You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Disgust has a strong claim to be a distinctively human emotion. But what is it to be disgusting? What unifies the class of disgusting things? Colin McGinn sets out to analyze the content of disgust, arguing that life and death are implicit in its meaning. Disgust is a kind of philosophical emotion, reflecting the human attitude to the biological world. Yet it is an emotion we strive to repress. It may have initially arisen as a method of curbing voracious human desire, which itself results from our powerful imagination. Because we feel disgust towards ourselves as a species, we are placed in a fraught emotional predicament: we admire ourselves for our achievements, but we also experience rev...
This book provides an introduction to the major findings, challenges and debates regarding disgust as a moral emotion, and brings together scholarship from multiple disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, anthropology and law.
This comprehensive and cutting-edge volume maps out the terrain of moral psychology, a dynamic and evolving area of research. In 57 concise chapters, leading authorities and up-and-coming scholars explore fundamental issues and current controversies. The volume systematically reviews the empirical evidence base and presents influential theories of moral judgment and behavior. It is organized around the key questions that must be addressed for a complete understanding of the moral mind.
The idea that the self is inextricably intertwined with the rest of the world—the “oneness hypothesis”—can be found in many of the world’s philosophical and religious traditions. Oneness provides ways to imagine and achieve a more expansive conception of the self as fundamentally connected with other people, creatures, and things. Such views present profound challenges to Western hyperindividualism and its excessive concern with self-interest and tendency toward self-centered behavior. This anthology presents a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary exploration of the nature and implications of the oneness hypothesis. While fundamentally inspired by East and South Asian traditions, in whi...
Kolnai made a breakthrough in the phenomenology of aversion when he showed the "double intentionality" of emotions like fear, focusing on both the object of fear and the subjects' concern for his own well-being, this being one of the ways in which fear differs from disgust. In a surprising yet persuasive move, Kolnai argues that disgust is never related to inorganic or non-biological matter, and that its arousal by moral objects has an underlying similarity with its arousal by organic material: a particular combination of life and death. Kolnai gives an analytic list of various kinds of disgusting objects (which should not be read just before lunch) and shows how disgust relates to the five senses.
A Guardian 'Best ideas book of 2023' A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'The best book I have ever read that explores the effect on the brain of the carer, when someone has dementia' Professor June Andrews, author of Dementia: The One-Stop Guide Dasha Kiper was twenty-five when she first became the live-in carer for a Holocaust survivor with Alzheimer's disease. She soon discovered the emotional strain and challenges of caring for a person whose condition disrupts the rules of time, order and continuity. In Travellers to Unimaginable Lands, Kiper explores the complex and profound psychology of caregiving, illuminating how the healthy brain's biases and intuitions make caring for people with dementia disorders so profoundly and inherently difficult. Blending neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and literature with beautifully-observed case studies, Kiper illuminates the underlying mental mechanisms behind carers' experiences, dispels the myth of the perfect caregiver and, in the process, opens the door to understanding and forgiveness.
What kind of an emotion is regret? What difference does it make whether, how, and why we experience it, and how does this experience shape our current and future thoughts, decisions, goals? Under what conditions is regret appropriate? Is it always one kind of experience, or does it vary, based on who is doing the regretting, and why? How is regret different from other backward-looking emotions? In The Moral Psychology of Regret, scholars from several disciplines—including philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, law, and neuroscience—come together to address these and other questions related to this ubiquitous emotion that so many of us seem to dread. And while regret has been somewhat under-theorized as a subject worthy of serious and careful attention, this volume is offered with the intent of expanding the discourse on regret as an emotion of great moral significance that underwrites how we understand ourselves and each other.
Envy is a vicious and shameful response to the good fortune of others, one that ruins friendships and plagues societies—or so the common thinking goes, shaped by millennia of religious and cultural condemnation. Envy’s bad reputation is not completely unwarranted; envy can indeed motivate malicious and counterproductive behavior and may strain or even tear apart relations between people. However, that is not always the case. Investigating the complex nature of this emotion reveals that it plays important functions in social hierarchies and it can motivate one to self-improve and even to achieve moral virtue. Philosophers and psychologists in this volume explore envy’s characteristics in different cultures, spanning from small hunter-gatherer communities to large industrialized countries, to contexts as diverse as academia, marketing, artificial intelligence, and Buddhism. They explore envy’s role in both the personal and the political sphere, showing the many ways in which envy can either contribute or detract to our flourishing as individuals and as citizens of modern democracies.
"What is the significance of our gut feelings? Can they disclose our deep selves or point to a shared human nature? The phenomenon of perpetrator disgust provides a uniquely insightful perspective by which to consider such questions. Across time and cultures, some individuals exhibit signs of distress while committing atrocities. They experience nausea, convulse, and vomit. Do such bodily responses reflect a moral judgment, a deep-seated injunction against atrocity? What conclusions can we draw about the relationship of our gut feelings to human nature and moral frameworks? Drawing on a broad range of historical examples as well as the latest scholarship from the philosophical and scientific...
An autodidact explores issues of education itself through essays and personal portraits of the key minds who influenced her What does it mean to be educated? Through her evocative paintings and narrative, author Arlene Goldbard has portrayed eleven people whose work most influenced her—what she calls a camp of angels. She sees each as a brave messenger of love and freedom for a society that badly needs “uncolonized minds.” Goldbard describes how the learning from each changed the course of her life in essays that offer generative moments of a life in art and social change. She also reveals ways a dominant society tried to put a first-generation American from a socially marginal family in her place—and failed. Readers will learn about the author’s own self education, issues of formal higher education and its discontents, and the damage done by a society that prizes profits over people. Goldbard asks readers to consider the impact of credentialism on U.S. society and what we can do to set it right.