Hedonism

I’m nearly late to my lab that day. I rush up the stairs of the old brick building, laughs and conversations of the luckier students who had just gotten out of class echoing through the halls. My feet pound against the dingy linoleum, almost loud enough to drown them all out. I step into the lab room, exhale in one long woosh, and let my shoulder’s drop – the professor isn’t there yet. But the TAs are. They sweep through the aisles with strange plastic cylinders in their hands. I step foot in…

The first version starts with the founder, Jeremy Bentham, where the ethical system is developed around the idea of pleasure and pain. He built this ethical system on hedonism which avoided all physical pain and focused on physical pleasure. Bentham believed the acts that were most moral were acts that maximized pleasure and minimized pain (Stewart, Blocker, & Petrik, 2013). The second version is John Stewart Mill’s version…

Analysis of “The Cyclops” Ancient Grecians lived by a philosophy that many still follow today, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” They were advocates of hedonism and sought out pleasure in all regards of life. In the play “The Cyclops” by Euripides, we see a person named Odysseus use the pleasures of man to trick the one-eyed giant Cyclops, Polyphemus, escape death, and find his way out of a tough situation. “The Cyclops”, written around 408 BC, is the only known complete satyr…

In the novel of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Picture of Dorian Gray, both main characters landed up in a place of desolation and unhappiness through their heavy pursuit of what they thought would give them happiness. Both characters started off young with a large potential for happiness by following their own individual pursuits, but instead the route that they took ultimately lead them down a slippery slope of tragedy and melancholy. They followed a way of denial from the factors that would…

at least. The definition to pleasure in the Nicomachean Ethics is “Pleasure together with pain, a crucial determinant of human action and hence crucial to Aristotle’s account of moral virtue and vice. The noun supplies the root of the English term hedonism, that is, the philosophic doctrine according to which the good all human beings of necessity seek is some kind of pleasure.” (Bartlett and Collins 2011) This statement is vague on what pleasure actually is but allows us to see what Aristotle…

In the branch of normative ethics, a person discerns what is right or wrong behavior. There are several theories about what is right or wrong conduct, but two of the most popular ideas is Utilitarianism and Kantianism. Both set up strict methods of deciding how a person would know what the right thing to do in a situation would be. On one hand, utilitarianism claims that you can use intuition to discern what the greatest good for the greatest number of people is. On the other side, Kantianism…

If “someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing the man has one eye,” then the man who draws a landscape for his eternity will believe there is nothing on the other side (Carson 140). Indeed, if the limit of your vision, your insight is as far as the eye can see, you lose the curiosity to know what lies beyond the horizon. Georges Braque, a prominent twentieth century painter who contributed as much to cubism as Picasso did, believed that perspective was a cursed thing.…

choices can be altered by the principles of deterrence and punishment” (Ronel & Segev, 2015). Beccaria suggests, each person has the “Free Will” to make a choice on whether or not to commit a crime. Additionally, Beccaria examined the effects of “Hedonism,” in which a person determines their course of action to be the most pleasurable versus the most painful (Seiter, 2014, p. 15). Examining the Classical School of thought, which dominated our way of thinking, when dealing with criminals,…

ability to achieve it. In conclusion, the symbolism in every elements in “The Great Gatsby” such as background, objects and characters, collectively reflects the mistaken modern idea that was once flourished in the Jazz Age: the excessive egoism and hedonism. These ideas brought corruptions to the society, evoking vanity and selfishness in people’s minds. “The Great Gatsby” symbolizes not only one generation, but also all generations of America in the past and future. It symbolizes both…

class division – Gallegos utilizes Coveney (1996, p.50), who argued that cuisine is about “positioning people in accordance with their class expectations and their collective consciousness”. Campbell saw taste as a reflection of the psychological; hedonism defines modern consumption, created by longings for pleasures via daydreaming. Therefore, cookbooks can construct a balance between binaries that define the self, and serve as a way of testing the tensions between this. Gallegos goes on to…