Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Philip Kitcher
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Middle Years ◽  
Philosophical Significance ◽  
Relative Neglect ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Central Characters

The Introduction explores the philosophical significance of Ulysses. Despite the relative neglect of the novel by Anglophone philosophers who have discussed literary modernism, it argues that Joyce’s fiction takes up the oldest questions of philosophy, those revolving around the qualities of the good life. In particular, Ulysses focuses on the middle years, when the “straight way” has been lost. Through its explorations of the thoughts and feelings of the central characters – Bloom, Stephen, and Molly – Joyce brings about a revaluation of everyday values, and an elevation of the commonplace. His strategies for doing so require the development of new narrative techniques, so that philosophical explorations are often intertwined with attention to the features on which literary scholars have fastened. The introduction closes with brief summaries of the themes of the individual chapters.

A Critique of Raz’s Liberal Perfectionism: Morality and Politics

1996 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-364
Author(s):  
Bi‐Hwan Kim
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Objective Knowledge ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Liberal Perfectionism

Joseph Raz Has Long Been Well Known as a Legal philosopher and theorist of practical reason. But it is only in the last decade that he has come to be widely identified as the most prominent defender of a distinctive interpretation of the liberal tradition. Raz wholeheartedly endorses the communitarian view that the individual is a social being, who needs society to establish his/her self-identity and to gain objective knowledge of the good, rather than a self-contained subject abstracted from any specific social experience. Unlike neutralist liberals, such as Rawls and Dworkin, he rejects ‘the priority of right over the good’, stressing the interdependent relationship between right and the good. Yet he remains very much a liberal in his commitment to the value of autonomy (or freedom) and argues powerfully for the desirability (or necessity) of incommensurable plural conceptions of the good life for the well-being of people, as well as for the liberal virtue of toleration, and for their attendant liberal democratic political institutions.

Why British Society Had to ‘Get a Young Virgin Sacrificed’: Sacrificial Destiny in The Tree of Heaven

May Sinclair ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanna Melin Schyllert
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Tree Of Heaven ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Personal Sacrifice ◽  
Central Characters

In May Sinclair’s fiction, images of sacrifice abound. From the self-abnegating Katherine Haviland in Audrey Craven (1897) to the eponymous antiheroine of The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), Sinclair’s central characters seem to be eternally struggling with the issue of renunciation. The treatment of the theme is heterogeneous in many of Sinclair’s texts, not least in the novel The Tree of Heaven, which both condemns and praises personal sacrifice for a higher or communal purpose. This displays a fundamental insecurity about the nature, function and value of sacrifice. It is this ambivalence, which underlies so much of Sinclair’s fiction, in combination with the individual mixture of philosophies in her work, that will be explored here. This chapter investigates the concept of sacrifice in the war novel The Tree of Heaven and how it is connected to community and feminism. In order to find an understanding of sacrifice as proposed by Sinclair, and its meaning in the lives of both women and men in the context of early 20th century England, the chapter discusses the crossroads in the text between sacrifice, idealism, feminism, and the nation-wide feeling of community that appears to be required in wartime.

Positive Psychology: Past, Present, and Future

2009 ◽  
pp. 6-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ed Diener
Keyword(s):  
Positive Psychology ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Functioning ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

This chapter briefly reviews the history of positive psychology, and the endeavor by scientists to answer the classic question posed by philosophers: What is the good life? One piece of evidence for the growth of positive psychology is the proliferation of measures to assess concepts such as happiness, well-being, and virtue. The chapter briefly reviews the importance of C. R. Snyder to the field of positive psychology. Several critiques of positive psychology are discussed. One valid critique is that there is too much emphasis within positive psychology on the individual, and too little focus on positive societies, institutions, and situations. We can profit from considering the various critiques because they will help us to improve the field. Positive psychology has important strengths, such as the number of young scholars and practitioners who are entering the field. The Handbook of Positive Psychology is an outstanding resource for all those who are working in this discipline, and also for others outside of the area, to gain broad knowledge of the important developments that are occurring in our understanding of positive human functioning.

WRITING COLLABORATIVE HAPPINESS

2022 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-29
Author(s):  
Catherine Kingfisher
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Collaborative Research ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Joint Production ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Research Project ◽  
The Individual

Abstract In this article, I discuss a collaborative research project with two urban cohousing communities: Kankanmori, in Tokyo, and Quayside Village, in North Vancouver. The project focused on the joint production of the good life in the two communities, both of which situate well-being as simultaneously social and subjective, thus expanding beyond mainstream approaches to happiness narrowly focused on the individual. In what follows, I describe the particular forms that collaboration took over the course of the six-year project and then provide a brief overview of the positive contributions cohousing can make to social and environmental sustainability.

God, the Good Life, and Pastoral Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 440-459
Author(s):  
Thomas (Tae Sung) Shin
Keyword(s):  
Practical Theology ◽  
Pastoral Theology ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Living Well ◽  
Triune God ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Pastoral Practice

In this study, I emphasize that pastoral practice revitalizes the significance of spiritual life as an alternative way to negotiate the science of well-being. This article is written from the perspective of practical theology, which is framed as a way of “living well” in which it is doubtful for both the individual and community to fulfill the good life without spirituality. Such an approach entails a degree of a transformative and transcendent life created by new senses, attentions, knowledge, ontological understanding, and disciplines out of the experience of the triune God. This study responds to the vocation of practical theology according to Ruard Ganzevoort and Johan Roeland, who assert that, “In its focus on praxis, practical theology has evolved out of three historical different styles of theology with differing concepts of and methodological approaches toward praxis: pastoral theology, empirical theology, and public theology.” They suggest that pastoral practice should be something that contributes to the culture of well-being and that the roles of spiritual life in the formation and reformation of the good life should be clarified.

scholarly journals SPEAKING IN MEDIAS RES: MODERNISM VERSUS MODERNITY IN SHERWOOD ANDERSON’S WINESBURG, OHIO

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-115
Author(s):  
Yonca DENİZARSLANI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Times ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
The Individual

Since the times of Homeric epics, speaking in medias res has been the most suitable form of storytelling, leaving the threshold of narrative ajar in the present, upholding a historical sense. This ancient historical sense of time, inherent in oral traditions revived in early twentieth century literary Modernism as T. S. Eliot stated in his 1919 essay, “Tradition and The Individual Talent:” “… And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.” Be it a messianic revival or primitivism, calling for a coherent context for all, the Modernists were in urge for new narrative techniques overcoming the devastating traumas of the World Wars, representing the shared experiences worldwide. In this respect, early twentieth-century. Modernism provided a literary niche for a new generation of storytellers engaged in the momentous grasp of time coalescing with an epiphany. Thus, regarding the present global crises of humanity against which we need to retreat to our local worlds, a review on literary Modernism would suggest a solution as it had once achieved as an internationalist current by gathering the minds and shared experiences in recovering from the overwhelming forces of modernity. This article aims to review literary Modernism and its correspondence with ancient forms of storytelling and sense of time in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio stories regarding the shared thematic motifs transcending the cultural and national boundaries in representing the overwhelming traumas of early twentieth century modernity.

scholarly journals Post-Aural Story-Telling and the Iranian Flaneurs: A Benjaminian Reading of Sina Dadkhah’s Yousef Abad, Street 33

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Bakhtiar Sadjadi ◽  
Bahareh Nilfrushan
Keyword(s):  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Urban Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modern Aspect ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Central Characters ◽  
The City

The city has fascinated the street wanderer as the contemplation of modern life. Walter Benjamin’s conception of ‘flâneur,’ originally borrowed from Charles Baudelaire, could be taken as the true legacy of such fascination. There is always a sense of nostalgia being revealed through the flânerie of the city stroller passing through the metropolis, its shopping centers, and boulevards nourishing the mind of the bohemic storyteller with tales of post-aural experience and memory. Adapting Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘flânerie’ in the streets of Paris to those of Tehran, the present paper attempts to explore Sina Dadkhah’s Yousef Abad, Street 33 in order to demonstrate the post-aural stories of the flaneurs in an Iranian milieu. This article focuses on the modern aspect of the Iranian contemporary society and explores the immediate consequences of modernity on the individual subjectivity of the characters represented in the novel. Considering Dadkhah’s novel as a product of the urban literature of a generation dealing with modernity of the arcades and other lures of the megapolis on the one hand and feeling of nostalgia for their past spirit on the other, the paper simultaneously reveals the close affinity between the subjectivity of the characters and Benjaminian tenets of flânerie and modern storytellers. The flaneurs represented in the novel, by rambling through and about the city of Tehran, are turning to be the storytellers who narrate their ‘post-aural’ experiences. In Yousef Abad, Street 33 the central characters are, as fully manifested in the paper, deeply engaged in the experiences of a modern sense of living while wandering to console their wistful longings despite the everyday challenges.

Criminalization and Liberalism

2020 ◽  
pp. 37-52
Author(s):  
Stuart P. Green
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Sexual Misconduct ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Criminal Offenders ◽  
Important Method ◽  
Liberal Neutrality ◽  
Criminal Sanctions ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Conception Of The Good

This chapter considers the concepts of criminalization and liberalism. Criminal sanctions are just one of a range of means by which society can respond to sexual misconduct, but they are a particularly important method in light of their stigmatizing effects and potential to deprive persons of liberty. The theory developed here assumes that it is intrinsically wrong to punish criminal offenders who are blameless and also wrong to punish blameworthy offenders more harshly than they deserve. One of the most important elements of blameworthiness is wrongfulness, which is understood to involve a violation of a victim’s rights. The approach followed here is liberal in the sense that it emphasizes the freedom of the individual. It recognizes that the government has an obligation to protect individuals from being harmed by others but also that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. A key feature of this approach is liberal neutrality, the idea that the state should not reward or punish particular conceptions of the good life but should instead provide a neutral framework within which citizens can pursue their own conception of the good.

Self-Realization in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life

1986 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Elster
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Private Ownership ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Marxist Conception ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Conception Of The Good ◽  
Means Of Production

In arguments in support of capitalism, the following propositions are sometimes advanced or presupposed: (i) the best life for the individual is one of consumption, understood in a broad sense that includes aesthetic pleasures and entertainment as well as consumption of goods in the ordinary sense; (ii) consumption is to be valued because it promotes happiness or welfare, which is the ultimate good; (iii) since there are not enough opportunities for consumption to provide satiation for everybody, some principles of distributive justice must be chosen to decide who gets what; (iv) the total to be distributed has first to be produced. What is produced depends, among other things, on the motivation and information of the producers. The theory of justice must take account of the fact that different principles of distribution have different effects on motivation and information; (v) economic theory tells us that the motivational and informational consequences of private ownership of the means of production are superior to those of the various forms of collective ownerships.In the traditional controversy over the relative merits of capitalism and economic systems, the focus has been on proposition (v). In this paper, I consider instead propositions (i) and (ii). Before one can even begin to discuss how values are to be allocated, one must consider what they are – what it is that ought to be valued. I shall argue that at the center of Marxism is a specific conception of the good life as one of active self-realization, rather than passive consumption.

scholarly journals Personal Utopia: The “Good Life” in Popular Religion and Literature in Contemporary Sweden

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-150
Author(s):  
Daniel Enstedt ◽  
Kristina Hermansson
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Religion And Literature ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
Culturally Based ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Individual

This article examines the discourse of the “good life” in popular religion and literature in contemporary Sweden. The results indicate thnew spiritual movements (e.g. mindfulness and the Enneagram) situate traditional transcendental goals within the individual, immanent self and the utopian ideals (e.g. individual wellbeing and happiness) expressed in popular literature are to be achieved through changing individuals’ attitudes rather than their material and structural circumstances. Furthermore, this understanding of the individual relies on a culturally based discourse in which medicalized, therapeutic language, what Michel Foucault called “bio-power”, defines humanity and the human condition. This cultural discourse centers on the individual’s potential and responsibility to change dysfunctional habits, situations, and relationships, whereas structural, contextual, and situational solutions are ignored. The Swedish popular literature and religion examined here both express this discourse and constitute an important new form of authority when it comes to articulating new utopian ideals to relate to in everyday life, at work, and in family life.

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