Locating and Losing the Self in the World
Locating and Losing the Self in the World

Author: Masato Ishida

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-10-16

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1443869503

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Comparative philosophy brings into focus relationships found across philosophies of disparate cultures. In the contemporary globalizing world, this perspective is vital – it ensures that diverse voices have the opportunity to be heard and refines the understanding of the many varieties of philosophical thought. Philosophy departments around the world are beginning to see the import of this broader perspective. Recent years have seen tremendous growth in the areas of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Islamic, African, Latin American, and indigenous philosophies. Every year, graduate students from around the world gather at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, the defining center of this comparative movement, in order to attend the Uehiro Graduate Student Philosophy Conference. These students bring a range of philosophical interests that converge to a definite theme over the course of the conference. At the 2012 meeting, this theme revolved around human beings’ recognition of themselves as selves, the discovery of the nature of these selves, and their relation to the world at large. These issues are comparative in the best sense of the word, drawing on the interests of canonical Western philosophy, as well as reflecting the fundamental concerns of non-Western philosophies. The three sections of this volume capture the stages of thought moving from self-awareness to self-transcendence, and leading to the general theme of the volume: locating and losing the self in the world. The papers in this volume represent diverse philosophical viewpoints, from canonical Western figures such as Immanuel Kant and Simone de Beauvoir, to those of non-Western philosophers who have been gaining interest in the English-speaking world, such as Nāgārjuna and Nishida Kitarō. By gaining familiarity with these figures’ perspectives, readers will become better able to distinguish and think through issues including linguistic and phenomenological understanding of the self, the self’s full engagement with the world, and the world’s reciprocal determination of the self.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost
A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Author: Rebecca Solnit

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2006-06-27

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1101118717

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“An intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism.” —Los Angeles Times From the award-winning author of Orwell's Roses, a stimulating exploration of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown Written as a series of autobiographical essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Rebecca Solnit's life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. Solnit is interested in the stories we use to navigate our way through the world, and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves, or losing ourselves. While deeply personal, her own stories link up to larger stories, from captivity narratives of early Americans to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting, not to mention encounters with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating voyage of discovery.

A World in Discourse
A World in Discourse

Author: Matthew Izor

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-10-28

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1443885711

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Comparative philosophy refines the inter-cultural and inter-regional development of philosophical thought that is imperative for a globalizing world. The influence of comparative philosophy can be seen in the growing number of departments that include one or more comparative specialists in their ranks, and this is no longer only a trend in philosophy. Playing no small part in this growth is the fact that training in comparative thought provides one with a methodological backdrop against which rapidly diversifying sets of topics are being addressed from a broad range of perspectives. This volume illustrates precisely that trend by gathering together original work first presented at the Uehiro Graduate Philosophy Conference, an annual conference held in the spring at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. The campus that has been the epicenter of comparative philosophy has, through this conference, become a meeting place for new philosophical talent. Organized by the graduate students of UH Mānoa, the conference routinely attracts presenters from Asia, Europe and North America, and has featured keynote speakers hailing from universities in Japan, China, and the US. This volume publishes for the first time the standout papers from the 2013 meeting of the conference, the theme of which was “Convergence and Alterity”. Presenters were asked to submit their finest work that demonstrated the far-reaching nature of comparative thought. The result is a collection of novel voices emerging within the field. As can be seen in the uniqueness and vigor with which they approach the discipline, these writers demonstrate the ever-enlarging boundaries of comparative analysis. The volume includes papers covering figures such as Kant, Plato, Dewey and Merleau-Ponty in the Western tradition, and Miki Kiyoshi, Zhuangzi, and Confucius in the Eastern traditions. From boredom and cynicism to imagination and feminism, the topics treated are also of much interest to contemporary research. Throughout its pages, the reader will find not only a resurgence of the comparative methodology, but also a detailed analysis of both fresh ideas and classical texts.

Willpower
Willpower

Author: Roy F. Baumeister

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2011-09-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1101543779

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One of the world's most esteemed and influential psychologists, Roy F. Baumeister, teams with New York Times science writer John Tierney to reveal the secrets of self-control and how to master it. "Deep and provocative analysis of people's battle with temptation and masterful insights into understanding willpower: why we have it, why we don't, and how to build it. A terrific read." —Ravi Dhar, Yale School of Management, Director of Center for Customer Insights Pioneering research psychologist Roy F. Baumeister collaborates with New York Times science writer John Tierney to revolutionize our understanding of the most coveted human virtue: self-control. Drawing on cutting-edge research and the wisdom of real-life experts, Willpower shares lessons on how to focus our strength, resist temptation, and redirect our lives. It shows readers how to be realistic when setting goals, monitor their progress, and how to keep faith when they falter. By blending practical wisdom with the best of recent research science, Willpower makes it clear that whatever we seek—from happiness to good health to financial security—we won’t reach our goals without first learning to harness self-control.

Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World
Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World

Author: Iddo Landau

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-07-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0190657685

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Does life have meaning? Is it possible for life to be meaningful when the world is filled with suffering and when so much depends merely upon chance? Even if there is meaning, is there enough to justify living? These questions are difficult to resolve. There are times in which we face the mundane, the illogically cruel, and the tragic, which leave us to question the value of our lives. However, Iddo Landau argues, our lives often are, or could be made, meaningful—we've just been setting the bar too high for evaluating what meaning there is. When it comes to meaning in life, Landau explains, we have let perfect become the enemy of the good. We have failed to find life perfectly meaningful, and therefore have failed to see any meaning in our lives. We must attune ourselves to enhancing and appreciating the meaning in our lives, and Landau shows us how to do that. In this warmly written book, rich with examples from the author's life, film, literature, and history, Landau offers new theories and practical advice that awaken us to the meaning already present in our lives and demonstrates how we can enhance it. He confronts prevailing nihilist ideas that undermine our existence, and the questions that dog us no matter what we believe. While exposing the weaknesses of ideas that lead many to despair, he builds a strong case for maintaining more hope. Along the way, he faces provocative questions: Would we choose to live forever if we could? Does death render life meaningless? If we examine it in the context of the immensity of the whole universe, can we consider life meaningful? If we feel empty once we achieve our goals, and the pursuit of these goals is what gives us a sense of meaning, then what can we do? Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World is likely to alter the way you understand your life.

The Last Lecture
The Last Lecture

Author: Randy Pausch

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780340978504

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The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

The Geography of Bliss
The Geography of Bliss

Author: Eric Weiner

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2014-10-30

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1448168481

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What makes a nation happy? Is one country's sense of happiness the same as another's? In the last two decades, psychologists and economists have learned a lot about who's happy and who isn't. The Dutch are, the Romanians aren't, and Americans are somewhere in between... After years of going to the world's least happy countries, Eric Weiner, a veteran foreign correspondent, decided to travel and evaluate each country's different sense of happiness and discover the nation that seemed happiest of all. ·He discovers the relationship between money and happiness in tiny and extremely wealthy Qatar (and it's not a good one) ·He goes to Thailand, and finds that not thinking is a contented way of life. ·He goes to the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and discovers they have an official policy of Gross National Happiness! ·He asks himself why the British don't do happiness? In Weiner's quest to find the world's happiest places, he eats rotten Icelandic shark, meditates in Bangalore, visits strip clubs in Bangkok and drinks himself into a stupor in Reykjavik. Full of inspired moments, The Geography of Bliss accomplishes a feat few travel books dare and even fewer achieve: to make you happier.

The Location of Experience
The Location of Experience

Author: Adela Pinch

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1531508634

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We tend to feel that works of fiction give us special access to lived experience. But how do novels cultivate that feeling? Where exactly does experience reside? The Location of Experience argues that, paradoxically, novels create experience for us not by bringing reality up close, but by engineering environments in which we feel constrained from acting. By excavating the history of the rise of experience as an important category of Victorian intellectual life, this book reveals how experience was surprisingly tied to emotions of remorse and regret for some of the era’s great women novelists: the Brontës, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It shows how these writers passed ideas about experience—and experiences themselves—among each other. Drawing on intellectual history, psychology, and moral philosophy, The Location of Experience shows that, through manipulating the psychological dimensions of fiction’s formal features, Victorian women novelists produced a philosophical account of experience that rivaled and complemented that of the male philosophers of the period.

Global Dexterity
Global Dexterity

Author: Andy Molinsky

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Published: 2013-02-19

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1422187284

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“I wrote this book because I believe that there is a serious gap in what has been written and communicated about cross-cultural management and what people actually struggle with on the ground.”—From the Introduction What does it mean to be a global worker and a true “citizen of the world” today? It goes beyond merely acknowledging cultural differences. In reality, it means you are able to adapt your behavior to conform to new cultural contexts without losing your authentic self in the process. Not only is this difficult, it’s a frightening prospect for most people and something completely outside their comfort zone. But managing and communicating with people from other cultures is an essential skill today. Most of us collaborate with teams across borders and cultures on a regular basis, whether we spend our time in the office or out on the road. What’s needed now is a critical new skill, something author Andy Molinsky calls global dexterity. In this book Molinsky offers the tools needed to simultaneously adapt behavior to new cultural contexts while staying authentic and grounded in your own natural style. Based on more than a decade of research, teaching, and consulting with managers and executives around the world, this book reveals an approach to adapting while feeling comfortable—an essential skill that enables you to switch behaviors and overcome the emotional and psychological challenges of doing so. From identifying and overcoming challenges to integrating what you learn into your everyday environment, Molinsky provides a guidebook—and mentoring—to raise your confidence and your profile. Practical, engaging, and refreshing, Global Dexterity will help you reach across cultures—and succeed in today’s global business environment.

Sources of the Self
Sources of the Self

Author: Charles Taylor

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1992-03-01

Total Pages: 628

ISBN-13: 0674257049

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In this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led—it seems to many—to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality. The major insight of Sources of the Self is that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and political ramifications, has its roots in ideas of human good. After first arguing that contemporary philosophers have ignored how self and good connect, the author defines the modern identity by describing its genesis. His effort to uncover and map our moral sources leads to novel interpretations of most of the figures and movements in the modern tradition. Taylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth. In telling the story of a revolution whose proponents have been Augustine, Montaigne, Luther, and a host of others, Taylor’s goal is in part to make sure we do not lose sight of their goal and endanger all that has been achieved. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defense of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.