Given the need to explore the factors that can account for a better understanding of the intention-behavior gap in exercise practice in health club settings, and considering the emergence of hedonic assumptions related to exercise adherence, this cross-sectional study aimed to test the moderation effect of the intensity traits agreement/disagreement in three relevant outcomes of exercise enjoyment: exercise habit, intention to continue exercising, and exercise frequency. A sample consisted of 273 exercisers (male = 127; Mage = 36.21; SD = (...) 11.29) enrolled in nine health clubs who voluntarily fulfilled a battery of questionnaires. All analyses were performed using SPSS v. 23.0/PROCESS v. 3.5. The results of the study presented a moderation effect of exercise intensity traits agreement on three relevant enjoyment outcomes: exercise habit, intention to continue exercising, and exercise frequency. No relevant results emerged from intensity traits disagreement. The results suggest that assessing and tailoring exercise prescription and supervision in order to customize exercise intensity may influence future exercise participation. (shrink)

Enjoyment of negative emotions in music is seen by many as a paradox. This paper argues that the paradox exists because it is difficult to view the process that generates enjoyment as being part of the the same system that also generates the subjective negative feeling. Compensation theories explain the paradox as the compensation of a negative emotion by the concomitant presence of one or more positive emotions. But compensation brings us no closer to explaining the paradox because (...) it does not explain how experiencing sadness itself is enjoyed. The solution proposed is that an emotion is determined by two critical processes—labelled motivational action tendency (MAT) and subjective feeling (SF). For many emotions the two processes are coupled in valence. For example, happiness has positive MAT and positive SF, annoyance has negative MAT and negative SF. However, in an aesthetic context, such as listening to music, emotion processes can become decoupled. Sadness retains its negative SF but the aversive, negative MAT is inhibited, leaving sadness to still be experienced as a negative valanced emotion, while contributing to the overall positive MAT. Individual differences, mood and previous experiences mediate the degree to which the aversive aspects of MAT are inhibited. The reason for hesitancy in considering or testing this parallel processes hypothesis, as well as the preponderance of research on sadness at the exclusion of other negative emotions, are discussed. (shrink)

This dissertation develops a theory of personal well-being---i.e., a theory of what is it for a person's life to go well for them. The proposed theory is called "the successful activity view of well-being." It is an end-neutral account of individual welfare that primarily values the pursuit, achievement, and enjoyment of ends that are important to a person. The parts of this process---e.g., the pursuit of ends, the achievement of ends, the enjoyment of activities and situations, and even (...) the satisfaction of desires for situations---are also of some significance for a person's level of well-being when actualized separately. I argue that previous end-neutral accounts of well-being, such as hedonism and desire-satisfactionism, are open to damaging objections because pleasures and desires can fail to coincide with a person's values. I also argue that the successful activity view has greater unity, explanatory power, and ontological economy than any form of perfectionism or any hybridized theory of wellbeing currently on offer.^. (shrink)

Žižek has asked us to consider when we should care about the _tyrant’s bloody robes_. He was asking whether we should show restraint in responding to terrible injustice. The unsettling depiction of ‘Joker’ in Todd Phillips’ (2019) film of the same name goes some way to answering this question. We witness in this film a Joker unlike the many others we had seen in the Batman cinematic universe. Arthur Fleck is not a villain, at least not when he sets out (...) to live in our world. In his own words, he is just a man with ‘nothing left to lose’ living a life that has become ‘nothing but a comedy’. He is not the chaos spreading sociopath depicted in _The Dark Knight_ (2008). He is a man with a mental health condition. An outcast. Pushed around by society until he decided to do something about it. But why is a vigilante in a bat mask acceptable, but one in clown make-up is not? Maybe our traditional understandings of “right” and “wrong” and our childish cultural tropes about “good” and “evil” no longer serve us as they should when our heroes are greedy corporatists and our villains are the marginalised, disabled and mentally ill. Could it be that the Batman stories we have heard since we were children are designed to make us fret about the tyrant’s bloody robes? In this paper I explore Žižek’s analysis of Joker alongside his accounts of surplus-enjoyment with particular reference to Arthur Fleck’s life whilst living with a disability. (shrink)

According to a variety of recent ‘enactivist’ proposals, the material basis of conscious experience might extend beyond the boundaries of the brain and nervous system and into the environment. Clark (2009) surveys several such arguments and finds them wanting. Here I respond on behalf of the enactivist. Clarifying the commitments of enactivism at the personal and subpersonal levels and considering how those levels relate lets us see where Clark’s analysis of enactivism goes wrong. Clark understands the enactivists as attempting to (...) provide hypotheses about the subpersonal mechanisms underlying experience according to which those mechanisms contingently include portions of the environment. But understanding enactivism instead as involving a relational conception of experience at the personal level, with apparent implications for the location of the subpersonal mechanisms of experience, allows us to make better sense of the enactivist arguments, and make the case for conscious externalism. (shrink)

Beatific Enjoyment in Medieval Scholastic Debates traces the reception of Saint Augustine’s concept of beatific enjoyment in Peter Lombard’s Sentences. It identifies the main themes and problems which shaped the discussion of the concept in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century scholastic commentaries. Bringing together theological and scientific approaches to the idea of enjoyment, Severin Kitanov exposes the intricacy of the discourse and develops a new perspective for students and scholars.

Through the concept of enjoyment in Levinas, this paper examines the phenomenological and ontological dimension of everyday aesthetics. Enjoyment, in Levinas, forms an essential element in the constitution of the subjectivity of the human being and is no longer to be seen as a moment of ‘inauthenticity’ or ‘alienation’. The experience of the objects of everyday experience is not related to that of objects of representation or of tools, but rather to that of a system of nourishment into (...) which the subject is integrated, as in an ‘element’ or ‘atmosphere’. This constitutive closeness of enjoyment indicates the fundamental difference between what we understand as everyday aesthetics and other aesthetics characterised by contemplation or disinterest. (shrink)

Through the concept of enjoyment in Levinas, this paper examines the phenomenological and ontological dimension of everyday aesthetics. Enjoyment, in Levinas, forms an essential element in the constitution of the subjectivity of the human being and is no longer to be seen as a moment of ‘inauthenticity’ or ‘alienation’. The experience of the objects of everyday experience is not related to that of objects of representation or of tools, but rather to that of a system of nourishment into (...) which the subject is integrated, as in an ‘element’ or ‘atmosphere’. This constitutive closeness of enjoyment indicates the fundamental difference between what we understand as everyday aesthetics and other aesthetics characterised by contemplation or disinterest. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments ENJOYING NEGATIVE EMOTIONS IN FICTIONS by John Morreall There is a puzzle going back to Aristotle and Augustine that has sometimes been called the "paradox of tragedy": how is it that nonmasochistic, nonsadistic people are able to enjoy watching or reading about fictional situations which are filled with suffering? The problem here actually extends beyond tragedy to our enjoyment of horror films and other fictional (...) depictions of situations which we would not enjoy in real life. What is it about fiction that turns intensely unpleasant situations into situations we can enjoy? Ofthe many solutions proposed to this puzzle, I shall mentionjust four. Aristotle held that in viewing tragedy we experience negative emotions — pity and fear — but get pleasure from the experience nonetheless because we are thereby purged of excess pity and fear. For Aristotle, too, there is a pleasure which tragedy shares with fiction in general, the delight we take in representations.1 Hume put more weight on this latter delight. Our pleasure in tragedy, he said, is based on our appreciation of the skill with which the literary or other artist has depicted the unpleasant scenes.2 Susan Feagin has recently located the pleasure we take in tragic art not in our direct responses to the work, which are "unpleasant experiences," she says, but in our meta-response of moral self-congratulation at these responses.3 The fourth solution to our puzzle is really a dissolution: it consists of denying that we actually feel fear, pity, and other negative emotions in our experience of fiction. The guiding principle here is that in order to have some emotion toward a situation, we must believe that it is a real situation. This principle is articulated in an influential article by Kendall Walton, though he does not apply it to our puzzle.4 95 96Philosophy and Literature I believe that this last solution is no solution at all because we do in fact feel emotions in our appreciation of fiction (a point I will develop later). The other three solutions above address the puzzle, and the pleasures they appeal to all have some explanatory power. But these solutions seem to me to overlook perhaps the most basic pleasure we take in tragedy, horror films, and the like — the direct pleasure of feeling (ear, pity, and similar emotions. The idea of enjoying negative emotions seems counterintuitive at first; indeed it may seem analytically false. But let us look more closely at those emotions to see what there might be to enjoy in them. Because the idea that we experience real emotions in response to fiction is controversial, we will begin not with fiction but with real life. After seeing how negative emotions can be enjoyed in real life, we can then consider their enjoyment in response to fiction. Fear is perhaps the most basic negative emotion, and at first glance one of the least likely to be enjoyed. To feel fear, many have claimed, we have tojudge that we are in danger, and danger is disturbing to us. And so it is natural that in fear there is the motivation to eliminate the danger, by fleeing, protecting ourselves, or attacking. Changes in the autonomic nervous system and the endocrine system equip us forjust such actions. They produce an increase in alertness and muscle tension, a faster and stronger heartbeat, a redistribution of the blood from the skin and internal organs to the voluntary muscles and brain, and a release of stored sugar from the liver into the bloodstream. Now although we may not be able to identify all these changes when we are in a state of fear, we can feel many of them directly, and we certainly feel the overall excitement which they produce. It is this excitement, I think, that makes fear potentially enjoyable. Especially for someone who leads a relatively dull life, the stimulation provided by fear can be pleasurable by contrast with the ordinary lack of stimulation. Many people, indeed, go to considerable trouble to put themselves into dangerous situations, in part, at least, for the thrill of fear that the danger will provide. Consider mountain climbers and skydivers, for instance. Now there are many sources... (shrink)

In this book John Kekes examines the indispensable role enjoyment plays in a good life. The key to it is the development of a style of life that combines an attitude and a manner of living and acting that jointly express one's deepest concerns. Since such styles vary with characters and circumstances, a reasonable understanding of them requires attending to the particular and concrete details of individual lives. Reflection on works of literature is a better guide to this kind (...) of understanding than the futile search for general theories and principles that preoccupies much of contemporary moral thought. -/- Enjoyment proceeds by the detailed examination of particular cases, shows how this kind of reflection can be reasonably conducted, and how the quest for universality and impartiality is misguided in this context. Central to the argument is a practical, particular, pluralistic, and yet objective conception of reason that rejects the pervasive contemporary tendency to regard reasons as good only if they are binding on all who aspire to live reasonably and morally. Reason in morality is neither theoretical nor general. Reasons for living and acting in particular ways are individually variable and none the worse for that. -/- Kekes aims to reorient moral thought from deontological, contractarian, and consequentialist preoccupations toward a reasonable but pluralistic reflection on what individuals can do to make their lives better. (shrink)

As learner burnout and disengagement affect the functioning and performance of college learners and can also influence future career-related well-being, they can be an issue for higher education organizations. Conversely, the discipline of language education has experienced an emotional turn, primarily triggered by Positive Psychology, and the scholars and students have been affected by various emotions. One of the seldom mentioned constructive emotions concerning learners’ disengagement and burnout is enjoyment in learning a foreign language, as has been demonstrated by (...) literature reviews. It is important to note that this review helps scholastic institutions and policymakers in the scholastic community to take into consideration the role of constructive emotions, specifically enjoyment, and their constructive influence on language education in diminishing learners’ challenges in the learning process. (shrink)

Applied to video games, Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow evidences that a positive gaming experience is intrinsically self-rewarding and primarily determined by the skill/challenge balance. A multi-layered measure of enjoyment is built to take these components into account. Gamers were asked to report the concentration-enjoyment they experienced during a first-person shooter game, and to better assess the gap between skill and challenge, the challenge enjoyment was also rated. Along with concentration level, concentration enjoyment is used to build (...) a gaming experience typology that accounts for the self-rewarding component. An enjoyment-based challenge mapping is also drawn up, crossing challenge enjoyment and challenge level. The results show that this integrative enjoyment measure strengthens the causal link between challenge and gaming experience. Most importantly, the findings suggest that challenge or concentration-based enjoyment measures outweigh the standard concentration and difficulty measures as they are more likely to ensure a pleasant and positive experience (flow or relaxation) for the gamers. Indeed, regardless of the reported level of challenge, a gamer is more likely to have a positive experience when challenged at a level she perceives as pleasant. This article emphasizes the importance for game publishers of gathering enjoyment-based concentration and challenge assessments to ensure a positive gaming experience and gamers’ commitment. (shrink)

Despite being a seemingly straightforward moral concept (that all humans have certain rights by virtue of their humanity), human rights is a contested concept in theory and practice. Theorists debate (among other things) the meaning of “rights,” the priority of rights, whether collective rights are universal, the foundations of rights, and whether there are universal human rights at all. These debates are of relatively greater interest to theorists; however, a given meaning of “human rights” implies a corresponding theory of change (...) and through that can be an important guide to the practice of human rights activists and their funders. In practice, any organization can describe their work as “rights based.” This article clarifies the practices of human rights activists and their funders that are consistent with a theory of human rights as (1) universal, (2) interdependent across groups and categories of people, (3) indivisible across issue areas and claims, and (4) measured by the enjoyment of rights. (shrink)

This paper examines the notion of aesthetic pleasure within the framework of an aesthetics of value. The topic is introduced in sect. 1, while sect. 2 presents Moritz Geiger’s distinction between two kinds of aesthetic pleasure: liking, which enables us to grasp the aesthetic values of the artwork; and enjoyment, which is understood to be an emotional response. Sect. 3 reassesses the main tenets of Geiger’s account in the light of current research. In particular, I provide arguments in favor (...) of Geiger’s distinction between liking and enjoyment, but I call into question the claim that liking reveals aesthetic values. In sect. 4, I suggest that liking is a form of feeling motivated by the cognition of aesthetic value and I distinguish it from both the grasping of values and emotional responses. I conclude in sect. 5 by briefly summarizing my main claims. (shrink)

The French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre meditates on the relationship between jouissance, space, and architecture. Commissioned as a part of a study on tourist new towns in Spain, the book identifies spaces devoted to pleasure, enjoyment, sensuality, and desire as sites where the possibilities for a society moving beyond Fordism are manifested. In order to study these possibilities, architecture needs to be redefined as a mode of imagination rather than being restricted to a specialized practice or a (...) collection of monuments. Taking the practices of habitation as the starting point of the inquiry, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment is understood as a production of space on all scales, from the domestic interiors, through urban spaces, to landscapes. Extending the focus of the book from “architecture” to “space of jouissance” within a transdicisplinary perspective, Lefebvre opens the discussion towards questions of subversive spaces, rhythmanalysis of the body, and pedagogy of senses. He proposes a Marxist take of architecture different from and alternative to the voice of Manfredo Tafuri, which since then has dominated critical architectural theory and history. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment not only fundamentally changes our view on French and international architecture culture after 1968 but it gives new impulses for today’s debates about architecture and the urban society. (shrink)

This study investigates the relations between narrative experiences and film enjoyment, and explores the possibility that transportability and perceived realism facilitate narrative experience and indirectly influence enjoyment. The study measured narrative experience and realism in three films from different genres. Results demonstrate that transportability, and both external realism and narrative realism positively influence at least one aspect of narrative experience, and that narrative experience in turn is a significant predictor for enjoyment.

After having received little attention over the past decades, one of the least known human rights—the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications—has had its dust blown off. Although included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)—be it at the very end of both instruments -this right hardly received any attention from States, UN bodies and programmes and academics. The role of science in (...) societies and its benefits and potential danger were discussed in various international fora, but hardly ever in a human rights context. Nowadays, within a world that is increasingly turning to science and technology for solutions to persistent socio-economic and development problems, the human dimension of science also receives increased attention, including the human right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications. This contribution analyses the possible legal obligations of States in relation to the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications, in particular as regards health. (shrink)

First book to identify the political project inherent in the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis.

Drawing on recent developments in media entertainment research, this study examined the relationship between social question and answer (Q&A) websites use and users’ perceived enjoyment with the goal of expanding the line of research on the enjoyment of new and interactive forms of media entertainment. Special attention was paid to meaningfulness, self-presentation, and social presence, which were introduced as mediators. An online survey of users of a social Q&A website was carried out (N = 150). Results indicated an (...) indirect effect of social Q&A websites usage on enjoyment through users’ meaningfulness, self-presentation success, and social presence. Theoretical implications and further directions were discussed in detail. (shrink)

Impostors, confidence artists, and artful deceivers seem to have achieved a strange kind of popularity and even prestige in our contemporary political landscape, for reasons that remain elusive, especially given how harmful and socially unwanted such behaviors ostensibly are. Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, helps us shift our perspective on this seemingly irrational phenomenon because it points out how being susceptible to dupery is linked to the enjoyment of fiction itself. This insight also highlights the importance (...) of epistemological failure in the recent “return to aesthetics” in literary studies, where the positive dimension of unconsciously “willing one’s dupery” directly links aesthetic form to politics. The logic that connects aesthetics to unconscious enjoyment is then elaborated in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Helene Deutsch and others to raise particular questions about how and why the enjoyment of being duped has been associated with feminine sexuality. Reading Melville’s novel while considering psychoanalytic concepts such as the “as if” personality, imposture, and interpassivity illuminates how confidence games play upon the ruses of sexuality, which have profound implications for why the public remains in thrall to the workings of known deceivers. (shrink)

While considerations of gender predominate in scholarly accounts of why and how people derive pleasure from videogame play, the question of sex remains either undertheorized or conspicuously absent from the conversation. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, this article argues that the jouissance (enjoyment) of videogame play is sexed rather than gendered. It theorizes two logics of enjoyment in videogame play: enjoyment with exception and enjoyment without exception. Through an analysis of the videogame Inside, it (...) argues that the logic of enjoying without exception undergirds the libidinal satisfaction of all videogame play. To accept that the enjoyment of videogame play is predicated on such a logic, however, means to accept the ontological failure of the sexual relation. Videogame culture is subsequently founded on a disavowal of the logic of enjoying without exception and a pathological identification with the logic of enjoying with exception. (shrink)

This review explored the investigations on the role of teacher immediacy in English as a Foreign Language learners’ foreign language enjoyment. Earlier investigations have proved that teacher immediacy, such as posture, body language, vocal variety, gestures, and smile, can significantly affect learners’ positive emotions like foreign language enjoyment. It means that teachers should try both to control the feelings of their learners and manage their feelings to enhance enjoyment among learners. Moreover, studies have shown that teacher immediacy (...) is significantly related to learner motivation which is a basis for increasing foreign language enjoyment among learners. However, specific strategies can be employed to increase learner motivation, which in return increases learner foreign language enjoyment. Furthermore, the study presented the implications and future directions of this line of research for different people, such as EFL teachers, teacher educators, and foreign language scholars. The ideas can improve their awareness of teacher-student relationships, in particular, teacher immediacy and its role in learners’ foreign language enjoyment. (shrink)

Brussen, Kerri Anne This article begins with a fictionalised account of a teenage party to celebrate a sporting club's end of season achievements. It then looks at some of the potential outcomes of the behaviours displayed and the longer term consequences.

Entertainments and celebrations are meant to give audiences and participants pleasure. Pleasure and enjoyment are an integral part of flourishing human life, and the desire for pleasure and enjoyment is a distinctive aspect of human nature. Psychological hedonism is a descriptive doctrine concerned with giving an account of actual human motivation. Ethical hedonism is a prescriptive doctrine that advances the view that human beings ought to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, that prospective pleasure and pain are severally the (...) only good reasons for action. ‘Pleasure’, ‘enjoyment’, and ‘being pleased’ are three graces that stand at the intersection of psychology, axiology, and practical reasoning. The relation between pleasure and awareness or consciousness of pleasure is subtle and unlike the corresponding relation to having a pain. To live the life of a practical hedonist is to live a life guided by the pursuit of pleasure. (shrink)

This essay explores the lasting theoretical value of Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation” via the psychoanalytic concepts of Žižek and Lacan. It argues that Marcuse’s theory should be adapted to include Lacanian notions of death drive and enjoyment, but also that it remains particularly suitable to structurally define consumer capitalist ideologies that incorporate both drive and immediate gratification to reinforce institutional patriarchy. Combining the theories then reveals a paradoxical demand to “enjoy responsibly,” which engenders various indirect rationalizations of Marcuse’s “performance principle.” (...) This interpretation also points to various positive ideological beliefs with critical significance that exceeds Marcuse’s focus on their “higher unification.”. (shrink)

Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony interprets in a peculiar way two central concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the signifier and the real. Laclau maintains that signifiers are per se tendentially empty and that there is some constituting impossibility in every social system, that is, some real in the Lacanian sense. This paper levels two criticisms at this interpretation. Firstly, Lacan never employs the concept “empty signifier”: His definition of the signifier as that which represents a subject—and his enjoyment—for another signifier (...) contradicts this emptiness. Secondly, in the place of the impossible, Lacan puts enjoyment. The main political consequence of these two considerations is that the theory of hegemony is mistaken when focusing on the rhetorical debate and forgets that individual political inclinations are based mainly on their enjoyment. (shrink)

Žižek is not a legal theorist, nonetheless, he has written about the law throughout his work. This essay builds on Jodie Dean’s work in ‘Žižek and Law’ which sets out a theory of law, preferable to most critical legal theories because it retains the belief that law can serve emancipatory aims. My aim in is to apply this Žižekian theory of law to copyright, in the hopes of presenting an alternative framework that retains the initial promise of copyright: that cultural (...) material may be dis-alienated public property. This is necessary in a music-focused issue, because copyright law dictates the forms in which music, and cultural products, are created and consumed. The argument is presented in three parts: the founding of copyright, its obscene supplement, and its paradoxical future from within. I argue that future copyright legislative proposals should not focus on extending or limiting any overall term, or what marginal increase in revenues a creator should be entitled to; rather, creators should be given a renewal right. In this way, an author has the ability to constantly renegotiate the terms on which their work is commoditized. (shrink)

_Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment_ is the first publication in any language of the only book devoted to architecture by Henri Lefebvre. Written in 1973 but only recently discovered in a private archive, this work extends Lefebvre’s influential theory of urban space to the question of architecture. Taking the practices and perspective of habitation as his starting place, Lefebvre redefines architecture as a mode of imagination rather than a specialized process or a collection of monuments. He calls for an architecture (...) of jouissance—of pleasure or enjoyment—centered on the body and its rhythms and based on the possibilities of the senses. Examining architectural examples from the Renaissance to the postwar period, Lefebvre investigates the bodily pleasures of moving in and around buildings and monuments, urban spaces, and gardens and landscapes. He argues that areas dedicated to enjoyment, sensuality, and desire are important sites for a society passing beyond industrial modernization. Lefebvre’s theories on space and urbanization fundamentally reshaped the way we understand cities. _Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment_ promises a similar impact on how we think about, and live within, architecture. (shrink)

Ng :255–285, 1995. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00852469) models the evolutionary dynamics underlying the existence of suffering and enjoyment and concludes that there is likely to be more suffering than enjoyment in nature. In this paper, we find an error in Ng’s model that, when fixed, negates the original conclusion. Instead, the model offers only ambiguity as to whether suffering or enjoyment predominates in nature. We illustrate the dynamics around suffering and enjoyment with the most plausible parameters. In our illustration, (...) we find surprising results: the rate of failure to reproduce can improve or worsen average welfare depending on other characteristics of a species. Our illustration suggests that for organisms with more intense conscious experiences, the balance of enjoyment and suffering may lean more toward suffering. We offer some suggestions for empirical study of wild animal welfare. We conclude by noting that recent writings on wild animal welfare should be revised based on this correction to have a somewhat less pessimistic view of nature. (shrink)

I defend moral generalism against particularism. Particularism, as I understand it, is the negation of the generalist view that particular moral facts depend on the existence of a comprehensive set of true moral principles. Particularists typically present "the holism of reasons" as powerful support for their view. While many generalists accept that holism supports particularism but dispute holism, I argue that generalism accommodates holism. The centerpiece of my strategy is a novel model of moral principles as a kind of "hedged" (...) principles that incorporate an independently plausible "basis thesis" concerning the explanation of moral reasons. The model implies that moral reasons requires the existence of a comprehensive set of true hedged principles, and so it captures generalism. But the model also offers an alternative explanation of holism, and so it undercuts much of the motivation for particularism. I defend this moderate (because holism-tolerating) form of generalism against a number of objections, and show how it can be used to defeat three distinct arguments from holism to particularism. (shrink)

The #metoo movement has forced many fans to consider what they should do when they learn that a beloved artist has acted immorally. One natural thought is that fans ought to give up the artworks of immoral artists. In Why It's OK to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists, Mary Beth Willard argues for a more nuanced view. Enjoying art is part of a well-lived life, so we need good reasons to give it up. And it turns out good reasons (...) are hard to find. Willard show that it's reasonable to believe that most boycotts of artists won't succeed, so most of the time there's no ethical reason to join in. Someone who manages to separate the art from the artist isn't making an ethical mistake by buying and enjoying their art. She then considers the ethical dimensions of canceling artists and so-called "cancel culture," arguing that canceling is ethically risky because it encourages moral grandstanding. Willard concludes by arguing that the popular debate has overlooked the power of art to change our lives for the good. It's of course OK to decide to give up the artwork of immoral artists, but--as Willard shows in this provocative little volume--it's OK to continue to enjoy their art, as well. Key Features Offers accessible discussions of complicated philosophical topics like aesthetic value, collective action problems, and epistemic justice Provides a unique perspective and underexplored argument on the popular issue of cancellation Explores the role of aesthetic value in our lives, including its relation to our ethical decisions and our well being. (shrink)

In this paper, we criticize the current focus of the bio-based economy (BBE) on efficiency and control and demonstrate the contradictions that this causes. We elucidate these tensions by comparing the BBE to alternative conceptions of economy that emphasise the relevance of both the human condition and unfathomable nature in the macro ecological transition project. From Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, we take and extrapolate two major concepts—il y a and enjoyment—that help to re-evaluate the status of both nature and the (...) human subject involved in environmental instability. From this analysis, we evaluate current economic practice in close relation to the deteriorating environment to contribute to a conception of an economy that is truly based on principles of the biosphere. We conclude that humankind and nature are notions that must be always considered in this encompassing and topical effort and explain how they have been fundamentally overlooked in current thought on the bio-based and circular economy. (shrink)

An eminent psychologist and a gerontologist explain how to cope with the problems of aging and how to get the most out of one's later years.

On average, women make up half of introductory-level philosophy courses, but only one-third of upper-division courses. We contribute to the growing literature on this problem by reporting the striking results of our study at the University of Oklahoma. We found that two attitudes are especially strong predictors of whether women are likely to continue in philosophy: feeling similar to the kinds of people who become philosophers, and enjoying philosophical puzzles and issues. In a regression analysis, they account for 63% of (...) variance. Importantly, women are significantly less likely to hold these attitudes than men. Thus, instructors who care about improving the retention of women undergraduates should find ways to improve these attitudes – for instance, by demonstrating the ways in which professional philosophers are like them. We will discuss some tentative but intuitively plausible suggestions for interventions, though further research is required to establish the effectiveness of those interventions. (shrink)

THIS essay is concerned with two theses about enjoyment to be found in William of Ockham: Enjoyment is a certain kind of love, and Enjoyment is a cause of pleasure, not the same thing as pleasure or an effect of it. Its own thesis is that Ockham’s extensive discussions of such topics in human nature as love, pleasure, and volition, as well as cognition, deserve not only more attention but more varied attention than they typically receive: Ockham (...) can fruitfully be read as a contemporary philosopher of mind, as a pre- and possibly super-Humean founder of behavioral science, and as a committed philosophical theologian ; further, in each of these ways he can well be taken either in the abstract or as a pivotal historical figure in such larger late medieval-early modern movements of thought as involve a conception of what human beings are and what they can or should do. In view of this spread of aspects, one might wish for a unifying definition of Ockham’s own essential philosophical-psychological nature. The present study is not intended to provide such a definition. Its aim, rather, is to present Ockham as a sort of intellectual revolving door between positions, disciplines, and philosophical concerns which are now largely separated, or as a craggy mountain standing between secular or "modern" thought and vast but nebulous ranges of ideas looming in the distance beyond. An affinity for such ideas is not, to be sure, exclusively medieval, yet Ockham’s peculiar position as a defender of traditional spiritual truths and values who at the same time inaugurated an eminently influential via moderna in philosophy and theology suggests that we may find vantage points in his work for insights not easily available elsewhere. Whether we in corporate these into a system like Ockham’s, or a different system, or no system may be less important than seeking the insights in the first place. (shrink)