The Good Life and the Greater Good in a Global Context offers a timely contribution to the debates about the good life that surround us every day in the media, politics, the humanities, and social sciences. The authors’ examine the relationship between the good life and the greater good as represented across different genres, media, cultures, and disciplines. This enables them to develop a framework of values that transcends the overly rational and individualistic model of the good life advanced by neoliberalism and the “happiness industry.” Thus, over and against normative conceptualizations of the good life that reduce meaning to money, creativity to consumption, and compassion to self-help, the contributors propose an ethically charged philosophy of living that views the care for the self, for the other, and for the planet as the catalysts of true human flourishing. In addition to recovering the original usage of “the good life” from classical thought—especially the Aristotelian understanding of eudaimonia as living well and doing well—the essays gathered here highlight its entanglement with distinctly modern ideas of happiness, wellbeing, flourishing, progress, revolution, democracy, the American Dream, utopia, and sustainability. As such, the essays capture the breadth and depth of the conversation about the good life that is of central importance to how we relate to the past, engage the present, and envision the future.

What could middle-class German supermarket shoppers buying eggs and impoverished coffee farmers in Guatemala possibly have in common? Both groups use the market in pursuit of the "good life." But what exactly is the good life? How do we define wellbeing beyond material standards of living? While we all may want to live the good life, we differ widely on just what that entails. In The Good Life, Edward Fischer examines wellbeing in very different cultural contexts to uncover shared notions of the good life and how best to achieve it. With fascinating on-the-ground narratives of Germans' choices regarding the purchase of eggs and cars, and Guatemalans' trade in coffee and cocaine, Fischer presents a richly layered understanding of how aspiration, opportunity, dignity, and purpose comprise the good life.

“A landmark book in the science of emotions and its implications for ethics and human universals.”—Library Journal, starred review In this startling study of human emotion, Dacher Keltner investigates an unanswered question of human evolution: If humans are hardwired to lead lives that are “nasty, brutish, and short,” why have we evolved with positive emotions like gratitude, amusement, awe, and compassion that promote ethical action and cooperative societies? Illustrated with more than fifty photographs of human emotions, Born to Be Good takes us on a journey through scientific discovery, personal narrative, and Eastern philosophy. Positive emotions, Keltner finds, lie at the core of human nature and shape our everyday behavior—and they just may be the key to understanding how we can live our lives better. Some images in this ebook are not displayed owing to permissions issues.

The Good Life and the Greater Good in a Global Context brings together scholars working in the fields of the humanities and social sciences who critically examine the notion of the "good life," understood in all of its dimensions--material, psychological, moral, emotional, and spiritual--and in relation to the greater good. In so doing, the authors provide interdisciplinary insights into what the good life means today and how a viable vision of it can be achieved to benefit not just individuals but our interdependent world as well.

Economic growth and the creation of wealth have cut global poverty rates, yet vulnerability, inequality, exclusion and violence have escalated within and across societies throughout the world. Unsustainable patterns of economic production and consumption promote global warming, environmental degradation and an upsurge in natural disasters. Moreover, while we have strengthened international human rights frameworks over the past several decades, implementing and protecting these norms remains a challenge.These changes signal the emergence of a new global context for learning that has vital implications for education. Rethinking the purpose of education and the organization of learning has never been more urgent. This book is inspired by a humanistic vision of education and development, based on respect for life and human dignity, equal rights, social justice, cultural diversity, international solidarity and shared responsibility for a sustainable future. It proposes that we consider education and knowledge as global common goods, in order to reconcile the purpose and organization of education as a collective societal endeavour in a complex world.

Sustainability and the City: Urban Poetics and Politics contributes to third-generation discourse on sustainable development by considering, through a humanistic lens, theories and practices of sustainability in a wide range of urban cultures. It demonstrates cities’ inextricability from discussions on sustainability because not only is the world urbanizing at an unprecedented rate but also cities are primary locations of the circulation of excess capital, socioeconomic divisions and hierarchies, political resistance, friction between human and non-human worlds, and the confluence of art, policy, and identity formation in placemaking. With essays by scholars working in a variety of fields—from architecture to literature to music to sociology—this collection maintains that any hope for achieving urban sustainability will require taking seriously the ways in which cities are imagined. Efforts to make cities sustainable must fully incorporate the humanities because critical endeavors and creative expressions that fall within the purview of the humanities are vital to closing the conceptual gulf, as well as the practical gap, between human and non-human conservation. Even if the environmental humanities embrace cities, critics must ask whether coalescing the terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘city’ may actually obstruct human action to combat climate change—which, from some angles, seems impending, self-imposed apocalypse. To examine the urban turn, Sustainability and the City attends to culture. Essays in the first part of the collection approach urban sustainability from various disciplinary vantage points to emphasize history, ideology, pedagogy, and critical theory. The second part of the collection analyzes urban commons on four different continents. Finally, the collection moves from a diverse set of interpretations of on-the-ground urban phenomena to a compilation of readings of sustainability in different media and genres—sound art, drama, fiction, and film—set in, or evocative of, cities. The collection carves out a place for artists and critics to help realize social justice in cities, which generate remarkable power, but power that is too often and too easily used destructively, unfairly, and wastefully despite cities’ unique capacities to inspire and sustain humanity.

This volume traces the formation of the Asian American literary canon and the field of Asian American Studies from 1965-1996. It is intended for an academic audience, ranging from advanced undergraduate students to scholars from a variety of disciplines, interested in the formation of Asian American literary studies from 1965-1996.