Humor’s Privileged Access to Truth, Meaning, and Goodness

Jeremy Barris is Professor of Philosophy in the Humanities Department at Marshall University, USA.

• Introduction.- Chapter 1. Humor as a Privileged Grasp of Deep Truth.- Chapter 2. Humor as a Privileged Grasp of Goodness, Meaningfulness, and Mutually Exclusive Truths.-Chapter 3. Overlaps and Illuminating Problems with Alternative Accounts of Humor.- Chapter 4.Further Features of Humor’s Access to Deep Truth: Humor’s Devices for Fixing and Sustaining our Attention on Sense as Such.- Chapter 5.- Henry Fielding I: Amiable Humor.- Chapter 6. Henry Fielding II: Amiable Humor, Ironic Distance, and the Charitable Embrace of Conflicting Truths and Values.- Chapter 7.- The More Fine-Grained Structure of Humor’s Self-Canceling Distance from Sense: How Bringing Out Sense’s Unqualified Truth Itself Makes Room for Sense That It Wholly Excludes.- Chapter 8 Jane Austen: The Consummate Ironist Chapter 9. Charles Dickens: Bleak House, Caricature, and the Meaning and Meaningfulness of Reality Itself.- Chapter 10.- Oscar Wilde: The Perversity of Paradox and the Sense of Sense Itself.- Chapter 11.- George Bernard Shaw: ThePertinence of Paradox and the Call in Sense Itself for Charitable Compassion.- Chapter 12. Gilbert Keith Chesterton:The Impertinence of Paradox and the Meaningfulness of Reality Itself.- Chapter 13.- Long or Narrative Jokes.- Chapter 14. Humor and Religious Insight: Humor as a Celebratory Appreciation of Life and the World. Chapter 15. Humor and the Insights of Particular Religious Traditions.- Conclusion.