In 2007, Song-Ming Ang initiated Guilty Pleasures, a series of listening parties dedicated to sharing beloved “bad songs” and facilitating critical discussions about complex desires and hierarchies of taste. In this article, I extend on these discussions and offer a theory of guilty pleasures. Informed by queer and critical approaches to affect and minor aesthetic categories, I argue that guilty pleasures are characterized not by a specific medium or style, but rather by their ability to evoke pleasure interrupted by a (...) meta-response of guilt. This experience is activated by the outmoded, saccharine, or naff qualities of an object. I contrast guilty pleasures with good-bad art, painful art, and objects that foster akrasia, and provide an extended examination of naff, another minor aesthetic category with roots in Polari that intersects aspects of camp, heteronormativity, and Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism.” I ultimately argue that guilty pleasures are far from a simplistic category of low art enjoyed with indifference. Instead, I perceive guilty pleasures as always enjoyed with a degree of criticality or skepticism that is tethered to the beholder’s taste, life experiences, and values. (shrink)

Despite many twenty-first century efforts to minimize corporate corruption, initiatives taken by local governments, global organizations, academic institutions, or the corporate world itself, it is clear that corporate corruption is perpetuating itself. In this paper, I apply the Aristotelian concept of “akrasia” (moral weakness) in order to provide an interpretation of corporate corruption as an act of moral failure and misapprehension of the right thing to do, if not an act of wickedness, which originates with lack of integrity. By utilizing (...) Aristotle’s philosophical framework, I attempt a redefinition of integrity not only with reference to the Aristotelian moral and intellectual virtues but also with a combination of theoretical and practical wisdom, that is, a connection between theory and action, definitive of moral consistency. Through this interpretation, I also wish to further emphasize the need for a philosophical background of contemporary managerial practices for a more effective countering of corporate corruption. (shrink)

A tradition of work in cognitive science indicates that much of our mental lives is not available to introspection . Though the researchers often present these results as surprising, little has been done to explore the degree to which people presume introspective access to their mental events. In this paper, we distinguish two dimensions of introspective access: the power of access, i.e. whether people believe they can unfailingly or only typically introspect mental events; and the domain of access, i.e. what (...) types of mental events people believe they are able to introspect. We report five experiments carried out to discover where lay beliefs about introspection fall on these dimensions. In our experiments, people did not presume universal introspective access, but they did overestimate the amount of access they actually have, particularly in the case of decisions. (shrink)

This thesis poses the question ‘What is the critique of democracy in Plato’s Republic?’ It is not the first to do so. But contrary to standard readings, this thesis does not assume neither epistemological nor elitist explanations. Rather, it sees the Kallipolis, ‘the beautiful city in words’ as predicated on a particular anthropology. This theory of human nature, which claims that it is human to be greedy for wealth, sex, and power is contributed by Glaucon, Socrates’ main interlocutor in the (...) dialogue. Noting this, the argument of this thesis makes the following interpretational claims about the Republic: First, I claim that the Kallipolis should be read as an answer to the following question: What would a just city look like given the anthropology of Glaucon? The second claim informing this thesis is the following: Reading the Republic itself as challenging this anthropology, the function of the anthropology it provides is not so much a positive theory of human nature as it is revealing of what Glaucon, in most regards a paradigmatic Athenian citizen, thinks is human nature. His ideas and character are thus central to my reading of the Republic. What has this got to do with democracy? Glaucon’s beliefs, ideas, and his character can not be understood without reference to the society which has produced him, that is, the democratic polis of Ancient Athens. This premise is inserted by the city-soul analogy, a central tenet of the argument of the Republic. As this thesis argues, the tripartite soul provides an explanatory model which accounts for why and how the human soul is moldable and plastic. Furthermore, the thesis contributes to the issue of akrasia, by that it based on this interpretation becomes possible to say that cases of akrasia, – breakdowns of rationality – differ in its causes like the souls of humans differ in their internal constitutions: Humans, the Republic postulates, simply attribute different weight to different reasons, depending on what part of our soul rules, and hence, what the soul has set as its ‘good’. Building on this account of individual decision-making, this thesis offers a twofold analysis of how the interaction between regime and man is portrayed in the Republic, first with regard to the social institutions, secondly with regard to the political institutions. This analysis is based on the premise that the Kallipolis represents an implicit critique against democratic Athens, but rather than being an ideal to offset democratic shortcomings, I argue that the Kallipolis is the realization of democratic desires combined with a need for justice. If, and only if, Glaucon’s is the true anthropology of man, is Kallipolis the most just state. But, as this thesis will show, Glaucon’s anthropology is not universalizable, but is rather an expression of the particularly democratic anthropology. Ultimately, Socrates will show that if allowed to evolve unchecked, the natural culmination of the democracy is tyranny. In order to make this argument, the Republic mobilizes tropes related to tyranny which already abound within democratic and dissenting discourse, in order to posit the democratic value of ‘freedom’ as closely related to the tyrannical lust for power. Following this interpretation, the answer to the initial question is that the Republic criticizes democracy’s institutional practices, poetic tradition, and theoretical ideals showing how democracy instills in its citizens the kind of desires and values that will make them susceptible to the tyrannical coups which the Athenians of the fifth century seemed more than eager to avoid. In my reading of the Republic, the main threat was not outside forces, but their own desires and internal constitutions. Only through developing self-knowledge in the philosophical sense can the Athenian, represented by Glaucon, truly learn to guard himself against tyranny from within. (shrink)