On the Therapeutic Value of Contemplation

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-88
Author(s):  
Jason Costanzo ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Therapeutic Value

In recent times, we have seen a resurgence of interest in the application of philosophy as a therapeutic for the purpose of alleviating the existential ills of human life. Within this paper, it is argued that not only can philosophy be applied as a therapeutic, but that the very act of doing philosophy is therapeutic. The paper begins with a discussion of human nature as bound to finitude and the suffering of existence. The necessity to labor along with the need for relief from labor in the form of recreation and play is then discussed. Play is thereafter distinguished from leisure, and the concept of philosophical contemplation (theoria), following Aristotle, is introduced. It is argued that the activity of contemplation results in relief from the suffering of existence, and that its exercise may in consequence be considered a kind of therapeutic.

scholarly journals The Enduring Greatness: The Mahāpuruşha Paradigm—An Indian Perspective

2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110008
Author(s):  
Maharaj K. Raina
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Spirit ◽  
Positive Direction ◽  
Indian Tradition ◽  
Indian Perspective ◽  
Relative Concept ◽  
The Way

Greatness, a relative concept, has been historically approached in different ways. Considering greatness of character as different from greatness of talents, some cultures have conceptualized greatness as an expression of human spirit leading to transcending existing patterns and awakening inner selves to new levels of consciousness, rising above times and circumstances, and to change the direction of human tide. Individuals characterized by such greatness working with higher selves, guided by moral and ethical imperatives, and possessing noble impulses of human nature are considered to be manifesting spiritual greatness. Examining such greatness is the goal of this article. Keeping Indian tradition in focus, this article has studied how greatness has been conceptualized in that particular tradition and the way in which life and times have shaped great individuals called Mahāpuruşha who exhibited extraordinary moral responsibility relentlessly in pursuit of their visions of addressing contemporary major issues and changing the direction of human life. Four Mahāpuruşha, who possessed such enduring greatness and excelled in their thoughts and actions to give a new positive direction to human life, have been profiled in this article. Suggestions have also been made for studies on moral and spiritual excellence to help realize our true human path and purpose.

Law and biomedicine

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima Comartova ◽  
Andrey Pomazanskiy ◽  
Elena Nikitina ◽  
Saria Nanba ◽  
Timur Mel'nik ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Social Orientation ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
Biomedical Technologies

The rapid development of modern biomedicine creates both hopes for solving global problems of humanity, and risks associated with the enormous potential of its impact on human nature. In this regard, the processes of development and application of biomedical technologies need timely and adequate legal regulation that defines the boundaries of biotechnological intervention in human life. This publication is devoted to the theoretical development of general legal approaches to the essence, content, social orientation and the main industry features of the regulation of relations in the field of biomedicine, which would allow to form a special legal regulation in this area. For researchers, teachers, postgraduates, students, practicing lawyers, employees of public authorities.

scholarly journals Environmental Ecology versus Human Ecology

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-22
Author(s):  
Szczepan Szpoton
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Ecology ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Gift

A collation of environmental ecology with human ecology was the essence of the article. The field of the research included the topics: blending the range of care for ecosystem with the responsibility for our own human nature; presenting a connection between sexuality and procreation concentrated on the gift of marital unity yet protecting the dignity of human procreation; pointing at the areas of human life where the “ecological conversion” takes place.

The Epicureans on Human Nature and its Social and Political Consequences

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jan Maximilian Robitzsch
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Contract Theory ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
The Social

Based on certain passages in Colotes, Hermarchus, and Horace, the Epicureans may be thought to defend a social contract theory that is roughly Hobbesian. According to such a view, human life without the social contract is solitary and brutish. This paper argues that such a reading is mistaken. It offers a systematic analysis of Lucretius’s culture story in On the Nature of Things v as well as the Epicurean passages that at first sight seem to contradict the Lucretian account. The conclusion of such an analysis is not only that all extant evidence is internally consistent, but also that Epicurean social contract theory relies on a ‘dynamic’ conception of human nature: On the Epicurean view, agents have very different psychological motivations when coming together to form societies and when coming together to form political and legal states.

Human Nature

2018 ◽  
pp. 261-276
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Great Apes ◽  
Primate Model ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Behavioral Norms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gendered Roles ◽  
Early Human

This chapter looks at the scientific revelations produced by Jane Goodall's studies on great apes and the effects these studies had on the contentious field of sociobiology. When Jane Goodall and David Hamburg argued for the biological similarities shared by humans and chimpanzees, they also articulated a vision of human nature. They based this vision on biological relatedness rather than on ecological sympathy and implicitly questioned the gendered roles and social hierarchies that characterized baboon behavior as the most appropriate primate model for reconstructing the social and behavioral norms that might have characterized early human life on the savannah. Goodall's early discoveries that chimpanzees manufactured tools, sticks with which to eat termites and masticated leaves with which to sponge up water, fit well with hypotheses that the origins of tool use lay in manufacturing aids for “gathering and processing food” rather than as weapons. But one of Hamburg's graduate students later recalled him warning her not to go overboard with sociobiology.

The Death of God

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Michalski
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Gospel Of Matthew ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Death Of God ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Cross

This chapter turns to Plato's Phaedo as well as the Gospel of Matthew: two narratives about death, and two visions of human nature. Christ's cry on the cross, as told by Matthew, gives voice to an understanding of human life that is radically different from that of Socrates. For Phaedo's Socrates, the truly important things in life are ideas: the eternal order of the world, the understanding of which leads to unperturbed peace and serenity in the face of death. The Gospel is the complete opposite: it testifies to the incurable presence of the Unknown in every moment of life, a presence that rips apart every human certainty built on what is known, that disturbs all peace, all serenity—that severs the continuity of time, opening every moment of our lives to nothingness, thereby inscribing within them the possibility of an abrupt end and the chance at a new beginning.

Conclusions

2020 ◽  
pp. 198-208
Author(s):  
Gregory J. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Global Community ◽  
Donald Trump

The conclusion argues that the time is right for a reappraisal and renewal of interest in Niebuhr’s approach to IR and U.S. foreign policy. It reviews the importance of dialectics to his work, and from a Niebuhrian perspective, comments on Putin’s Russia, the politics of Donald Trump, and the rise of the post-truth era. One of the most important aspects of Niebuhr’s contributions to IR was his recognition of the importance of dialectics. Dialectics found its way into much of Niebuhr’s writing, from his views on human nature to his views on the potential for realizing a peaceful, mutually tolerable global community, which he concluded was the “final possibility and impossibility of human life” and “will be in actuality the perpetual problem as well as the constant fulfillment of human hopes.”

‘I wish you joy of the worm’: Evolutionary ecology in Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Martin
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Evolutionary Ecology ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Antony And Cleopatra ◽  
Human Uniqueness ◽  
Similarity And Difference ◽  
Industrial State

Disaffected from the court and shaken out of conventional assumptions about human nature by the Ghost’s revelations, Hamlet begins to think of comparisons with non-human life, beginning with his father as ‘old mole’ (1.5.170). Later he turns to worms, and his attention suggests a willed strategy of existential and ecological discovery, since worms occupied a place diametrically opposite to humans in the traditional hierarchy of life. Renaissance Humanists often used the perceived inferiority of worms and other animals to define human uniqueness. Their gradations of being, by extension, justified human mastery of the earth represented in Hamlet by Claudius’s modernizing transformation of Denmark into a military-industrial state. Adopting a worm-oriented perspective (wryly imagined by conservation ecologist André Voisin in my epigraph), Hamlet begins to question his own conventional Humanist reflexes, such as those on display in his opening soliloquy (e.g. ‘O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason /Would have mourned longer’ [1.2.150–51]). Recent critics have shown how analogies between social behaviour and animals in Hamlet and other Shakespeare plays reflect the rediscovery of classical scepticism towards human superiority by Humanists such as Michel de Montaigne, before René Descartes and other Enlightenment philosophers elevated mind and soul into essential qualities of human nature. As in other areas of ecology and environmentalism discussed in this book, early modern reflections such as Hamlet’s look forward to today’s post-Cartesian and post-human enquiries into human, animal, and cyborgian crossovers. In this chapter I want to align these pre-modern and present-day horizons with the scientific revolution that links them: evolutionary biology’s tracing of human origins to the shared creaturely and genetic life of the planet. Worms will be my trope for Hamlet’s attention to what Giorgio Agamben calls a ‘zone of indeterminacy’ between human and animal life, and what Andreas Höfele identifies as the complex doubleness of similarity and difference that runs through all of Shakespeare’s animal–human relations, beginning with the comic dialogues of Crab and Lance in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Internet memes we live by (and die by)

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-173
Author(s):  
Chaoqun Xie
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Internet Age ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Revaluation Of Values

Abstract In the internet age, memes are at once products and driving forces of social practices. A meme contains a memetic message and a meme output, and boasts, if guided by a pragmatic way of thinking, several features, including but not limited to salience, frequency, adaptability, argumentativity, sociality, embeddedness, embodiedness, locality, relativity, emotionality and dynamicity. The current global COVID-19 pandemic serves as a fitting and timely touchstone to testify how human beings are surrounded by numerous good and evil memes in the online world, and how internet memes, as can be seen from the illustration of two specific memes, namely, the ‘stay home, stay safe’ meme and the ‘wear a mask’ meme, are impacting human life-worlds, online and offline, with their transformative power, be it constructive or destructive. Moreover, researching how memes plays a decisive part in internet-mediated interaction provides a lens of insight through which ‘deep states’ of human nature of both self and others can be uncovered and through which what Nietzsche called “a revaluation of values” is possible.

MULTIKULTURALISMEDALAM SASTRAKONTEMPORERAMERIKA Analisis Kumpulan Cerita Pendek Karya Brian Leung

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Arido Laksono
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Culture Time ◽  
Work Spaces ◽  
The World ◽  
Capital Constraints ◽  
Close Distance

The understanding towards values, norms ana culture of societies is a crucial matter nowadays considering the close distance among countries in the world. This phenomenon is undoubtedly considered as the result of the advancement of technology distributed and understood by people around the world as a big leap to comprehend societies with their various culture and customs. Thus, the understanding towards multiculturalism is an important issue in global societies to avoid prejudice and stereotypes of other ethnic and tribes. One of the ways is studying the values of multiculturalism either implicitly or explicitly through the work of literature as a reflection of human life. Literary work is regarded as an excellent medium for studying the richness of human nature and its culture considering the fact that only a few people are fortunate to have the opportunity to see and experience other culture. Time and capital constraints have given literary work spaces to accommodate someone's interest in experiencing values, norms and culture of other societies in different areas of the world.

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