Reflections upon wit and humour in the writings of Sir Richard Blackmore, Joseph Addison and Lord Shaftesbury.

This book assesses the adequacy of the traditional theories of laughter and humor, suggests revised theories, and explores such areas as the aesthetics and ethics of humor, and the relation of amusement to other mental states. Theories of laughter and humor originated in ancient times with the view that laughter is an expression of feelings of superiority over another person. This superiority theory was held by Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes. Another aspect of laughter, noted by Aristotle and (...) Cicero and neglected until Kant and Schopenhauer developed it into the incongruity theory, is that laughter is often a reaction to the perception of some incongruity. According to the third and latest traditional theory, the relief theory of Herbert Spencer and Freud, laughter is the venting of superfluous nervous energy. Historical examples of all these theories are presented along with hybrid theories such as those of Descartes and Bergson. The book also features traditional explorations of the place of humor in aesthetics, drama, and literature. This is the first work in the last fifty years to include the classic sources in the philosophy of humor and the first to present theories by contemporary philosophers. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions about humour go back to ancient aesthetics, to laughing Democritus and the aporia of Socratic self-irony, to Diogenes the Dog performing tricks on the streets of Athens, and to the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics. Dramatized in texts and the arts, the comic emerges not only in popular literature and public events, like Dionysia and Saturnalia, but also in the lives of eminent philosophers in antiquity, the Renaissance, and today. Recently, humour has seen a resurgence in (...) aesthetics, in part owing to the titanic efforts of Noël Carroll. Desiring to learn first-hand about the risky aspects of philosophical wit, Valery Vino invited Noël to engage with a series of remarks and anecdotes borrowed from dead authors, led by Michel de Montaigne, about the nexus between humour and cruelty. In what follows, we consider why humans laugh (sometimes at themselves), what social function cruel humour plays, why a callous sense of humour may be of benefit in the face of life’s horrors, and whether we can hold each other morally culpable for vicious jokes. (shrink)

Humor has been praised by philosophers and poets as a balm to soothe the sorrows that outrageous fortune's slings and arrows cause inevitably, if not incessantly, to each and every one of us. In mundane life, having a sense of humor is seen not only as a positive trait of character, but as a social prerequisite, without which a person's career and mating prospects are severely diminished, if not annihilated. However, humor is much more than this, and (...) so much else. In particular, humor can accompany cruelty, inform it, sustain it, and exemplify it. Therefore, in this book, we provide a comprehensive, reasoned exploration of the vast literature on the concepts of humor and cruelty, as these have been tackled in Western philosophy, humanities, and social sciences, especially psychology. Also, the apparent cacophony of extant interpretations of these two concepts is explained as the inevitable and even useful result of the polysemy inherent to all common-sense concepts, in line with the understanding of concepts developed by M. Polanyi in the 20th century. Thus, a thorough, nuanced grasp of their complex mutual relationship is established, and many platitudes affecting today's received views, and scholarship, are cast aside. (shrink)

Except for its belated proof of 1 + 1 = 2, Principia Mathematica doesn’t feature in studies of mathematical humour. Yet there is restrained and understated humour in that work, despite the inauspicious conditions under which it was written. Russell, to take one of the authors, had an irrepressible talent for enlivening his subject matter. This paper explores even the "obscure corners" of PM to uncover its humour and wit, which, for non-logicians, can be an entree to the work.

This anthology brings together extracts that come from a wide variety of sources and that illustrate Western thought on the subject of humour and laughter from Antiquity to Late Modernity. The selection of texts is comprehensive, historically representative, and original, and includes writings from more than 40 different authors.

Baofu discusses the future of humor, especially in the dialectic context of joking and laughing--while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them. He offers a new theory to go beyond the existing approaches in the literature on humor in a novel way.

Introduction: Laughter as an expression of human nature in the Middle Ages and the early modern period: literary, historical, theological, philosophical, and psychological reflections -- Judith Hagen. Laughter in Procopius's wars -- Livnat Holtzman. "Does God really laugh?": appropriate and inappropriate descriptions of God in Islamic traditionalist theology -- Daniel F. Pigg. Laughter in Beowulf: ambiguity, ambivalence, and group identity formation -- Mark Burde. The parodia sacra problem and medieval comic studies -- Olga V. Trokhimenko. Women's laughter and gender politics (...) in medieval conduct discourse -- Madelon Köhler-Busch. Pushing decorum: uneasy laughter in Heinrich von Dem Türlîn's Diu crône -- Connie L. Scarborough. Laughter and the comic in a religious text -- John Sewell. The son rebelled and so the father made man alone: ridicule and boundary maintenance in The Nizzahon vetus -- Birgit Wiedl. Laughing at the beast: the judensau: anti-Jewish propaganda and humor from the Middle Ages to the early modern period -- Fabian Alfie. Yes . . . but was it funny? Cecco Angiolieri, Rustico Filippi and Giovanni Boccaccio -- Nicolino Applauso. Curses and laughter in medieval Italian comic poetry -- Feargal Béarra. Tromdhámh guaire: a context for laughter and audience in early modern Ireland -- Jean E. Jost. Humorous transgression in the non-conformist fabliaux: a Bakhtinian analysis of three comic tales -- Gretchen Mieszkowski. Chaucerian comedy: Troilus and Criseyde -- Sarah Gordon. Laughing and eating in the fabliaux -- Christine Bousquet-Labouérie. Laughter and medieval stalls -- Scott L. Taylor. Esoteric humor and the incommensurability of laughter -- Jean N. Goodrich. The function of laughter in The second shepherds' play -- Albrecht Classen. Laughing in late-medieval verse and prose narratives -- Rosa Alvarez perez. The workings of desire: Panurge and the dogs -- Elizabeth Chesney Zegura. Laughing out loud in the Heptaméron: a reassessment of Marguerite de Navarre's ambivalent humor -- Lia B. Ross. You had to be there: the elusive humor of the Sottie -- Kyle Diroberto. Sacred parody in Robert Greene's Groatsworth of wit -- Martha Moffitt Peacock. The comedy of the shrew: theorizing humor in early modern Netherlandish art -- Jessica Tvordi. The comic personas of Milton's Prolusion VI: negotiating masculine identity through self-directed humor -- John Alexander. Ridentum dicere verum (using laughter to speak the truth): laughter and the language of the early modern clown "pickelhering" in German literature of the late seventeenth century (1675-1700) -- Thomas Willard. Andreae's ludibrium: Menippean satire in The chymische hochzeit -- Diane Rudall. The comic power of illusion-allusion -- Allison P. Coudert. Laughing at credulity and superstition in the long eighteenth century. (shrink)

This book examines the revival of antique philosophy in the Renaissance as a literary preoccupation informed by wit.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Theoretical Framework for the Study of Humor in Literature and the Other ArtsJerry Farber (bio)With a clearer understanding of the way humor works, we might be better able to give it the attention it deserves when we study and teach the arts. But where do we turn to find a theoretical framework for the study of humor—one that will help to clarify the (...) role that humor plays in the arts and that will help us as well to understand differences in the way individual perceivers respond to humor in art?A superiority theory of humor emerged in classical times and more or less held the stage through the seventeenth century; now, however, though an occasional attempt to revive it is still made,1 superiority theory is usually regarded as far too narrow in scope to be useful as a general account of humor. What are commonly referred to as "release" (or, occasionally, "relief") theories— and associated with Spencer and Freud—were for a time very influential, but are somewhat narrow too in their own way, and furthermore, as Noël Carroll puts it, "have the liability of presupposing hydraulic views of the mind that are highly dubious."2 Incongruity theory, which has been around in one form or another since at least the eighteenth century, dominates contemporary humor theory but is still widely regarded as not quite there yet. And so humor remains somewhat mysterious and elusive. Or not even that. It may be that most people, even teachers in the arts, bypass theory entirely and simply accept humor as a given: an unanalyzable fact of human life. I've sometimes wondered if it may be that we don't want to understand humor, either because we're afraid that this understanding will spoil the game or, just possibly, because we sense that, as a consequence of it, we may discover things about ourselves that we would prefer not to know.Is a well-founded, broadly inclusive theoretical framework for the study and teaching of humor in the arts achievable? I want to propose that it is if [End Page 67] we take incongruity theory a few steps further, integrating an analysis of the humorous situation (that is, what we perceive: the caricature, the witty dialogue, the bit of stage business) with an analysis of what goes on in the perceiver (the humor experience itself).A General Theory of HumorIncongruity theory, though clearly the front-runner these days, continues to be problematic, making too much sense for us to discard it, but not quite enough sense to get us where we need to go. Thus, Carroll concludes his recent overview of this theoretical tradition: "Though promising, the Incongruity Theory of Humor remains a project in need of further research."3 Reading this we may find ourselves wondering, just as we might about some writer or performer who's been on the scene for a good long time, how much longer this centuries-old theoretical approach gets to remain "promising."What have been the major problems associated with incongruity theory? For one thing, it doesn't tell us much about the affective dimension of humor.4 Neither does it satisfactorily explain differences in the way individual perceivers respond. The major weakness of incongruity theory, however, has been a failure to account adequately for all of those instances of incongruity that are not funny: for example, brainteasers, logic problems, and puzzles. One way of dealing with this problem has been to keep adding on exclusionary clauses until the category has been pared down satisfactorily. In other words, humor is based on incongruity, provided that we exclude situations that inspire fear, or are disgusting, or are perceived instrumentally, or are regarded primarily as a puzzle, and so on. But, of course, this is patchwork. What we need is a humor theory where stipulations such as these don't have to be added on, because they follow logically from the theory itself.It's been proposed repeatedly that the incongruous elements in humor are likely to be connected in some way, though some of the terms that have been advanced to identify this connection are unnecessarily limiting if... (shrink)

English metaphysical poetry, from Donne to Marvell, is conspicuously witty. A. J. Smith seeks the central importance of wit in the thinking of the metaphysical poets, and argues that metaphysical wit is essentially different from other modes of wit current in Renaissance Europe. Formal theories and rhetorics of wit are considered both for their theoretical import and their appraisals of wit in practice. Prevailing fashions of witty invention are scrutinized in Italian, French, and Spanish writings, so as to bring out (...) the nature and effect of various forms of wit: conceited, hieroglyphic, transformational, and others from which the metaphysical mode is distinguished. He locates the basis of Renaissance wit in the received conception of the created order and a theory of literary innovation inherent in Humanist belief, which led to novel couplings of time and eternity, body and soul, man and God. Yet, he finds that metaphysical wit distinctively works to discover a spiritual presence in sensible events; and he traces its demise in the 1660s to changes in the understanding of the natural world associated with the rise of empirical science. (shrink)

One of many writers inspired by Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the German novelist Jean Paul Richter coined the term 'Shandean humour' in his work of aesthetic theory. The essays in this volume investigate how Sterne's humour functions, the reasons for its enduring appeal, and what role it played in identity-construction and in the representation of melancholy. In tracing its hitherto under-recognised impact both on literary writers, such as Jean Paul and Herman Melville, and on philosophers, including Hegel and Marx, the (...) collection reveals that Shandean humour is a Grenzgänger - a point of commerce not only between Anglophone and German discourses, but also between literature and philosophy.Klaus Vieweg is Professor of Philosophy at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena; James Vigus is postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of English and American Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; Kathleen M. Wheeler is Reader in English Literature at the University of Cambridge. (shrink)

Background: Humor, both producing and appreciating, underpins positive social interactions acting as a facilitator of communication. There are clear links to wellbeing that go along with this form of social engagement. However, humor appears to be a seldom studied, cross-disciplinary area of investigation when applied to people with an intellectual disability, this review collates the current state of knowledge regarding the role of humor behavior in the social interactions of people with intellectual disabilities and their carers. Method: (...) A systematic review utilizing the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines was completed which aimed to explore the current state of knowledge and quality of empirical evidence relating to humor in people with intellectual disabilities. Following this, articles were grouped thematically and summarized. A comprehensive search of four electronic databases (1954–2017) and additional search strategies yielded 32 articles which met the final inclusion criteria. Results: Humor played a significant positive and negative role in the social interactions of people with intellectual disabilities. Research had investigated humor in the classroom and humor expression in different groups including those with autism, Down syndrome, Angelman syndrome, Williams syndrome and Rett syndrome. Few investigations directly studied humor appreciation and comprehension hence themes did not focus solely on humor production/appreciation. Humor comprehension was reportedly supported by gestures. Some groups with intellectual disabilities found non-literal humor (e.g. sarcasm, irony) more difficult to understand which may affect social relationships. Various types of humor were found to be appreciated. The role of humor in relationship development, social facilitation, creativity and stigma had all received some limited attention. Humor also played a role for carer groups in coping with and enjoying the caring role. Research varied in quality with few experimental studies and mainly quasi-experimental and well-conducted qualitative studies. Conclusions: This review revealed the importance of humor behavior in many aspects of the social lives of people with intellectual disabilities. Limited disparate research exists pertaining to humor in this group, suggesting the need for further robust research in this area, including more high quality primary research in the areas of humor production, appreciation, comprehension and stigma. (shrink)

This article tries to defend the position that Holocaust Education can be enriched by appreciating laughter and humor as critical and transformative forces that not only challenge dominant discourses about the Holocaust and its representational limits, but also reclaim humanity, ethics, and difference from new angles and juxtapositions. Edgar Hilsenrath’s novel The Nazi and the Barber is discussed here as an example of literature that departs from representations of Holocaust as celebration of resilience and survival, portraying a world (...) in which lies, hatred and violence are still perpetuated. Because of its transgressive qualities, Hilsenrath’s narrative of the Holocaust as a satire with elements of black comedy can offer pedagogical openings for using laughter to interrupt normative constructions of the Holocaust as an unspeakable and sacred event that lies outside history, and thus beyond the capacities of human understanding. It is argued that laughter is an important modality for inviting deep thinking about the Holocaust, to move it from a transcendent phenomenon to an immanent event, situated clearly in the realm of human action and worthy of understanding so as to prevent it from happening again. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Slipping on Banana Peels, Tumbling into WellsPhilosophy and ComedyPaul A. Kottman (bio)Alenka Zupančič. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2008.[T]he philosopher... is the jest, not only of Thracian handmaids but of the general herd, tumbling into wells and every sort of disaster through his inexperience [hupo apeirias].—Plato, Theaetetus 174cWhy stop philosophy’s most precious intrinsic comedy when it comes to comedy?—Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In1“Comedy,” (...) writes Alenka Zupančič in The Odd One In, “draws our attention to the fact that something of our life lives on its own as we speak, that is to say, at any moment of our life” [218]. Reelaborating some of Jacques Lacan’s formulations regarding comedy, drive, and desire, Zupančič clarifies that this “something” is the “Real of human desire”— namely, “the incongruence of the reality of desire and drive with all those (also quite factual) outlines that determine our supposedly realistic reality” [218]. This extrapolation from Lacan frames Zupančič’s views on comedy and its subversive character; but it is her unique engagement with G. W. F. Hegel’s remarks on comedy—particularly the sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit in which Hegel tracks the passage from the Comedy of Aristophanes to Christianity—that give a distinctive arc to Zupančič’s highly original and generative approach to comedy and its subversive character. In this review essay, I will draw attention to some of the most original aspects of this critical appropriation of Hegel, while highlighting key elements of the text’s argumentative trajectory. Toward the end of this essay, I will also suggest ways that Hegel’s speculative remarks, which see the comic figure as symptomatic of a community that is not yet conscious of itself as such, might allow us to put into question some of Zupančič’s central claims regarding the subversive nature of both comedy and her own critical intervention.Zupančič’s reflections on comedy—which are not only innovative, but also delightfully readable—merit, in their own right, the attention of anyone interested in the intersection of literature, philosophy, and contemporary culture; but her text is all the more significant in light of the oft-remarked rarity of sustained philosophical reflections on comedy. Although there are a number of books on comedy as a literary genre, philosophical studies of comedy are surprisingly rare.1 Henri Bergson’s Le rire (published in 1900) [End Page 3] is perhaps the most well known. More recently, Simon Critchley has written about laughter, wit, and jokes in On Humour. Perhaps the most comprehensive philosophical account of comedy to date—Agnes Heller’s Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature and Life (2005)—was published only three years before The Odd One In.2In contrast to Heller’s work, which offers a philosophical account of a variety of comic works and genres, and unlike these other earlier studies, which deal with the poetics of comedy and related phenomena such as laughter or jokes, Zupančič does not approach comedy as an object of inquiry that might be analyzed by philosophical categories or methods, nor even as a phenomenon that is extrinsic to philosophy. Instead, she sees comedy and philosophy as intrinsic to one another, such that the fate of philosophical activity is tied to the fate of the comical. In assessing Zupančič’s claims, therefore, I will strive less for a summary catalogue of the claims presented in the book than for a reelaboration of what I take to be her most provocative and important assertions regarding what she calls the “critical edge” shared by both philosophy and comedy [Zupančič 9].The Odd One In is the eighth title in the series Short Circuits, edited by Slavoj Žižek, in relation to whose writings Zupančič’s text clearly stands in intellectual and stylistic propinquity. (Žižek himself might be taken as a prime figure in whom comic and philosophical practices, in Zupančič’s sense, coincide.) The book opens and closes with a reminder that we too often mistake the subversive side of comedy for “a consolation... (shrink)

Heroides9 takes the form of a letter sent by Deianira to Hercules as a reinforcement to the tunic smeared with Nessus' blood which she has already dispatched in the mistaken belief that it will revive the hero's love for her. In this epistle she tries to persuade her husband to give up his latest girlfriend by showing him that she loves him, by arousing pity for herself, and by making him feel ashamed of his philandering and see that he thereby (...) disgraces himself. Obviously there is pathos here, particularly as the deaths of Hercules and Deianira loom in the background, but there is also wit, irony, and humour, creating a piquant tonal mixture which has been almost entirely neglected by critics. They have seen the sadness, and some of the irony, but they have not grasped the facetious aspects, whereby our irreverent poet ensures that the piece does not lapse into mawkishness and engages the head as well as the heart. (shrink)

"Ancient philosophers were very interested in the themes of laughter, humor and comedy. They theorized about laughter and its causes, moralized about the appropriate uses of humor and what it is appropriate to laugh at, and wrote treaties on comedic composition. Further, they were often merciless in ridiculing their opponents' positions, often borrowing comedic devices and techniques from comic poetry and drama to do so. The volume is organized around three themes that were important for ancient philosophers: the (...) psychology of laughter, the ethical and social norms governing laughter and humor. and the philosophical uses of humor and comedic technique"--. (shrink)

The subject of the article encompasses the change in social communication concerning the creation of new competition between two knowledge systems: the expert system and the system of dispersed knowledge. The expert model is the one in which knowledge is created only by the sender endowed with institutional authority. In opposition to this, there exist an alternative model which is characterized by so many existing decentralized, not-institutionalized centers of information processing and dissemination. This division can be described only in a (...) strictly informative dimension. Social aspect is also important, more precisely the question of social stratification forming on the basis of access criteria to every source of knowledge defined this way.The article tries to describe the relation between the worlds of: producers and consumers of information, experts and laymen, professionals and amateurs. The analysis of the problem, in author’s mind, is the beginning of the debate over the role and forms of scientific knowledge protection functioning in the time of development of information society. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente artículo revisa los usos de la figura del testigo en dos novelas chilenas de reciente publicación: La dimensión desconocida de Nona Fernández y Monte Maravilla de Miguel Lafferte, ambos relatos cuyas tramas están basadas en casos, lugares y personajes históricos reales relacionados con violaciones a los derechos humanos en Chile durante la dictadura pinochetista. En ambos casos, la figura del testigo es compleja e intrincada, ya sea porque es un victimario arrepentido, una niña que se convertirá en (...) la narradora del futuro o un fantasma que resulta ser real. De paso, y a la luz del testigo como figura articuladora común tanto para el derecho como para la literatura, el artículo quiere reflexionar acerca de las posibilidades de los procesos judiciales, en tanto narrativas, como fuentes de memoria colectiva para dar cuenta del horror. El rol del testigo resulta clave en ambos campos discursivos: mientras en los procesos judiciales el testigo es el sujeto de la enunciación del testimonio y, con ello, elemento de prueba en la determinación de responsabilidades, en la literatura el testigo tiene implicancias tanto narratológicas como éticas importantes, las que le proporcionan una riqueza al testimonio que lo vuelven una forma eficaz de memoria que más que contar lo sucedido, se acerca a mostrarlo.: This article reviews how the witness figure has been used in two chilean novels that have been recently published: La dimensión desconocida, from Nona Fernández and Monte Maravilla, from Miguel Lafferte. Both script plots are based in real cases, places and historical characters, related to Pinochet´s dictatorship. They present a complex and intrincate witness figure, through the form a regretful torturer, a girl who will be the future´s narrator or a ghost that happens to be real. Meanwhile, in light of the witness understood as an common articulating figure for the law, as well as for literature, the article wants to reflect on judicial processes posibilities, while narrative, as colective memory sources that can be held accountable for the horror. The witness role turns out to be essential in both discourse fields: meanwhile in judicial procesess the witness is the subject of the testimony enunciation and, as such, an evidence element for criminal liabilities determination, in literature, the witness has important narrative as well as ethics implications, wich give such richness to the testimony, that it becomes an effective way of memory that not only narrates what happened, it closes to show it. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis, and its ensuing periods of confinement, has generated high levels of social stress on a global scale. In Spain, citizens were isolated in their homes and were not able to interact physically with family members, friends or co-workers. Different resources were employed to face this new stressful and unexpected situation (fitness, reading, painting, meditation, mindfulness, dancing, listening to music, playing instruments, cooking, etc.). Humor was one of the most frequent and widely used strategies in an attempt (...) to keep perspective, deal with the seriousness of the situation and make the day-to-day more bearable. Humor is cultural: it varies from one country to the next and is part of the idiosyncrasies of a culture. It is deemed a particularly important feature of the Spanish personality. During the COVID-19 crisis, the main means or channels of communication were social networks. Throughout the confinement period, there was an excessive flow of humorous memes concerning Coronavirus and related shared experiences during the National State of Emergency decreed by the Spanish Government. The memes draw on irony, ingenuity and creativity to make a difficult and stressful experience more bearable. In this paper, a qualitative methodology based on ethnography research is used and ethnographic fieldwork is carried out on the memes disseminated through WhatsApp during the lockdown period experienced in Spain (14 March to 21 June 2020). The memes are considered to be an example of Netlore, digital contemporary folklore, and a theoretical framework on memes and humor is presented that discusses its different functions in order to channel grief, fear and suffering or to play down specific situations. A corpus of 644 memes that have flooded social networks are categorized and analyzed to witness how the Spanish have managed to bring out their humorous and creative side in difficult times even as they have criticized political decisions, let out their frustrations, described their new “normal” lives, interacted with others and anticipated the future. (shrink)

Scholastic philosophers can be quite funny. What’s more, they have good reason to be: Aristotle himself lists ready wit (eutrapelia) among the virtues, as a mean between excessive humor and its defect. Here, I assess Scholastic discussions of humor in theory, before turning to examples of it in practice. The last and finest of these is a joke, hitherto unacknowledged, which Aquinas makes in his famous Five Ways. Along the way, we’ll see (i) that the history of philosophy (...) is not so hostile to humor as is commonly supposed; and (ii) that the competing theories of humor like the Incongruity Theory and the Release Theory are not altogether incompatible. We’ll also see at least one example of an apparent attempt by modern translators to excise humor from a medieval text. Our considerations will open a window into what oral discussion and debate at medieval universities was actually like, and how we should understand the relationship between the texts we have now and the exchanges that actually occurred then. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy has adopted an increasingly tragic point of view. Tragedy, though, is only a partial truth of the human condition. Comedy is another partial truth. The nature of human existence is neither wholly the one nor the other, but tragi-comic. Philosophy must be attuned to both despair and laughter if it is to understand its own world. In Making Philosophy Laugh, the philosopher Dustin Peone makes an apology for the comic side of existence and its use in philosophy. He (...) demonstrates the social and moral uses of humor and analyzes its significance for speculative thinking. Folly and irony are shown to be vital facets of dialectical philosophy. The reader is introduced to the comical side of Socrates and Homer, Descartes and Vico, Kant and Hegel, and many others. Finally, a doctrine of the tragi-comic sense of life is presented that does justice to all aspects of human existence and liberates the spirit from the grimness of serious thought. (shrink)

Le commun imagine mal que les philosophes, gens. austères et graves, puissent s abandonner au rire, ou même qu'ils daignent, s'interroger sur la signification et la désirabilité de ce comportement frivole.t pourtant si, comme l'observa le premier Aristote, " rire est le propre de l'homme ", il faut bien que les philosophes sachent rire, comme tout à chacun, et même qu'ils s'inquiètent des raisons d'être du rire, de sa finalité, d'autant plus que leur propre démarche et leurs ambitions ont depuis (...) toujours prêté à rire aux profanes. Rire est-il pour l'homme un privilège ou une tare? Si les dieux d'Homère s'esclaffent dans l'Olympe, Jésus lui n'aurait jamais ri. Repoussant les réserves de Descartes, Spinoza a pris résolument le parti du rire. Et si Nietzsche nous demande de rire à la vie, c'est par contre au nom de la vie que Bergson intente un procès au rire. Tout se passe comme si ces appréciations contradictoires du rire, loin d'être dune importance secondaire, traçaient une nette ligne de partage entre les philosophes, révélant peut-être des divergences décisives entre leurs options fondamentales. (shrink)

Humor, as a source of fun, provides panacea from stress. There are writers whowrite humorous stories, but few use humor as a literary device. Alejandro Roces isone of the few, but no literary critical evaluation is made about his fiction because heis more popular as Filipino journalist. Thus, this study, entitled “Humor in AlejandroRoces’ Short Fiction”, aims to ignite aesthetic stimulation by critical analysis toassess its literary merits. His fiction, “We Filipinos Are Mild Drinkers,” “Of Cocksand Hens,” (...) “Of Cocks and Kings,” “Of Cocks and Battle Cocks,” and “Of Cocksand Super Cocks”, as qualitative research work, leans on formalistic and mimeticapproaches to Literature. Consequently, the key findings illustrate how humordevelops an uncommon conflict of an inveterate gambler-protagonist because insteadof feeling burdensome of his struggle, readers experience relief and release of tension.Moreover, some collective satirized peculiar Filipinism include English speechaffectations, gambler’s inveteracy, Hispanic cultural attitudes and traditionalism.Hence, Roces’ characterizations and themes inherently reveal humor that satirizespeculiar Filipinism. For deeper aesthetic stimulation, this study should be comparedand contrasted with the fiction of local and foreign humorists. Keywords: Literature and Communication, humor, inveteracy and satirized peculiarFilipinism, fiction, content analysis, Philippines. (shrink)

_An exploration of philosophical and religious ideas about humor in modern philosophy and their secular implications._.

The legendary biologist, provocateur, and bestselling author mounts a timely and passionate defense of science and clear thinking with this career-spanning collection of essays, including twenty pieces published in the United States for the first time. For decades, Richard Dawkins has been the world's most brilliant scientific communicator, consistently illuminating the wonders of nature and attacking faulty logic. Science in the Soul brings together forty-two essays, polemics, and paeans--all written with Dawkins's characteristic erudition, remorseless wit, and unjaded awe of the (...) natural world. Though it spans three decades, this book couldn't be more timely or more urgent. Elected officials have opened the floodgates to prejudices that have for half a century been unacceptable or at least undercover. In a passionate introduction, Dawkins calls on us to insist that reason take center stage and that gut feelings, even when they don't represent the stirred dark waters of xenophobia, misogyny, or other blind prejudice, should stay out of the voting booth. And in the essays themselves, newly annotated by the author, he investigates a number of issues, including the importance of empirical evidence, and decries bad science, religion in the schools, and climate-change deniers. Dawkins has equal ardor for "the sacred truth of nature" and renders here with typical virtuosity the glories and complexities of the natural world. Woven into an exploration of the vastness of geological time, for instance, is the peculiar history of the giant tortoises and the sea turtles--whose journeys between water and land tell us a deeper story about evolution. At this moment, when so many highly placed people still question the fact of evolution, Dawkins asks what Darwin would make of his own legacy--"a mixture of exhilaration and exasperation"--and celebrates science as possessing many of religion's virtues--"explanation, consolation, and uplift"--without its detriments of superstition and prejudice. In a world grown irrational and hostile to facts, Science in the Soul is an essential collection by an indispensable author. Advance praise for Science in the Soul "The illumination of Richard Dawkins's incisive thinking on the intellectual world extends far beyond biology. What a treat to see so clearly how matter and meaning fit together, from fiction to philosophy to molecular biology, in one unified vision!"--Daniel C. Dennett, author of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds "I thank Thor and Zeus that in their infinite wisdom they chose to make the great wordsmith of our age a great rationalist, and vice versa."--Matt Ridley, author of The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge "In this golden age of enlightened science writing, it is stunning that no scientist has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is time literature's highest award be granted to a scientist whose writings have changed not just science but society. No living scientist is more deserving of such recognition than Richard Dawkins.Science in the Soul is the perfect embodiment of Nobel-quality literature."--Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, columnist for Scientific American, and author of The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People "Science in the Soul is packed with Dr. Dawkins's philosophy, humor, anger, and quiet wisdom, leading the reader gently but firmly to inevitable conclusions that edify and educate."--James Randi, author of The Faith Healers. (shrink)

In this book the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben looks closely at the literature of the survivors of Auschwitz, probing the philosophical and ethical questions raised by their testimony."In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. (...) As a consequence, commenting on survivors' testimony necessarily meant interrogating this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it. Listening to something absent did not prove fruitless work for this author. Above all, it made it necessary to clear away almost all the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, have been advanced in the name of ethics."--Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

Chapter 14. Andrea Timár engages with literary representations of the experience of perpetrators of dehumanization. Her chapter focuses on perpetrators of dehumanization who do not violate laws of their society (i.e., they are not criminals) but exemplify what Simona Forti, inspired by Hannah Arendt, calls “the normality of evil.” Through the parallel examples of Dezső Kosztolányi’s Anna Édes (1926) and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950), Timár first explores a possible clash between criminals and perpetrators of dehumanization, showing (...) class='Hi'>literature’s exceptional ability to reveal the gap between ethics and law. Second, she examines novels focalized through perpetrators and the difficult narrative empathy they provoke, arguing that only the critical reading of these novels can make one engage with the potential perpetrator in oneself. As case studies, Timár examines Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which may potentially turn its reader into an accomplice in the process of dehumanization, and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), which puts on critical display the dehumanizing potentials of both aesthetic representation and sympathy as imaginative violence. Third, she reads Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones [Les Bienveillantes, 2006], which can make the reader question, through the polyphony of the voice of its protagonist, the notions of narrative voice and readerly empathy, only to reveal that the difficulty involved in empathizing with perpetrator characters lies not so much in the characters’ being perpetrators, but rather in their being literary characters. Eventually, Timár briefly touches upon the problem of the aesthetic and the comic via Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) to ask whether one can avoid some necessarily dehumanizing aspects of humor. (shrink)

This seriously playful book provides comic relief in an age of neoliberalism and argues that parody can be used to creatively benefit our practices of self-narration and quests for knowledge. It demonstrates how parody utilizes humor, play, and self-reflection to allow for a helpful, alternative relationship to mistakes and our multifaceted-self. The book works to delineate specific ways of viewing, studying, creating, and performing a particular form of humorous parody, and through pedagogical application, it balances practical hands on examples (...) via digital video creation with examples and exercises such as interrogating our creative histories and parodying them--either as a classroom exercise or in individual self-reflection. The core readership for this book is rhetoric and composition scholars researching continental philosophy, humor, and narrative theory, and it lends itself to classroom implementation for professors, as it brings together (often for the first time) major academic conversations on humor throughout philosophy, literary and cultural studies, communication studies, and media studies. Therefore, this book will be essential reading for undergraduate/graduate courses that feature humor, alternative forms of communication in the public sphere, alternative rhetorical strategies, and courses that focus on the importance of creativity and play in our daily lives and scholarship. (shrink)

While it has been omitted by numerous critics in their otherwise comprehensive readings of Yeats’s oeuvre, “Beautiful Lofty Things” has been placed among the mythical poems, partly in accordance with Yeats’s own intention; in a letter to his wife, he suggested that “Lapis Lazuli, the poem called ‘To D. W.’ ‘Beautiful Lofty Things,’ ‘Imitated from the Japanese’ & ‘Gyres’... would go well together in a bunch.” The poem has been inscribed in the Yeats canon as registering a series of fleeting (...) epiphanies of the mythical in the mundane. However, “Beautiful Lofty Things,” evocative of a characteristically Yeatsian employment of myth though it certainly is, seems at the same time to fuse Yeats’s quite earthly preoccupations. It is here argued that the poem is organized around a tightly woven matrix of figures that comprise Yeats’s idea of the Irish nation as a “poetical culture.” Thus the position of the lyric in the poet’s oeuvre deserves to be shifted from periphery towards an inner part of his cultural and political ideas of the time. Indeed, the poem can be viewed as one of Yeats’s central late comments on the state of the nation and, significantly, one in which he is able to proffer a humanist strategy for developing a culturally modern state rather than miring his argument in occasionally over-reckless display of abhorrence of modernity. (shrink)

Timeless Radcliffe: A Review of Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic - Tomasz Fisiak Yeats’s Genres and Tensions: A Review of Charles I. Armstrong’s Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History - Wit Pietrzak Review of Anna Pochmara’s The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance - Antoni Górny “Artful Exaggeration” - Krzysztof Majer Interviews Bill Gaston Transcultural Theatre in the UK - Uilleam Blacker Talks to Joanna Kosmalska.

How does literature illuminate the way we live? Maurice Natanson, a prominent champion of phenomenology, draws upon this method's unique power to show how fiction can highlight aspects of experience that are normally left unexamined. By exploring the structure of the everyday world, Natanson reveals the "uncanny" that lies at the core of the ordinary. Phenomenology--which involves the questioning of that which we usually take for granted--is for Natanson the essence of philosophy. Drawing upon his philosophical predecessors Edmund Husserl, (...) Alfred Schutz, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Natanson paves his own way with stories and examples that themselves bear witness to how phenomenology occurs in literature. In considering such works as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Natanson shows how literature opens us to the domain of possibility and how metaphor offers philosophical power when we think about freedom and change. This book, written by one of the twentieth century's leading phenomenologists, will interest students in philosophy and in literature. They will value the work particularly for its clarification of concepts and terms that frequently emerge in the contemporary intellectual climate. (shrink)

Given Plutarch’s fragmentary piece on Aristophanes and Menander, a piece of Table Talk on almost the same topic and various attacks on comic poets scattered through the Lives, one might believe that Plutarch is a staid, conservative and humourless author. But several other instances in his writings reveal a playful, facetious, witty and humorous Plutarch. This paper will focus on the Quaestiones Convivales, which bear ample witness to this aspect of Plutarch’s personality and authorial technique. It will examine the ways (...) in which he introduces and describes the various interlocutors, discuss certain comments with which he tries to ridicule his philosophical opponents, notably the Stoics and the Epicureans, try to distinguish the various manifestations of Plutarch’s humour and finally suggest that Plutarch’s stance and attitude towards playfulness, comic situations and laughter may ultimately be affected, at least in part, by his allegiance to Plato. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel measure of civic norm compliance. We combine the literature on norm compliance from institutional economics and social philosophy. Institutional economics draws on survey data to measure civic norms, whereas social philosophy offers a theoretical framework that proves fruitful when used to operationalize civic norms. This paper shows that significantly different results emerge when the operationalization of civic norms in institutional economics draws on the theoretical framework that social philosophy offers. Furthermore, this study is relevant (...) for social philosophy too, as it shows the potential of survey data as a test-bed for philosophical theories of norm compliance. (shrink)

It is embarrassing, to say the least, to admit in limine the impossibility of defining the key concepts of this paper, for I do not know either what tradition is or what topoi are. And what is even worse, I have no theoretical conclusions to present. But, after all, why define tradition? We all know what tradition is since it is one of the staples of our academic fare. Even the word itself is in great part an academic one. As (...) a matter of fact, in classical Latin, what we mean by tradition was expressed by words like memoria or institutum or mos vetus, whereas traditio meant surrender or the handing over of a city or of an enemy, although the meaning of instruction, training, teaching is also attested. It was the latter meaning that prevailed in the humanistic period, though with the technical sense of transmission of a text; and in this special meaning the word traditio still survives in the discipline of textual criticism. Of course, the transmission of the text was understood not only in the material sense but also as a means of conveying ancient wisdom, as a witness to its institutions and mores. So the revival of ancient learning implied a reconstruction of a tradition which was thought to have been broken during the Middle Ages. Thus, the studia humanitatis were defined as study of the past, a very well circumscribed past. Even today when we talk about humanistic studies we understand in great part the study of the institutions, mentality, literary movements of the past. Paolo A. Cherci, associate professor in the department of Romance languages and literatures at the University of Chicago, is the editor of Tommaso Garzoni's Works and the author of the forthcoming works, Capitoli di Critica Cervantina, Effemeridi Romaunze, and a collection of short stories, Erostratismo. (shrink)

The environmental economic response to mainstream neo-classical economics’ disconnect from the natural world was to value external environmental costs and include those into decisions about human welfare. The ecological economic response, heavily influenced by systems ecology, brought the concept of ecological scale or carrying capacity, as a limit to human choice. The divisions between these two theories are not merely cosmetic as illustrated by the highpolitical stakes in recent economic and environmental debates. This article concerns itself specifically with the question (...) how Christian economists position themselves towards the unfolding ecological and economic crises. It is shown that the main positions taken in the policy debates on economy and ecology are closely mirrored in the broader Christian economic community, raising the question whether the Christian economic tradition does have anything particular to offer in response to the ecological and economic crises. We approach this question from two angles, first, reviewing the literature on an earlier debate by the Association of Christian Economists on what Christian economists should be doing and, second, reviewing the literature on the relationships between Christianity and environmental beliefs and behaviour. With reference to eco-theological literature on the varying theological views on the relationship between humanity and the rest of creation, and on different expectations of the eschaton, it is shown why such diverging positions are taken among Christian economists. Nevertheless, the objective reality of Jesus Christ demands a particular Christian ethics and behaviour, which in turn, kindles fertile questions for Christian economists in their practical engagement withthe economic and ecological sciences and with broader culture. (shrink)

The published works of scientists often conceal the cognitive processes that led to their results. Scholars of mathematical practice must therefore seek out less obvious sources. This article analyzes a widely circulated mathematical joke, comprising a list of spurious proof types. An account is proposed in terms of argumentation schemes: stereotypical patterns of reasoning, which may be accompanied by critical questions itemizing possible lines of defeat. It is argued that humor is associated with risky forms of inference, which are (...) essential to creative mathematics. The components of the joke are explicated by argumentation schemes devised for application to topic-neutral reasoning. These in turn are classified under seven headings: retroduction, citation, intuition, meta-argument, closure, generalization, and definition. Finally, the wider significance of this account for the cognitive science of mathematics is discussed. (shrink)

In April 2017, scientists and science sympathizers held marches in the United Kingdom as part of a coordinated international March for Science movement that was held in over 600 cities worldwide. This article reports from participant-observation studies of the marches that took place in London and Cardiff. Supplemented with data from 37 interviews from marchers at the London event, the article reports on an analysis of the placards, focusing on marchers’ concerns and the language and images through which they expressed (...) those concerns. How did the protesters articulate their concerns and objectives, and how were these articulations used to build a community? The placards did not represent a clear, focused, and unifying message; they instead illustrated disparate concerns ranging from human-induced climate change, Trump and “alternative facts,” and local UK specific political issues concerning the country’s exit from the European Union. Our analysis shows that placards gave a playful and whimsical character to the march, with slogans displaying significant amounts of humor, often formulated through insider jokes, scientific puns, or self-deprecating appropriation of negative stereotypes about scientists. We analyze the march through the social movement literature and as a collective identity-building exercise for an community of scientists and sympathizers with long-term aims of establishing a louder voice for scientists, and experts, in public discourse. (shrink)

The philosophical literature that tackles foundational questions about normativity often appeals to normative reasons—or considerations that count in favor of or against actions—and their interaction. The interaction between normative reasons is usually made sense of by appealing to the metaphor of (normative) weight scales. This paper substitutes an argumentation-theoretic model for this metaphor. The upshot is a general and precise model that is faithful to the philosophical ideas.

Kierkegaard makes a controversial and little-understood claim: irony, humor, and the comic are essential to ethics and religion. This account, grounded in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, explicates that idea for a philosophical and theological audience with a level of conceptual analysis never seen before in Kierkegaard scholarship.

In this paper, I explore what Robert Clewis, in The Origins of Kant’s Aesthetics, suggests is an ‘analogy’ between humour and beauty. I do this by focusing on Kant’s concept of wit (Witz), which is central to both reflective judgement and humour. By exploring the concept of Witz as a distinctive kind of cognitive activity, I believe a case can be made that the origin of Kant’s mature aesthetic theory in the Critique of the Power of Judgement and his discovery (...) of the principle of taste were, in part, a result of Kant’s thinking about Witz. I therefore share Clewis’s puzzlement about why, in the third Critique, humour, arguably the art of Witz, is not considered to be a beautiful art. I conclude by suggesting a possible reason why Kant thought that a judgement of humour is different from a judgement of beauty. (shrink)