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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 Happinessshines a welcome new light on the heart of the human condition.

For many eighteenth-century thinkers, happiness was a revolutionary new idea filled with the promise of the Enlightenment. However, Vivasvan Soni argues that the period fails to establish the importance of happiness as a guiding idea for human practice, generating our modern sentimental idea of happiness.Mourning Happinessshows how the eighteenth century's very obsession with happiness culminates in the political obsolescence of the idea. Soni explains that this puzzling phenomenon can only be comprehended by studying a structural transformation of the idea of happiness at the level of narrative form. Happiness is stripped of its ethical and political content, Soni demonstrates, when its intimate relation to narrative is destroyed. This occurs, paradoxically, in some of the most characteristic narratives of the period: eighteenth-century novels includingPamela, The Vicar of Wakefield, andJulie; the pervasive sentimentalism of the time; Kant's ethics; and the political thought of Rousseau and Jefferson. For Soni, the classical Greek idea of happiness-epitomized by Solon's proverb \"Call no man happy until he is dead\"-opens the way to imagining a properly secular conception of happiness, one that respects human finitude and mortality. By analyzing the story of Solon's encounter with Croesus, Attic funeral orations, Greek tragedy, and Aristotle's ethics, Soni explains what it means to think, rather than feel, a happiness available for public judgment, rooted in narrative, unimaginable without a relationship to community, and irreducible to an emotional state. Such an ideal, Soni concludes, would allow for a radical reenvisioning of a politics that takes happiness seriously and responds to our highest aspirations rather than merely keeping our basest motivations in check.

The notions of happiness and trust as cements of the social fabric and political legitimacy have a long history in Western political thought. However, despite the great contemporary relevance of both subjects, and burgeoning literatures in the social sciences around them, historians and historians of thought have, with some exceptions, unduly neglected them. In Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought, editors László Kontler and Mark Somos bring together twenty scholars from different generations and academic traditions to redress this lacuna by contextualising historically the discussion of these two notions from ancient Greece to Soviet Russia. Confronting this legacy and deep reservoir of thought will serve as a tool of optimising the terms of current debates. Contributors are: Erica Benner, Hans W. Blom, Niall Bond, Alberto Clerici, Cesare Cuttica, John Dunn, Ralf-Peter Fuchs, Gábor Gángó, Steven Johnstone, László Kontler, Sara Lagi, Adriana Luna-Fabritius, Adrian O'Connor, Eva Odzuck, Kálmán Pócza, Vladimir Ryzhkov, Peter Schröder, Petra Schulte, Mark Somos, Alexey Tikhomirov, Bee Yun, and Hannes Ziegler.

Antik Çağ’dan günümüze düşünce sistemlerinin, kadim inançların ve ilahi vahiylerin önceledikleri konulardan biri olan mutluluk, birey ve toplumların nihai amaçlarından biri olması nedeniyle her çağda gündemini korumaktadır. İnsanla birlikte tarih sahnesinde varlık bulan mutluluğa özgü bir tarih çizelgesi bulunmaktadır. Tarihsel süreçte yaşanan her türlü değişim ve dönüşümün mutluluğa yüklenen anlamları etkilediği görülmektedir. Her çağ kendi perspektifine göre mutluluk tecrübesini yaşamakta ve bu tecrübeyi yorumlamaktadır. İlk Çağ’da Tanrıların hediyesi veya şans olarak görülen, Orta Çağ’da teolojinin belirlediği alan içerisinde yaşanılacağı kabul edilen mutluluk, modern donemde sınırlarını bireyin tayin ettiği bir durum olarak yaşanmaktadır. Modern anlayışa göre mutluluk, bireyin arzu ve isteklerinin tatmin edilmesi tasavvuruyla şekillenmektedir. Bu makalede Antik Çağ’dan günümüze değişim ve dönüşüm süreçleriyle mutluluk tarihi anlatılmaktadır.

This book offers an original account of an ancient, alternative form of ‘negative’ reason which stands in antithesis to its modern instrumental form which has dominated thinking about the pursuit of human development since the Enlightenment. It advances arguments for the recovery of such reason as a spiritual and therapeutic way of life and demonstrates that it is impossible to fully appreciate the Christian apophatic tradition without investigating the intricacies of its philosophical herita.

During the past forty years, thousands of studies have been carried out on the subject of happiness. Some have explored the levels of happiness or dissatisfaction associated with typical daily activities, such as working, seeing friends, or doing household chores. Others have tried to determine the extent to which income, family, religion, and other factors are associated with the satisfaction people feel about their lives. The Gallup organization has begun conducting global surveys of happiness, and several countries are considering publishing periodic reports on the growth or decline of happiness among their people. One nation, tiny Bhutan, has actually made \"Gross National Happiness\" the central aim of its domestic policy. How might happiness research affect government policy in the United States--and beyond? In The Politics of Happiness, former Harvard president Derek Bok examines how governments could use the rapidly growing research data on what makes people happy--in a variety of policy areas to increase well-being and improve the quality of life for all their citizens.

A. Well, exactly. It's a real revelation to be able to work through these things. You start with Plato and Aristotle, and if you've looked at those books any, you'll know that happiness is a central concern in Greek philosophy. In book after book, it just seemed to jump off the page. This was in the 1990s --- the Roaring Nineties, I like to call them --- when thought about happiness seemed to be everywhere. Clinique, the cosmetics company, came out with a perfume sometime around then named Happy. You literally spray it on yourself. Happiness just seemed to be everywhere in the public media --- the sort of thing where you walk into a bookstore and go to the self-help section and there's just thousands of books there. And so I thought, wow, this would be a really interesting subject to look at historically, which is the way I like to come at things. It became apparent very quickly that everyone's looking for happiness in one way or another. It's a subject that's of interest not just to scholars and fellow professionals but to my parents, my friends, and, you know, ordinary folks. A. Yeah, happiness in a pill, or happiness in our genes. The [study of genetics led to] a whole type of thinking that our capacity for pleasure, joy, positive affect, subjective well-being, is genetically determined and that there's maybe not a whole lot we can do about it. Most people would agree now that one's genetic makeup has a lot to do with how we feel. If that's the case, and we live in a culture in which good feeling, positive outlook is thought of so highly, it raises the question immediately, will people accept the limitations of the genetic lottery, will they accept the limitations of their genes? My feeling is no, they won't. I think the drug companies --- and I always joke about this because my wife works in that industry --- they have a very clear interest in fulfilling a demand but also in nurturing it as well. What I think is slightly disturbing here is that, in the same way that we can't define what happiness is, it's impossible to say what normal happiness would be. Everyone's always feeling dissatisfied in some way and it's pretty easy to open a magazine and see smiling people and think, hmm, maybe I'm really not as happy as I should be. Maybe I got screwed at birth genetically or maybe I could just give myself a little lift. I don't mean to make light of this --- I'm somebody who understands the hell of mental illness and how liberating some of the drugs, the SSRIs and so forth, can be for people. The danger is when you cross the line from therapy to a kind of lifestyle enhancement. I don't think that line is by any means clear and is probably becoming less so. A. I have this line in my preface and I often joke that, when I first started this project, and I got a sense of how big it was going to be and how much work it was going to take, I started to feel the pain and figured out that writing a book on happiness was a way to make yourself miserable. But you work through that. I liken writing a book to long-distance running. There's a lot of grunting and sweating and pain. But then there are these highs. In some ways I think that's a good metaphor for the pursuit of happiness as well. Anything that we care about in life --- I always tell this to students, because they get this. I say, look, you think of happiness as something you should have all the time. But you wouldn't go out and think I'm going to be a great tennis player, I'm going to be a great football player, or whatever it is, without doing a lot of work. All you athletes in the room --- 'cause in Florida there're a lot of athletes --- know that there's an incredible amount of sacrifice and suffering that go into achieving that end. Well, happiness is the same way, I think. Finding one's peace with the world is an ongoing project that's at times painful.

This paper advances two interrelated theses. As for the first thesis, it distinguishes well-being, on the one hand, from happiness, on the other hand. As for the second thesis, it differentiates between two important facets of happiness: what this paper calls “happiness-as-tranquility” and “happiness-as-aspiration”. Actually, in order to differentiate the two facets of happiness, we first need to distinguish happiness from well-being. This is the case because happiness, after all, is a by-product of reflecting upon and ruminating over well-being. Given it is the same well-being, how could it give rise to different facets of happiness? It can only do so if we stop conflating happiness with well-being. This entails taking to task the widely accepted concept of “subjective wellbeing”. Such concept is expressly designed to obfuscate the difference between well-being and happiness. As for the two facets of happiness (the second thesis), this paper relies upon the contrast of two famous works of literature: the story of Job and the story of Faust. The contrast uncovers the criticality of the temporal dimension in the acts of reflection upon and rumination over well-being. If people reflect on past accomplishments, they experience backward-looking happiness along the Job story—i.e., happiness-as-tranquility. If people reflect on desire, they experience forward-looking happiness along the Faust story—i.e., happiness-as-aspiration. While the two facets of happiness seem contradictory, they are indeed complementary if we recognize the temporal element when one reflects upon and ruminates over well-being.

The same point applies to [Darrin M. McMahon]'s uncritical endorsement of the outlook of University of Chicago ethicist Leon R. Kass, the former chair of the Bush administration's Council on Bioethics. This endorsement ignores the reasons why Kass's conservative views are objectionable to many. McMahon maintains that \"there is a critical difference between aiming to alleviate senseless suffering and striving to overcome [what Freud called] 'ordinary unhappiness.' \" Senseless suffering should be assuaged, he argues, but ordinary unhappiness should be accepted as \"inherent to being human.\" Accordingly, he echoes Kass's antipathy to using medical science \" 'beyond therapy' -- beyond, that is, 'the usual domain of medicine and the goals of healing' \" to overcome ordinary unhappiness. But McMahon's own recognition that \"there is, and can be . . . no objective standard of what it is to feel normal, to experience a 'typical' human balance between pleasure and pain\" calls the distinction between \"senseless suffering\" and \"ordinary happiness\" into question. Furthermore, McMahon's cliched claim that humans who would manipulate \"our genes to enhance our happiness\" would \"be leaving a piece of their humanity behind\" should be assessed in light of a recent suggestion by technology pioneer Ray Kurzweil: The essence of being human lies not in our limitations but in our ability to transcend them. Again, a much more balanced treatment is needed.