RS#37: The science and philosophy of happiness
June 19, 2011 2 Comments
On Episode #37 of the Rationally Speaking podcast, Massimo and I talk about the science and philosophy of happiness:
“Debates over what’s important to happiness — Money? Children? Love? Achievement? — are ancient and universal, but attempts to study the subject empirically are much newer. What have psychologists learned about which factors have a strong effect on people’s happiness and which don’t? Are parents really less happy than non-parents, and do people return to their happiness “set point” even after extreme events like winning the lottery or becoming paralyzed? We also tackle some of the philosophical questions regarding happiness, such as whether some kinds of happiness are “better” than others, and whether people can be mistaken about their own happiness. But, perhaps the hardest question is: can happiness really be measured?”
How important is happiness?
Before that you would have to define what is happiness? You would get very different results depending on the definition(like in everything else) but with happiness we have also the distorting effect of the modern western culture on the definition of it, which is much more prevalent than for other general concepts (life, death, etc)