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His other postulations are better-grounded than the concept of presentism for this reason.
On page 123 in his Jetsons-like vision of the future, he mentions FedEx. This is an example of a situation where presentism does not exist. The company was not founded to expand on an existing concept; it was founded to build an entirely new vision from the ground up. You can see this when radically-new governments replace old ones, as occurred with the Communist takeover of Cuba or the fundamentalist takeover of Iran. Gilbert's theory of presentism fails to account for the many occurrences in history where the future is envisioned as something radically different than the present. Moreover, these radically different visions can also come true, as was the case for FedEx and Iran, albeit...
Examples like these run against his theory that while we may be able to imagine something completely unrealistic we have difficulty imagining something realistic but dramatically different from present reality.
Gilbert's discussion of presentism relies heavily on anecdotes that ring hollow or are unsupported, or on studies that undoubtedly do not yield universal results. This undermines the strength of his argument. For some people, the mind does not work in this way. The future may or may not be envisioned as being dramatically different than the present. Gilbert discounts this possibility simply because come people do not have the capacity to envision the future creatively. Yet this notion fails because he does not accept that for many individuals these generalizations do not hold true. Further, he ignores this fact for the convenience of creating an argument, when he should examine it to see where that takes his argument.
Works Cited
Gilbert, Daniel. (1997) Stumbling on Happiness. Random House, New York, 2006.
Works Cited
Gilbert, Daniel. (1997) Stumbling on Happiness. Random House, New York, 2006.
The following quotation, in which the author discusses how one of her patients was so adept at disassociating from painful situations that her appendix nearly ruptures, exemplifies this argument. "I don't want to die because I can't feel anything. I don't want to end up dead because I can't feel what's going on in my body…" This quotation from Stout's patient Julia indicates how hazardous it can be to
This example from Gilbert's book better illustrates our discussion of "constructivism" in class. As discussed, constructivism suggests that we actively construe much of our experience. The "reality" is filtered through our minds based on our wishes, expectations, goals, and mood. Also, what we believe to be real is a combination of reality (sensation) and how we interpret that reality (perception) ("Social Cognition"; "Constructing Reality: What is and What was"). When
Aristotle also argues that "happiness, above else, is held to be" (Book I, 7). He supports this argument by stating that, for every other virtue, people not only seek to obtain that virtue for its own sake, but also consider whether or not they will be happy in doing so. Thus, Aristotle sees happiness as the greatest because it is the only virtue that is sought simply for its
Moreover, she hates Dark and will stop at nothing from offending him as they stay together. Dark does not want just Mel as a girlfriend, as he often dreams about Montgomery, his shy and weird colleague from school. Montgomery is lonely and his only friend is Alyssa, a teenager obsessed about the coming of the end of the world. Alyssa's girlfriends, Dingbat and Egg, are two normal and somewhat shy