Happiness Death And The Remainder Of Life

Author : Jonathan Lear
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674040031
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life written by Jonathan Lear and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002-02-15 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Separated by millennia, Aristotle and Sigmund Freud gave us disparate but compelling pictures of the human condition. But if, with Jonathan Lear, we scrutinize these thinkers' attempts to explain human behavior in terms of a higher principle--whether happiness or death--the pictures fall apart. Aristotle attempted to ground ethical life in human striving for happiness, yet he didn't understand what happiness is any better than we do. Happiness became an enigmatic, always unattainable, means of seducing humankind into living an ethical life. Freud fared no better when he tried to ground human striving, aggression, and destructiveness in the death drive, like Aristotle attributing purpose where none exists. Neither overarching principle can guide or govern "the remainder of life," in which our inherently disruptive unconscious moves in breaks and swerves to affect who and how we are. Lear exposes this tendency to self-disruption for what it is: an opening, an opportunity for new possibilities. His insights have profound consequences not only for analysis but for our understanding of civilization and its discontent.

Author : Jonathan Lear
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674040023
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Radical Hope written by Jonathan Lear and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the story of Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation. This title contains a philosophical and ethical inquiry into a people faced with the end of their way of life.

Author : Jonathan Lear
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300074673
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Love and Its Place in Nature written by Jonathan Lear and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jonathan Lear has shown us both Freud`s texts and his subject matter from a new angle of vision, one that renders much recent controversy about psychoanalytic theory irrelevant. For any student of those texts this book is indispensable."--Alasdair MacIntyre "Lear makes one understand how psychoanalysis works not only on the therapist`s couch but also as a condition of being alive. . . . Love and Its Place in Nature not only offers a form of spiritual nutriment for the self, it also defines that self with a clear profundity that few readers will have encountered before."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times "A brief and engaging philosophical perspective on Freudian psychoanalysis. The book is simply written, but important themes are profoundly investigated. . . . An important philosophic reading of Freud."--Don Browning, Christian Century In this brilliant book, Jonathan Lear argues that Freud posits love as a basic force in nature, one that makes individuation--the condition for psychological health and development--possible. Love is active not just in the development of the individual but also in individual analysis and indeed in the development of psychoanalysis itself, says Lear. Expanding on philosophical conceptions of love, nature, and mind, Lear shows that love can cure because it is the force that makes us human.

Author : Jonathan Lear
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674973631
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wisdom Won from Illness written by Jonathan Lear and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can reason absorb the psyche’s nonrational elements into a conception of the fully realized human being? Without a good answer to that question, Jonathan Lear says, philosophy is cut from its moorings in human life. He brings into conversation psychoanalysis and moral philosophy, which together form a basis for ethical thought about how to live.

Author : Massimo Pigliucci
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 1541646940
Total Pages : 124 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Field Guide to a Happy Life written by Massimo Pigliucci and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant philosopher reimagines Stoicism for our modern age in this thought-provoking guide to a better life. For more than two thousand years, Stoicism has offered a message of resilience in the face of hardship. Little wonder, then, that it is having such a revival in our own troubled times. But there is no denying how weird it can be: Is it really the case that we shouldn't care about our work, our loved ones, or our own lives? According to the old Stoics, yes. In A Field Guide to a Happy Life, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci offers a renewed Stoicism that reflects modern science and sensibilities. Pigliucci embraces the joyful bonds of affection, the satisfactions of a job well done, and the grief that attends loss. In his hands, Stoicism isn't about feats of indifference, but about enduring pain without being overwhelmed, while enjoying pleasures without losing our heads. In short, he makes Stoicism into a philosophy all of us -- whether committed Stoics or simply seekers -- can use to live better.

Author : Jonathan Lear
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674455347
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Open Minded written by Jonathan Lear and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freud is discredited, so we donÕt have to think about the darker strains of unconscious motivation anymore. We know what moves our political leaders, so we donÕt have to look too closely at their thinking either. In fact, everywhere we look in contemporary culture, knowingness has taken the place of thought. This book is a spirited assault on that deadening trend, especially as it affects our deepest attempts to understand the human psycheÑin philosophy and psychoanalysis. It explodes the widespread notion that we already know the problems and proper methods in these fields and so no longer need to ask crucial questions about the structure of human subjectivity. ÒWhat is psychology?Ó Open Minded is not so much an answer to this question as an attempt to understand what is being asked. The inquiry leads Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, back to Plato and Aristotle, to Freud and psychoanalysis, and to Wittgenstein. Lear argues that Freud and, more generally, psychoanalysis are the worthy inheritors of the Greek attempt to put our mindedness on display. There are also, he contends, deep affinities running through the works of Freud and Wittgenstein, despite their obvious differences. Both are concerned with how fantasy shapes our self-understanding; both reveal how lifeÕs activities show more than we are able to say. The philosophical tradition has portrayed the mind as more rational than it is, even when trying to account for irrationality. Psychoanalysis shows us the mind as inherently restless, tending to disrupt its own functioning. And empirical psychology, for its part, ignores those aspects of human subjectivity that elude objective description. By triangulating between the Greeks, Freud, and Wittgenstein, Lear helps us recover a sense of what it is to be open-minded in our inquiries into the human soul.

Author : Jonathan Lear
Publisher : Psychology Press
ISBN 13 : 9780415314503
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.0X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Freud written by Jonathan Lear and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) developed the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, one of the twentieth century's most influential schools of psychology. He also made profound insights into the psychology and understanding of human beings. In this brilliant and long-awaited introduction, Jonathan Lear--one of the most respected writers on Freud--shows how Freud also made fundamental contributions to philosophy and why he ranks alongside Plato, Aristotle, Marx and Darwin as a great theorist of human nature. Freud is one of the most important introductions and contributions to understanding this great thinker to have been published for many years, and will be essential reading for anyone in the humanities, social sciences and beyond with an interest in Freud or philosophy.

Author : Laurence Goldstein
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 9780847695461
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Clear and Queer Thinking written by Laurence Goldstein and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laurence Goldstein gives a straightforward and lively account of some of the central themes of Wittgenstein's writings on meaning, mind, and mathematics. He does this both by drawing on Wittgenstein's work to show how his thinking developed over time and by helping the reader gain some impression of what a strange character Wittgenstein was--for how he was is intimately related to how and what he wrote.

Author : Jonathan Lear
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674416880
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Case for Irony written by Jonathan Lear and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2001, Vanity Fair declared that the Age of Irony was over. Joan Didion has lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama has become an "irony-free zone." Jonathan Lear in his 2006 book Radical Hope looked into AmericaÕs heart to ask how might we dispose ourselves if we came to feel our way of life was coming to an end. Here, he mobilizes a squad of philosophers and a psychoanalyst to once again forge a radical way forward, by arguing that no genuinely human life is possible without irony. Becoming human should not be taken for granted, Lear writes. It is something we accomplish, something we get the hang of, and like Kierkegaard and Plato, Lear claims that irony is one of the essential tools we use to do this. For Lear and the participants in his Socratic dialogue, irony is not about being cool and detached like a player in a Woody Allen film. That, as Johannes Climacus, one of KierkegaardÕs pseudonymous authors, puts it, Òis something only assistant professors assume.Ó Instead, it is a renewed commitment to living seriously, to experiencing every disruption that shakes us out of our habitual ways of tuning out of life, with all its vicissitudes. While many over the centuries have argued differently, Lear claims that our feelings and desires tend toward order, a structure that irony shakes us into seeing. LearÕs exchanges with his interlocutors strengthen his claims, while his experiences as a practicing psychoanalyst bring an emotionally gripping dimension to what is at stakeÑthe psychic costs and benefits of living with irony.

Author : Mark Edmundson
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674088204
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Self and Soul written by Mark Edmundson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-09 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ARTery Best Book of the Year An Art of Manliness Best Book of the Year In a culture that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, the desires of the individual self stand supreme, Mark Edmundson says. We spare little thought for the great ideals that once gave life meaning and worth. Self and Soul is an impassioned effort to defend the values of the Soul. “An impassioned critique of Western society, a relentless assault on contemporary complacency, shallowness, competitiveness and self-regard...Throughout Self and Soul, Edmundson writes with a Thoreau-like incisiveness and fervor...[A] powerful, heartfelt book.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post “[Edmundson’s] bold and ambitious new book is partly a demonstration of what a ‘real education’ in the humanities, inspired by the goal of ‘human transformation’ and devoted to taking writers seriously, might look like...[It] quietly sets out to challenge many educational pieties, most of the assumptions of recent literary studies—and his own chosen lifestyle.” —Mathew Reisz, Times Higher Education “Edmundson delivers a welcome championing of humanistic ways of thinking and living.” —Kirkus Reviews