Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science - Softcover

Bok, Sissela

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300178107 ISBN 13: 9780300178104

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2011

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of Lying, a brilliant exploration of happiness set in the context of the world’s great philosophers, leaders, writers, and artists

In this smart and timely book, the distinguished moral philosopher Sissela Bok ponders the nature of happiness and its place in philosophical thinking and writing throughout the ages. With nuance and elegance, Bok explores notions of happiness—from Greek philosophers to Desmond Tutu, Charles Darwin, Iris Murdoch, and the Dalai Lama—as well as the latest theories advanced by psychologists, economists, geneticists, and neuroscientists. Eschewing abstract theorizing, Bok weaves in a wealth of firsthand observations about happiness from ordinary people as well as renowned figures. This may well be the most complete picture of happiness yet.

This book is also a clarion call to think clearly and sensitively about happiness. Bringing together very different disciplines provides Bok with a unique opportunity to consider the role of happiness in wider questions of how we should lead our lives and treat one another—concerns that don’t often figure in today’s happiness equation. How should we pursue, weigh, value, or limit our own happiness, or that of others, now and in the future? Compelling and perceptive, Exploring Happiness shines a welcome new light on the heart of the human condition.

About this title

About the Author:

Sissela Bok is Senior Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and a moral philosopher of international renown. A former member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, Bok is a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and sits on the editorial boards of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Common Knowledge, and Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. Her many books include the seminal Lying, Secrets, A Strategy for Peace, Mayhem, and Common Values. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Confronted by a welter of conflicting definitions, eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope despaired of establishing a meaning for happiness. Less easily discouraged, Bok acknowledges the contradictions in the diversity of perspectives, yet she converts these contradictions into openings for deeper inquiry. Readers will contemplate the tension between, for instance, Seneca’s insistence on virtue as the basis for happiness and La Mettrie’s affirmation of self-indulgence as its true fount. In a wide-ranging survey of philosophical thought, readers weigh contrasting claims about happiness proffered by the joyfully devout and the bemusedly skeptical; by the gregarious socialite and the introspective recluse; by the champions of genetic determinism and the defenders of individual agency. Merely examining such a diverse range of theories will enrich readers’ thinking. Bok, however, looks to modern research to winnow wheat from chaff. Investigations in neurophysiology, for example, have exploded long-held assumptions about how optimism generates happiness. Survey sociology has now discredited Aristotle’s claim that advancing age means diminished happiness. Still, some knotty questions resist empirical assessment: Is true happiness the piercing exultation of a singular moment, or the gratifying culmination of an entire lifetime? What, in any case, guarantees happiness hereafter? Bok lifts her topic above merely subjective opinion into a probing intellectual analysis. --Bryce Christensen

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0300178107
• ISBN 13: 9780300178104
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224