The Good Life and the Greater Good in a Global Context

(Hardback)

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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 thoughtespecially the Aristotelian understanding of eudaimonia as living well and doing wellthe 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.

Reviews

What is the good life is a question that has occupied philosophers since Socrates. But what does this question mean in an increasingly globalized world How does globalization affect ideas of the good life and the greater good Savus collection vigorously explores these and related questions. It is a welcome addition to conservations about the fate of the good life in a world where it seems increasingly distant. -- Jeffrey R. Di Leo, University of Houston, Victoria
Smart, engaged, and provocative, Savu Walkers volume modernizes the ancient debate on the good life and makes it fit for a global context. The essays gathered here are a delight to read and central to the work of the humanities. Professors of philosophy and literature will find it especially useful. -- John Gibson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Louisville
This is a substantial essay collection on one of the most urgent and difficult subjects of our global era. Laura Savu Walker has gathered together essays that wrestle with the normative and descriptive dimensions of good life across a range of periods, genres, and cultural contexts from Seneca to rap, and Shakespeare to twenty-first century fiction. The Good Life and the Greater Good in a Global Context is timely, provocative, and well written. -- Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina

Author Bio

Laura Savu Walker is adjunct professor at the University of South Carolina.