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Chapter 1 - The Pleasure of Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2023

Tania Zittoun
Affiliation:
Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
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Summary

Many people have had the experience of thinking with pleasure, or of the pleasure of thinking, but can we substantiate the idea that thinking can be pleasurable? This first chapter explores non-psychological productions to search for evidence of the pleasure of thinking in the visual arts, in philosophy – mainly in the writings of Baruch Spinoza and Hannah Arendt - and in the self-writing of a few authors, among them Sigmund Freud and the novelist Chaim Potok. This enables to identify five modalities of the pleasure of thinking. The chapter then poses the theoretical frame for the book, a sociocultural and developmental psychology, and highlights its ontological and epistemological axioms. Two concepts are defined: on the one hand, the concepts of thinking, including reasoning, sense-making, and daydreaming; on the other hand, the concept of pleasure. The methodology used for the book is then exposed – an abductive integration of theoretical work with the secondary analysis of existing work and of data collected in our past work. The outline of the volume is finally presented.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • The Pleasure of Thought
  • Tania Zittoun, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
  • Book: The Pleasure of Thinking
  • Online publication: 05 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009039802.002
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  • The Pleasure of Thought
  • Tania Zittoun, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
  • Book: The Pleasure of Thinking
  • Online publication: 05 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009039802.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Pleasure of Thought
  • Tania Zittoun, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
  • Book: The Pleasure of Thinking
  • Online publication: 05 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009039802.002
Available formats
×