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How Can Philosophy Improve Your Sense of Humor?

  • Lydia Amir

    Tufts University, USA;

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Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 11. Juni 2024
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Abstract

It is often said that humor is a powerful tool that is helpful for living a good life. When saying this, we assume that humor is used sporadically for chance encounters with the spontaneously funny. In what follows, however, I lay out the educational premises of a new worldview, which, by making systematic use of self-referential humor in order to handle events that are not immediately funny, leads to a stable state which philosophers call the good life. The multifaceted philosophic notion of the “good life” will be reduced to the principles proposed below; but humor as presented here can help achieve any philosophical ideal, even one that is not in the spirit of the view articulated here.

      However, the form of philosophic humor that I advance in this article requires education, mainly self-education, as is often the case with much successful education. Thus, as intimated by existential philosophers, I maintain, first, that laughter can and should be learned; and second, that the discipline of laughter is philosophically significant because laughter enables to endorse new norms and to change one’s attitude towards oneself, others, and the world. To achieve the educational aims of this article, the theoretical clarification of the worldview that I introduce, Homo risibilis or the ridiculous human being, is illustrated by exercises that help implementing it.

About the author

Lydia Amir

Tufts University, USA;

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Published Online: 2024-06-11
Published in Print: 2024-06-11

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Titlepages
  3. Table of Contents
  4. Articles
  5. Democritus, The Laughing Philosopher
  6. The Contemptuous Laughter of Democritus and Nietzsche
  7. A Joke: On the Plurality of Worlds and Ostrichist
  8. Joke Capital vs. Punching Up/Punching Down: Accounting for the Ethical Relation between Joker and Target
  9. Humanistic Ethics of Humor: The Problematics of Punching Up and Kicking Down
  10. “You Must Be Joking!”: Theory, Religion, and The Domestication of the Ludic
  11. Humor in Chinese Traditions of Thought, Part One: Systematic Reflections in View of Ancient Confucian and Daoist Applications of Humor
  12. Discussion: Short Article for Further Debate
  13. Discussion: Short Article for Further Debate   Edited by John Marmysz
  14. The Shared Presupposition Norm of Joking: A Philosophical Exploration
  15. “I Finally Got the Joke”
  16. Do Joke-Telling Norms Apply to Laughtivism?
  17. “I’m Only Human”: A Self-Referential Sense of Humor and Meaningful Living
  18. Philosophical Satire and Criticism
  19. Philosophical Satire and Criticism   Edited by Steven Gimbel
  20. Recaptioning Cartoons from Historical Turkish Humor Magazines as Feminist Media Activism: The Case of Boşboğaz
  21. Humor in Philosophy Education
  22. Humor in Philosophy Education   Edited by Christine A. James
  23. How Can Philosophy Improve Your Sense of Humor?
  24. Symposium
  25. Symposium   Edited by Steven Gimbel   Dustin Peone. Making Philosophy Laugh: Humor, Irony, and Folly in Philosophical Thought. Cascade Books, 2023. pp. 158.   Critics
  26. In Search of a Lost Philosophical Humor
  27. The Moment of Laughter
  28. On Making Philosophy Laugh
  29. “Where the enemy is mighty, one must be clever”: Peone, Vico, and Guareschi on Power in Humor
  30. Author’s Response
  31. Author’s Response
  32. Humor Resartus
  33. Book Reviews
  34. Book Reviews   Edited by Lydia Amir With Pierre Destrée (Ancient and Medieval Philosophy) and John Marmysz (Modern and Contemporary Philosophy)
  35. Call for Papers, Book Reviews, Guidelines
  36. Call for Papers, Book Reviews, Guidelines
  37. Call for Papers
Heruntergeladen am 26.11.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/phhumyb-2024-0013/pdf?lang=de
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