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Few words in both everyday parlance and theoretical discourse have been as rhapsodically defended or as fervently resisted as \"experience.\" Yet, to date, there have been no comprehensive studies of how the concept of experience has evolved over time and why so many thinkers in so many different traditions have been compelled to understand it. Songs of Experience is a remarkable history of Western ideas about the nature of human experience written by one of our best-known intellectual historians. With its sweeping historical reach and lucid comparative analysis—qualities that have made Martin Jay's previous books so distinctive and so successful—Songs of Experience explores Western discourse from the sixteenth century to the present, asking why the concept of experience has been such a magnet for controversy. Resisting any single overarching narrative, Jay discovers themes and patterns that transcend individuals and particular schools of thought and illuminate the entire spectrum of intellectual history. As he explores the manifold contexts for understanding experience—epistemological, religious, aesthetic, political, and historical—Jay engages an exceptionally broad range of European and American traditions and thinkers from the American pragmatists and British Marxist humanists to the Frankfurt School and the French poststructuralists, and he delves into the thought of individual philosophers as well, including Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Hume and Kant, Oakeshott, Collingwood, and Ankersmit. Provocative, engaging, erudite, this key work will be an essential source for anyone who joins the ongoing debate about the material, linguistic, cultural, and theoretical meaning of \"experience\" in modern cultures.

William James is frequently considered one of America's most important philosophers, as well as a foundational thinker for the study of religion. Despite his reputation as the founder of pragmatism, he is rarely considered a serious philosopher or religious thinker. In this new interpretation David Lamberth argues that James's major contribution was to develop a systematic metaphysics of experience integrally related to his developing pluralistic and social religious ideas. Lamberth systematically interprets James's radically empiricist world-view and argues for an early dating (1895) for his commitment to the metaphysics of radical empiricism. He offers a close reading of Varieties of Religious Experience; and concludes by connecting James's ideas about experience, pluralism and truth to current debates in philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and theology, suggesting James's functional, experiential metaphysics as a conceptual aid in bridging the social and interpretive with the immediate and concrete while avoiding naive realism.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss the rise and the future of urban leisure format (ULF), i.e. local seasonal short-lived and repeatable small-scale place-time-based staging urban leisure experiences which become the focus of recreation and tourism development in many cities. It aims to analyse the structure of the ULF by identifying its main features and also to propose the future developments of the concept.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on the experience economy principles. It develops the models for structured experiences/experienscape by adding the analogy with television programme formats to propose the general logic of constructing, organising and packetizing urban leisure experiences that are multiplied effectively to other urban time-spaces.FindingsThe ULF’s future potential lies in its ability to adopt local components, i.e. people and urban resources, to global trends using a structured experiences/experience logic which makes the ULF formattable, i.e. with the capacity to get informally standardised, then repeated and adapted to other cities’ contexts.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper provides a conceptual framework for formatting the leisure events and places under the framework of the structured experience, will be carefully adapted to the micro-local level, i.e. community activities sphere. The ULF is a theoretical concept and needs empirical research to verify its validity.Practical implicationsThe ULF provides urban managers with a framework for replicating, multiplying and adapting urban leisure events and sites within the structured experiences (SE) designing framework.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the scientific discussion on the experience economy by introducing the ULF concept which can be adapted to various urban conditions.

In this 1999 book Pierre Keller examines the distinctive contributions, and the respective limitations, of Husserl's and Heidegger's approach to fundamental elements of human experience. He shows how their accounts of time, meaning, and personal identity are embedded in important alternative conceptions of how experience may be significant for us, and discusses both how these conceptions are related to each other and how they fit into a wider philosophical context. His sophisticated and accessible account of the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and the existential phenomenology of Heidegger will be of wide interest to students and specialists in these areas, while analytic philosophers of mind will be interested by the detailed parallels which he draws with a number of concerns of the analytic philosophical tradition.

This chapter contains sections titled: Two Concepts of Experience The Matrix of Experience The Work of Thought Re‐Making Experience References

In modern culture a “disenchantment of the world”, i.e. a turn to the ordinary, prosaic and pragmatic has taken place. This development is mirrored in modern art and philosophy with its low, critical-sceptical style and its allergic attitude towards “higher things” and the ideal. The thesis of the article is that in this way important aspects of human experience (in the sphere of care, friendship and suchlike, of scenic beauty, and of morality, spirituality and vision) are marginalised or discredited. The article pleads for a resumption of a (suitably muted) form of high-style thinking in philosophy, art and society.

Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way? In this article, we argue that they do not and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We first offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. We then explore experimentally the folk conception, proposing that for the folk, subjective experience is closely linked to valence. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness.

This study investigates the effects of the description of design concepts and the ease of anticipating how to use products on users’ subjective evaluation before use. The findings of this study contribute to considerations of a method of value transmission to be used to enhance the anticipated UX. Usefulness, usableness, desirableness, and willingness to use were compared among four conditions with different levels of value evaluation structure (product attributes, functional benefits, emotional benefits, essential value). The results reveal that the participants experienced a greater expectation of product attributes when they more easily imagined using them. On the other hand, participants felt a high expectation of emotional benefit when they found it difficult to anticipate how to use a product.

In Adorno, Roger Foster argues that there is a coherent critical project at the core of Adorno's philosophy of language and epistemology, the key to which is the recovery of a broader understanding of experience. Foster claims, in Adorno's writings, it is the concept of spiritual experience that denotes this richer vision of experience and signifies an awareness of the experiential conditions of concepts. By elucidating Adorno's view of philosophy as a critical practice that discloses the suffering of the world, Foster shows that Adorno's philosophy does not end up in a form of resignation or futile pessimism. Foster also breaks new ground by placing Adorno's theory of experience in relation to the work of other early twentieth-century thinkers, in particular Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Edmund Husserl, and early Wittgenstein.

Students' beliefs about why they may or may not be successful in various pursuits can influence the extent to which they are likely to invest effort in these pursuits and which in turn affects the level of achievement likely to be experienced. Attributional beliefs assign causes for success and failure to a range of factors, including ability, effort, task difficulty and luck. This paper reports on high school students' beliefs about the reasons for their success or otherwise in school subjects and other activities, using data collected as part of a larger study using a researcher-designed Survey of Musical Experiences and Self-Concept. The participants (N=282) were a mixture of Year 9 and 10 students from three high schools in metropolitan Adelaide. The data collected reveal that the facet of 'enjoyment' was perceived as being an important element among the reasons given for achieving success. There are implications for teaching in general, as well as specific implications for high school music education practices. [Author abstract]