benefit students or anyone studying happiness for the first time: Each chapter opens with an initial overview and ends with a summary and list of suggested readings.
Download or read book The Pursuit of Happiness written by Darrin M. McMahon and published by Penguin Group(CA). This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Men and women throughout history have pursued happiness more consistently than any other goal, but what they conceived happiness to be has constantly changed. Once it was considered a gift from the gods; now we consider it a right. How did these changes take place and what do they tell us about our society and ourselves? In The Pursuit of Happiness, cultural historian Darrin McMahon offers a brilliant summation of the history of happiness and its evolution from divine gift to natural human entitlement.
Download or read book Triumph of the City written by Edward Glaeser and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Best Book of the Year Award in 2011 “A masterpiece.” —Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics “Bursting with insights.” —The New York Times Book Review A pioneering urban economist presents a myth-shattering look at the majesty and greatness of cities America is an urban nation, yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, environmentally unfriendly . . . or are they? In this revelatory book, Edward Glaeser, a leading urban economist, declares that cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in both cultural and economic terms) places to live. He travels through history and around the globe to reveal the hidden workings of cities and how they bring out the best in humankind. Using intrepid reportage, keen analysis, and cogent argument, Glaeser makes an urgent, eloquent case for the city's importance and splendor, offering inspiring proof that the city is humanity's greatest creation and our best hope for the future.
Download or read book The Promise of Happiness written by Sara Ahmed and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.
Download or read book The Alchemy of Happiness written by Ghazzālī and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Origins of Happiness written by Andrew E. Clark and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new perspective on life satisfaction and well-being over the life course What makes people happy? The Origins of Happiness seeks to revolutionize how we think about human priorities and to promote public policy changes that are based on what really matters to people. Drawing on a range of evidence using large-scale data from various countries, the authors consider the key factors that affect human well-being, including income, education, employment, family conflict, health, childcare, and crime. The Origins of Happiness offers a groundbreaking new vision for how we might become more healthy, happy, and whole.
Download or read book The Museum of Happiness written by Jesse Lee Kercheval and published by Terrace Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "After her husband's sudden death, Ginny Gillespie travels with his ashes to Paris, where she meets and falls in love with Roland Keppi, a strange, visionary man without a country. Their dreamlike affair is disrupted when Roland vanishes, deported to a German camp for people without identity papers. But coincidences, dreams, and visions eventually reunite them with the promise of a bright future. Set primarily in France between the world wars, the narrative moves easily between the present and the past and among Ginny, Roland, and the important people in their lives. These intertwining stories raise questions of fate and the meaning of family, identity, and happiness."--Library Journal
Download or read book American Enlightenments written by Caroline Winterer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative reassessment of the concept of an American golden age of European-born reason and intellectual curiosity in the years following the Revolutionary War The accepted myth of the “American Enlightenment” suggests that the rejection of monarchy and establishment of a new republic in the United States in the eighteenth century was the realization of utopian philosophies born in the intellectual salons of Europe and radiating outward to the New World. In this revelatory work, Stanford historian Caroline Winterer argues that a national mythology of a unitary, patriotic era of enlightenment in America was created during the Cold War to act as a shield against the threat of totalitarianism, and that Americans followed many paths toward political, religious, scientific, and artistic enlightenment in the 1700s that were influenced by European models in more complex ways than commonly thought. Winterer’s book strips away our modern inventions of the American national past, exploring which of our ideas and ideals are truly rooted in the eighteenth century and which are inventions and mystifications of more recent times.
Download or read book Inventing Joy written by Joy Mangano and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The visionary entrepreneur and inventor shares an inspirational blueprint for promoting personal success and fulfillment, sharing stories from her childhood, family, and career experiences that illustrate how healthier perspectives can significantly improve one's life.
Download or read book The Invention of Hugo Cabret written by Brian Selznick and published by Scholastic. This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An orphan and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy train station. He desperately believes a broken automaton will make his dreams come true. But when his world collides with an eccentric girl and a bitter old man, Hugo's undercover life are put in jeopardy. Turn the pages, follow the illustrations and enter an unforgettable new world!
Download or read book Human Happiness written by Blaise Pascal and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2008-08-07 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Created by the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician Pascal, the essays contained in Human Happiness are a curiously optimistic look at whether humans can ever find satisfaction and real joy in life – or whether a belief in God is a wise gamble at best. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.
