Aristotelian Concept of Happiness (Eudaimonia) and its Conative Role in Human Existence: A Critical Evaluation

Despite the challenges of human existence, identifying the major features that sustain man’s striving to persist in life (conatus) is very essential in understanding who man is. This paper critically evaluates Aristotelian concept of happiness (eudaimonia) and its conative role in human existence as it ignites newness of interest in Aristotelian theory of happiness as the ultimate end of all human activities. Aristotle’s notion of happiness connotes conative experiences; actions that signify movements of some sorts for preservation of life. With regard to self-preservation in existence, Aristotle held the opinion that man has the natural inclination to actualize his potentialities through strong efforts of the will towards the right, and at the same time to create new potentialities to sustain his life. Through the activities of the soul (virtuous acts), man propels himself in a distinctive way towards objects of his desire for survival and flourishing. His concept of emotions as having the affective, cognitive as well as behavioural dimensions revealed that emotions have psychological values and vital functions which serve as survival instinct in man. However, they differ in their aims in that they have both attractive and aversive characteristics such that they move him either to seek or to avoid necessary objects that enhance or harm his existence, respectively. Considering the subjective experiences of pains and pleasures of emotions, they dispose man to virtuous actions towards excellence. However, to sustain man’s inner drive to persist in life, this paper objects to the theses that happiness can be restricted to only cognitive activities. Despite the weaknesses of his treatise concerning happiness in relation to man’s striving to persist, it was observed that Aristotle’s notion of happiness aids man’s striving in life. For further studies, it recommended clarification of ambiguous concepts and reconciliation of contradictions inherent in the theory.

Truth is Beauty, Beauty is Truth the Philosophy of John Keats Selected Odes

Life can never be completely free of problems and pain. This is perhaps because no two people think alike, work alike or have similar taste. Problems and pain will be there when two persons live. So there are bounds to be differences and judgements born there of and create disharmony and conflicts. The natural inclination of human mind to get rid of pain and problems of life wanders for a different world. The romantic poet John Keats philosophically searched for such a place and wanted to escape. And escaping into the world of imagination helped him to get rid of pain and problems of life and discovers anything true is beautiful as beauty dwells in truth. Manifestation of god in all the objects of nature magnetically attracts Keats’s mind as it serves as a therapy to contemplate in the serene and isolated space he sought for. Human being and Nature are interrelated, meaning the harmonious unity of Man and Nature are interrelated as both assume qualities of the other as they born and die, ashes go into the lap of Mother Nature as the very essence of human being, the structure is made up of the elements of Nature. The serene, calm and quiet Nature provides a kind of nourishment to Keats’ mind to discover the beauty, provides him joy and it is a truth. Longing of every soul is to be away from the problems of life.

Improvisation: A novel tool to study musicality

Humans spontaneously invent songs from an early age. Here, we exploit this natural inclination to probe implicit musical knowledge in 33 untrained and poor singers (amusia). Each sang 28 long improvisations as a response to a verbal prompt or a continuation of a melodic stem. To assess the extent to which each improvisation reflects tonality, a core organizational principle of musicality, we developed a new algorithm that compares a sung excerpt to a probability density function representing the tonal hierarchy of Western music. The results show signatures of tonality in both nonmusicians and individuals with congenital amusia, who have notorious difficulty performing musical tasks that require explicit responses and memory. The findings are a proof of concept that improvisation can serve as a novel, even enjoyable method for systematically measuring hidden aspects of musicality across the spectrum of musical ability.

HERMENEUTICS OF DANTE’S INTERPRETATION OF HAPPINESS AS A CONCEPT OF GOOD

The basis of human nature according to Dante is natural inclination, love to good (Aristotelianism, Thomism). God is the highest blessing but some souls are deceived and choose to love the created world, such love can be broken and become a false love, a sin when either the measure or the choice of worthful goal the object of this love is violated. Thus it becomes a transgression punished in Purgatory or a sin punished in Hell. The crucial thing in person's life is a vision of God. In this respect Dante is a Thomist. It is also important to see Comedy as a kind of model of the universe, Dante embodies mathematical, philosophical, Christological, astrological, numerological and other views in it Keywords: Dante, Thomism, hermeneutics, philosophy of happiness, philosophy of culture

Materialization of Love in Morrison’s Love: A Marxist Perspective

This article attempts to explore how human beings are controlled by the material values in the society governed by the capitalistic regime in Toni Morrison’s novel, Love where money and matter overshadows other moral and social customs. Fascination towards economic gain is the natural inclination of the human beings since all the capitalistic desires and provisions are generally dealt with money. The overall purpose of the study is to show how Toni Morrison’s dominant characters in Love, Cosey, Heed, L and Christine are much obsessed with material success in order to capture the sordid nature of materialization of human life in the commercial world. The research methodology, used to survey the unquenched material desire of human beings such as Mr. Cosey and Christine and their degradation for it, is Marxism. Christine is ready to do everything to be a capitalistic modern. The principal finding is that in the name of love, pre-menstruated girl is made to marry an old man. She is turned into a commodity item. People are seeking mammoth pleasure but they are spiritually barren, which shows money and matter over taking the realm of love and spirituality.

Clustering and Stereotyping

Social clustering and stereotyping are both unavoidable and necessary to navigate and try to make sense of the social world and yet also a source of major moral blind spots. It is part of the necessity to parse to predict, make decisions, and, ultimately, create meanings. This process leads to our natural inclination to cluster and create an information amalgam leading to much illusory correlations and biased attitudes in thinking about Blacks, Whites, Russians, Chinese, women, men, gays, straights, or Europeans as wholes having in common elusive essential characteristics. Social stereotypes have typically a negative connotation, linked to racism and all sorts of prejudices and discrimination toward minorities. However, they can be both negative and/or positive (e.g., Jews tend to be smart; Blacks are prone to be criminals). The ultimate function of social clustering and stereotypes is always to create contrasts that typically uphold one’s own group advantage, ultimately in defense of one’s own group sense of superiority and ascendance. Social stereotypes do not just help us in thinking about the social world; they can also hinder how we perform as individuals and foresee obstacles for oneself.

Deriving natural law from the Decalogue, natural inclination and God's silence

Amanda Perreau-Saussine de Ezcurra saw positive law as a resource for uncovering natural law. She also saw our natural inclinations, especially our natural sociability and our natural tendency toward benevolence, as crucial to a proper understanding of natural law. Drawing on these two foundational ideas of hers, this article will look at the Decalogue, the pre-eminent example of divine positive law, and then our concrete experience of desire, as revelatory of what she called ‘a law-like ordering of the world prior to human thought and action, a natural ordering that constrains practical reasoning’. To her characteristic concerns, it will add attention to God's silence.

About the Development of Improvisational Skills in the Pupils of Children’s Music Schools

A considerable amount of pedagogical manuals and the programs devoted to methods of instruction of improvisation is connected with examining improvisation in the context of jazz pedagogy, or the art of performance (most frequently — piano). However, the development of the composer’s improvisational skills is deemed to be more important. The diffi culties of creation of the algorithm of instruction of this type of activities, but quite apparent is the set of conditions connected, fi rst of all, with the natural inclination towards improvisation, and also the presence of compositional abilities; second, with the mandatory mastery of an entire complex of music theory knowledge. Upon the combination of these two factors, it becomes possible to speak of a high level of development of improvisational skills. The article offers the point of view regarding the organization of the process of acquisition of skills of improvisation, the basis of which is comprised by six basic components, presenting six types of improvisation: melodic, poetical, harmonic, textural, ornamental and genre-related. Each separately presented subject is signifi cant, most notably, for the content of the course of “Composition,” which reveals the basic laws of construction of a musical composition, which, in their turn, are fundamental for the development of improvisational abilities. And because improvisation frequently becomes the fi rst impulse for creating a musical composition, which presumes its expression through spontaneity, it follows that both improvisation and composition thereby exist in close mutual connection.

Drawing Upon Finnegans Wake

LOTS OF FUN WITH FINNEGANS WAKE is my six-year project to annotate / illustrate / disrupt the 628 pages of James Joyce’s final book. I’ve been reading Finnegans Wake off and on for about 40 years, and I consider it to be the most multi-layered, protean, and playful collection of words that we have. As a way to explore the book’s circular, recurring, enigmatic pathways, I am involved in the process of transmediation – I am turning some of its words into visual images and some of its linguistic images into words. This project is a way for me to indulge my natural inclination to connect the intellectual and the illustrative, the visual and the verbal.