Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults

Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults
English | ISBN: 019531431X | 2007 | 304 pages | PDF | 3,3 MB

"Sticks and stones may fracture my bones but words will not at all hurt me." This schoolyard rhyme projects some invulnerability to verbal insults that sounds benevolent but rings false. Indeed, the ~iness for such a verse belies its be in possession of claims. For most of us, sensibility insulted is a distressing-and distressingly frequent-experience.

In Sticks and Stones, student of first principles Jerome Neu probes the nature, purpose, and personal estate of insults, exploring how and for what cause they humiliate, embarrass, infuriate, and wound us so deeply. What kind of wrong is an insult? Is it determined by the insulter or the insulted? What does it show about the character of both parties because well as the character of club and its conventions? What role does abuse play in social and legal life? When is powerful the truth an insult? Neu draws immediately after a wealth of examples and anecdotes-taken in the character of well as a range of views from Aristotle and Oliver Wendell Holmes to Oscar Wilde, John Wayne, Katherine Hepburn, and multitude others-to provide surprising answers to these questions. He shows that what we find insulting can reveal much about our ideas of character, reputation, gender, the nature of speech acts, and civic and legal conventions. He considers to what extent insults, both intentional and unintentional, show themselves felt-in play, Freudian slips, offer an indignity to humor, rituals, blasphemy, libel, slander, and dislike intensely speech. And he investigates the affront's extraordinary power, why it can so quickly destabilize our sense of self and be imminent our moral identity, the very center of our self-feature and self-esteem.