The Effect of Instructional Gaming on Absenteeism: The First Step

For Bertrand Russell, the essential features of the good life are affective and cognitive: The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. We submit that these dimensions are also at the core of good learning, which is a central part of human life. This study focuses on the affective dimension as it is influenced by a learning environment organized a round instructional gaming.

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Introduction

Against Humanity ◽

10.1525/california/9780520296091.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Sam Dubal

Keyword(s):

Good Life ◽

Human Life ◽

Historical Context ◽

The Good Life ◽

Social Construct ◽

Lord's Resistance Army ◽

Lord’S Resistance Army

This chapter introduces the lives of Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels in Uganda, suggesting that these lives are too complex to be understood through the simple moral lens of humanity. It uses “against humanity” as a heuristic to think about the problems posed by the uses of humanity (including the “crime against humanity”)—a social construct that must be critically interrogated rather than taken as natural. Being “against humanity” means thinking about the richness of human life that exists outside limited notions of the good—life beyond humanity. Also included is important historical context for the LRA war, including its leader, Joseph Kony, as well as ways in which LRA rebels have been expelled from humanity.

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Part II

Good Lives ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198865384.003.0003 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 125-224

Author(s):

Samuel Clark

Keyword(s):

Good Life ◽

Human Life ◽

Point Of View ◽

The Self ◽

The Good Life ◽

Interesting Part ◽

Self Knowledge ◽

Good For ◽

Self Discovery

Part II works from the point of view of the reader of autobiography, and asks: what should we learn from autobiography? It argues for a lesson about selfhood and the good life, and specifically about the roles of narrative and of self-realization in those targets of human self-knowledge. This investigation addresses four questions: given that autobiographies are narratives, should we learn something from them about the importance of narrative in human life? Could our narration of our lives explain how their parts relate to them as wholes? Could it retrospectively unify them and thereby make them good for us? Could it create self-knowledge by interpretatively making the self? In each case it answers: no. The lesson we should learn here is instead about the centrality of self-realization to selfhood and the good life. To make that case, this part argues for pluralist realism about self-knowledge: autobiographies of self-discovery, martial life, and solitude show that the ‘self’ which is created and known by self-interpretation is, at best, one part of what we can know about ourselves, and not the most interesting part. These modes of self-discovery reveal a self that is unchosen, initially opaque to itself, and seedlike, which could not be a self-interpretation, and whose good is its realization.

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Plato on Pure Pleasure and the Best Life

Phronesis ◽

10.1163/15685284-12341263 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 59 (2) ◽

pp. 113-142 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Emily Fletcher

Keyword(s):

Good Life ◽

Human Life ◽

Detailed Examination ◽

The Good Life ◽

Human Beings ◽

Instrumental Value ◽

Different Types ◽

The Relationship ◽

Better Than ◽

Positive Evaluation

Abstract In the Philebus, Socrates maintains two theses about the relationship between pleasure and the good life: (1) the mixed life of pleasure and intelligence is better than the unmixed life of intelligence, and: (2) the unmixed life of intelligence is the most divine. Taken together, these two claims lead to the paradoxical conclusion that the best human life is better than the life of a god. A popular strategy for avoiding this conclusion is to distinguish human from divine goods; on such a reading, pleasure has merely instrumental value, and it benefits human beings only as a result of their imperfect nature. I argue that certain ‘pure’ pleasures are full-fledged, intrinsic goods in the Philebus, which are even worthy of the gods (thus Socrates ultimately rejects thesis 2). This positive evaluation of pure pleasure results from a detailed examination of pleasure, which reveals that different types of pleasures have fundamentally different natures.

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Good Lives

10.1093/oso/9780198865384.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Samuel Clark

Keyword(s):

Good Life ◽

Human Life ◽

The Self ◽

The Good Life ◽

Human Beings ◽

Transformative Experience ◽

Wide Range ◽

Self Knowledge ◽

Self Discovery ◽

Good Lives

Reasoning with autobiography is a way to self-knowledge. We can learn about ourselves, as human beings and as individuals, by reading, thinking through, and arguing about this distinctive kind of text. Reasoning with Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son is a way of learning about the nature of the good life and the roles that pleasure and self-expression can play in it. Reasoning with Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs is a way of learning about transformative experience, self-alienation, and therefore the nature of the self. Good Lives develops and defends this claim, by answering a series of questions. What is an autobiography? How can we learn about ourselves from reading one? On what subjects does autobiography teach? What should we learn about them? In particular, given that autobiographies are narratives, should we learn something about the importance of narrative in human life? Could our storytelling about our own lives make sense of them as wholes, unify them over time, or make them good for us? Could storytelling make the self? The overall aim of the book is a critique of narrative and a defence of a self-realization account of the self and its good. As it pursues that, the book investigates the wide range of extant accounts of the self and of the good life, and defends pluralist realism about self-knowledge by reading and reasoning with autobiographies of self-discovery, martial life, and solitude. It concludes: autobiography can be reasoning in pursuit of self-knowledge; each of us is an unchosen, initially opaque, seedlike self; our good is the development and expression of our latent capacities, which is our individual self-realization; self-narration plays much less role in our lives than some thinkers have supposed, and the development and expression of potential much more.

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Reflections on Plato and Global Capitalism

Phronimon ◽

10.25159/2413-3086/7183 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 20 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Cloete

Keyword(s):

Good Life ◽

Human Life ◽

Political Context ◽

Global Capitalism ◽

Ethical Challenge ◽

The Good Life ◽

Critical Engagement ◽

Human Happiness ◽

The Impact ◽

Point Of Departure

Global capitalism poses an ethical challenge similar in nature to the challenge of political materialism that Plato addressed in his assessment of the impact of the Sophist tradition of thought on the youth of Athens, in their search for the Good life. For Plato, a Good life is incompatible with a materialist conception of human happiness (in ethics) and justice (in politics); it presupposes an understanding of the significance of physical as well as spiritual dimensions of human life, in a social-political context. This article argues that Plato’s theory of economics offers an important point of departure for a critical engagement with the anti-humanist politics of global capitalism.

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Theology is ethics: how Karl Barth sees the good life

Scottish Journal of Theology ◽

10.1017/s0036930611000238 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 64 (4) ◽

pp. 425-438

Author(s):

Andy Alexis-Baker

Keyword(s):

Immanuel Kant ◽

Moral Philosophy ◽

Good Life ◽

Human Life ◽

Karl Barth ◽

The Good Life ◽

Proper Place ◽

Basic Premise ◽

Classical View ◽

The Church

AbstractSince Immanuel Kant, moral reasoning has been divorced from classical theology and reinscribed onto self-contained individuals. Shorn of theological particularities, modern ethics tries to identify behaviours to which every right-thinking person can assent. A basic premise of classical moral philosophy, however, was that if we know who we are and what ourtelosis, then we can have a good idea of how we ought to act. In his christology, Barth reappropriates this classical view of ethics and situates it christologically. Because Jesus’ human nature finds its being andtelosin his divinity, Barth found an ethical pattern in theanhypostasis-enhypostasisdoctrine. Restoring people to their proper place as creatures rather than Kantian demi-gods, Jesus shows us what it means to be truly human by being obedient to the Father. We cannot divinise individuals or the church, but the church existsenhypostatically. Thisanhypostatic-enhypostaticchristological pattern orders our activities, making worship the first task of ethics. In prayer and in Sabbath keeping, Jesus shows us his utter dependence on God through supplication and rest. In these acts of worship, Christians act as they were created to act. We respond obediently to our Creator. But we also find an orientation towards other people in christology. Love of enemies has everything to do with the content and shape of God's command. It is involved in thetelosof human life in being Christ-like.

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New Critical Theory or Analytical Empiricism?

Sotsiologicheskoe Obozrenie / Russian Sociological Review ◽

10.17323/1728-192x-2020-3-426-449 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 19 (3) ◽

pp. 426-449

Author(s):

Dmitry Kataev

Keyword(s):

Critical Theory ◽

Good Life ◽

Human Life ◽

Main Idea ◽

Modern Society ◽

Human Condition ◽

The Good Life ◽

Critical Sociology ◽

Early 21St Century ◽

The World

“If acceleration is a problem in modern society, then resonance is perhaps the solution” is the key thesis of Hartmut Rosa’s Sociology of Relationship to the World, or “the sociology of the ‘good life’”, which has become one of the brightest and most controversial critical theories at the beginning of this century. The content, the reception, the criticism of the concept of resonance, and the resulting discussions which became the reason for the renewal of the “methodological positivism dispute” in German sociology are the subjects of this article. The first part of the article is devoted to the consideration of the concept of resonance as a theoretical tool for the new critical sociology, an alternative to the resource-based approach prevailing in mainstream sociology which is unable to measure the quality of human life and the subject-world relationship. In conjunction with other works of the author, the paper analyzes the main idea of Rosa, that is, the creation of an updated critical theory of resonant relations. In doing so, Rosa thematizes the dialectics between the normative and descriptive content of resonance and alienation as integral elements of modern lifeforms and the human condition, the dichotomy of the “good life” and the “bad life”, and the differentiation of the horizontal, diagonal, and vertical “axes of resonance” and their role in building of “relationships to the world”. The second part highlights the main areas of the critical “sociology of relationship to the world” and the concept of resonance. Particular attention will be paid to the “methodological dispute”, since it is precisely this debate that is associated with another project of the “big theory” of the early 21st century, that of the “integrative sociology” of H. Esser, an updated theory of rational choice that was transformed into an analytical-empirical sociology as opposed to the new critical theory by Rosa. Finally, in the conclusion, an attempt is made to determine the place of both alternatives from the point of view of the Weberian-studies tradition, since both polemists explicitly or indirectly refer to the classic. The question of whether Rosa’s concept of resonance is a new sociological paradigm or whether it is a sociological theology remains open.

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