Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Social

Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection...

In "Reason, Tradition, and the Good, " Jeffery L. Nicholas addresses the failure of reason in modernity to bring about a just society, a society in which people can attain fulfillment. Developing the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Nicholas argues that we rely too heavily on a conception of rationality that is divorced from tradition and, therefore, incapable of judging ends. Without the ability to judge ends, we cannot engage in debate about the good life or the proper goods that we as individuals and as a society should pursue.Nicholas claims that the project of enlightenment...

In the first book to argue for the benefits of boredom, Peter Toohey dispels the myth that it's simply a childish emotion or an existential malaise like Jean-Paul Sartre's nausea. He shows how boredom is, in fact, one of our most common and constructive emotions and is an essential part of the human experience.

This informative and entertaining investigation of boredom--what it is and what it isn't, its uses and its dangers--spans more than 3,000 years of history and takes readers through fascinating neurological and psychological theories of emotion, as well as recent scientific...

Love--unconditional, selfless, unchanging, sincere, and totally accepting--is worshipped today as the West's only universal religion. To challenge it is one of our few remaining taboos. In this pathbreaking and superbly written book, philosopher Simon May does just that, dissecting our resilient ruling ideas of love and showing how they are the product of a long and powerful cultural heritage.

Tracing over 2,500 years of human thought and history, May shows how our ideal of love developed from its Hebraic and Greek origins alongside Christianity until, during the last two centuries,...

This uniquely engaging introduction to Jean Baudrillard's controversial writings covers his entire career focusing on Baudrillard's central, but little understood, notion of symbolic exchange. Through the clarification of this key term a very different Baudrillard emerges: not the nihilistic postmodernist and enemy of Marxism and Feminism that his critics have constructed, but a thinker immersed in the social world and passionately committed to a radical theorizsation of it.

Above all Baudrillard sought symbolic spaces, spaces where we might all, if only temporarily, shake off the...

In a world largely divided between giddy celebrants and dire detractors of digital culture, Milad Doueihi is one of the very few who speak with broadly informed and measured authority about what the rise of the digital means. Writing as a philologist and intellectual historian, Doueihi argues that digital culture is or will be akin to religion in the scope of its influence and power, and that because of its omnipresence it requires special analysis. Digital Cultures is the culmination of his deep and far-reaching attempts to meet this need.

Doueihi shows clearly how applying...