Description
Book SynopsisPhilosopher John Lachs observes that humans today live lives of comfort but also sees that these comfortable lives come at a cost: our increasing unhappiness. In The Cost of Comfort, Lachs contemplates what humans need in order to live fulfilled lives in today's world.
Trade Review"John Lachs provides, in a sustained manner, one of the deepest and most far-reaching investigations of mediation in modern life yet undertaken. It's an important effort that puts philosophy in the service of life and its problems."—Michael Sullivan, author of Legal Pragmatism
"This work is a very clear, engaging reflection on a genuine contemporary issue: deep feelings of disengagement and bewilderment about how to live responsibly in an almost overwhelmingly complex world."—John T. Lysaker, author of After Emerson
Table of ContentsPreface
1. Comfort
2. Discomfort
3. A Broken and an Integrated World
4. Complete and Dismembered Actions
5. Mediation
6. Philosophical Excursion: Hegel and Peirce on Mediation
7. Five Consequences of Mediation
8. (A) Passivity
9. (B) Impotence
10. (C) Ignorance
11. (D) Manipulation
12. (E) Psychic Distance
13. (F) Irresponsibility
14. Major Mediators: Tools
15. Major Mediators: Language
16. Major Mediators: Ideology
17. Major Mediators: Institutions
18. Major Mediators: Government
19. Mediated Immediacies
20. Eliminate Mediation?
21. Ineffective Ways of Dealing with Mediation
22. Pre-Existing Values
23. Advertising
24. Openness
25. Transparency
26. Education
27. The Power of Immediacy
28. Immediacy and Politics
29. New Rules of Responsibility
Conclusion
