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Just as a garden needs worms, we need bad feelings.... We tend to
think about bad feelings—feelings like anger, envy, spite, and
contempt—as the weeds in life's garden. You may not be able to
get rid of them completely, but you're supposed to battle them as
best you can. The best garden is one with no weeds. The best life
is one with no bad feelings. But this isn't quite right, according
to philosopher Krista K. Thomason. Bad feelings are the worms, not
the weeds. They're just below the surface, and we like to pretend
they aren't there, but they serve an important purpose. Worms are
just as much a part of the garden as the flowers, and their
presence means your garden is thriving. Gardens aren't better off
without their worms, and neither are we. The trick is learning how
to enjoy our gardens, worms and all. Thomason draws on insights
from the history of philosophy to show what we've gotten wrong
about bad feelings and to show readers how we can live better with
them. There is nothing wrong with negative emotions per se. Their
bad reputation is undeserved. Negative emotions are expressions of
self-love—not egoism or selfishness, but the felt attachment to
ourselves and to our lives. We feel negative emotions because our
lives matter to us. After explaining this, Thomason helps us look
at individual bad feelings: anger, envy and jealousy, spite and
Schadenfreude, and contempt. As she demonstrates in this tour of
negative emotions, these feelings are valuable parts of our
attachment to our lives. We don't have to battle negative emotions
or "channel" them into something productive. Bad feelings aren't
obstacles to a good life; they are part of what makes life
meaningful.
We know shame can be a morally valuable emotion that helps us to
realize when we fail to be the kinds of people we aspire to be. We
feel shame when we fail to live up to the norms, standards, and
ideals that we value as part of a virtuous life. But the lived
reality of shame is far more complex and far darker than this —
the gut-level experience of shame that has little to do with
failing to reach our ideals. We feel shame viscerally about nudity,
sex, our bodies, and weaknesses or flaws that we can't control.
Shame can cause self-destructive and violent behavior, and chronic
shame can cause painful psychological damage. Is shame a valuable
moral emotion, or would we be better off without it? In Naked,
Krista K. Thomason takes a hard look at the reality of shame. The
experience of it, she argues, involves a tension between identity
and self-conception: namely, what causes me shame both overshadows
me (my self-conception) and yet is me (my identity). We are liable
to feelings of shame because we are not always who we take
ourselves to be. Thomason extends her thought-provoking analysis to
our current social and political landscape: shaming has increased
dramatically because of the proliferation of social media
platforms. And although these online shaming practices can be used
in harmful ways, they can also root out those who express racist
and sexist views, and enable marginalized groups to confront
oppression. Is more and continued shaming therefore better, and is
there moral promise in using shame in this way? Thomason grapples
with these and numerous other questions. Her account of shame makes
sense of its good and bad features, its numerous gradations and
complexity, and ultimately of its essential place in our moral
lives.
This new, complete translation of Immanuel Kant's Groundwork for
the Metaphysics of Morals provides the most accessible version of
this challenging foundational work in moral philosophy. Calling on
the insights of a team of noted scholar-teachers, The Annotated
Kant renders the text as clearly as possible, supplementing it with
an inviting introduction, clarifying running commentary, and a
helpful glossary. Annotations are presented on facing pages to
provide support for readers and room for their note-taking.
Remaining true to the intricacies of the original German text, this
presentation of Kant's masterpiece enables all to appreciate the
powerful vision it offers.
This new, complete translation of Immanuel Kant's Groundwork for
the Metaphysics of Morals provides the most accessible version of
this challenging foundational work in moral philosophy. Calling on
the insights of a team of noted scholar-teachers, An Annotated Kant
renders the text as clearly as possible, supplementing it with an
inviting introduction, clarifying running commentary, and a helpful
glossary. Annotations are presented on facing pages to provide
support for readers and room for their note-taking. Remaining true
to the intricacies of the original German text, this presentation
of Kant's masterpiece enables all to appreciate the powerful vision
it offers.
Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across
public space, we study marginalization as a sociocultural practice
and hegemonic schema. Whereas mass incarceration and law
enforcement readily feature in discussions of institutionalized
racism, we differently highlight understudied sites of
normalization and exclusion. Our combined effort centers upon
physical contexts (skeletons, pageant stages, gentrifying
neighborhoods), discursive spaces (medical textbooks, legal
battles, dance pedagogy, vampire narratives) and philosophical
arenas (morality, genocide, physician-assisted suicide, cryonic
preservation, transfeminism) to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic
connections between body and behavior, Whiteness and normativity.
Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across
public space, we study marginalization as a sociocultural practice
and hegemonic schema. Whereas mass incarceration and law
enforcement readily feature in discussions of institutionalized
racism, we differently highlight understudied sites of
normalization and exclusion. Our combined effort centers upon
physical contexts (skeletons, pageant stages, gentrifying
neighborhoods), discursive spaces (medical textbooks, legal
battles, dance pedagogy, vampire narratives) and philosophical
arenas (morality, genocide, physician-assisted suicide, cryonic
preservation, transfeminism) to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic
connections between body and behavior, Whiteness and normativity.
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