Philosophy of Happiness
From Wikiprogress.org
New Master (MA) in Philosophy of Health and Happiness
Is the search for happiness a valid reason for change? How should be the concept of progress construed in such a way as to capture the variety of factors that boost change? Questions about the nature of change have long been organized in the framework of theories about the causes of economic progress, encouraging a one-size-fits-all approach to the roots of human prosperity. The driving motivation for the materialistic approach is the difficulty to ‘operationalize’ the notion of progress, that is, to provide reliable measures of the intangible forces that shape people’s perception of well-being. If this ought to be the target of policy interventions, the question that needs to be asked first is: What is happiness?
Happiness and the meaning of life have traditionally urged pressing questions in many areas of the intellectual geography. It has only been in recent years, however, that the long-standing issue of what it is to live a happy life has become the subject matter of a thorough and multi-disciplinary philosophical investigation. Indeed, this wave of studies has benefited from unprecedented academic trends and directions of research that transcend philosophical boundaries.
One is the demand for a more comprehensive approach to the quality of life, or well-being, motivated by discontent with the traditional preference-based measures in the social sciences. ‘Happiness economics’ addresses this challenge by designing psychology-based indicators of life satisfaction that capture the critical dimensions of well-being. Another is the philosophers’ willingness to explore the place of the meaning of life in the natural realm by using the methods of the natural sciences along with the tools of conceptual analysis.
Happiness calls for a multi-faceted approach that draws on the work of analytic research in the humanities and the social sciences, as well as on experimental findings from the cognitive sciences. It is in this spirit that the Philosophy Department at the University of Birmingham will be offering from 2010-11 (pending university approval) a new master degree in the ‘Philosophy of Health and Happiness’. Core modules will be chosen from a range of subjects including applied ethics, the study of the functioning of the mind and the conceptualization of the meaning of life. Considerable interest will also be devoted to methodological issues.
