Spring 2008 Professor's Blog - Happiness

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Next Morning Blogs

Jan 15 2008

Well, I hope we raised alot of the big course questions and that you're as excited about getting underway as I am. Please start organizing your reading for next week now. As you may know, with once-per-week courses, it's easy to "forget" about the course until the night before it happens each week. On the bright side, meeting once per week gives you more control of your time, and that class can become more of an event. But some of that is up to you.

I forgot to mention that my exams are based completely on the study questions we identify in the course schedule. We'll adapt some of last year's questions, so follow this each week. You can see the updated study questions from our first class on the schedule now as an example. My strong advice is that you make notes on these questions each week after class. That will be your study guide for the exam.

Please go ahead and logon to the course site and start building your grading scheme. You can change items in your grading scheme up until you turn them in.

I was really struck (again) by how much our images of happiness seems to involve specific situations of tranquility, satisfaction, and enjoyment. Here are some ancient greek terms that get at similar states:

hesychia - quietness athembia - absence of pain in the soul (psyche) eustatheia - stability euthymia - tranquility experienced as pleasurable kara - joy eudaimonia - being guided by or possessing a happy spirit (daemon)

As we start to explore the views of happiness of some large ancient cultures, you'll see some of these concepts (which we also find in sanskrit) informing philosophical accounts of wisdom and happiness. As you dig into your reading for next week, if you find terms or concepts that you don't completely understand, consult some quick reference sources such as www.wikipedia.com or, in philosophy, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (which is online through Foley). There are great, concise articles on both sources.

Well, it was great to meet you all last night. Please do stop in (Rebman 203) at some point to introduce yourself. My office hours are MW 10-11 and Th 10:45-12:00, and by appointment.

Mark Alfino

Jan 22, 2008 - Second Class - Models of Happiness in Global Traditions & Causes and Correlates of Happiness

Sorry about being in a bit of a fog last night from my cold. Last night after class I realized that I left a few things out and failed to underscore a couple of other things, so I'll use this "next morning" blog to take care of that. On the whole I thought your discussion was good and that most of the topics we started to discuss could have developed into longer discussions. Sorry if any of you felt skipped over. I'll continue to try to balance participation opportunities. We'll be doing more small group discussion in the coming weeks (especially when our reading volume settles down) and that should give more of you a chance to think through these issues in discussion with each other.

I think it's important to see Daoism and Buddhism as involving what I call a "strategy of separation and (re)union." Both of these traditions suggest that part of the cause of our unhappiness is our involvement in self-deception, over attachment to desire, and inaccurate judgment. The remedy is to separate ourselves from these "snares" and achieve a kind of union with fundamental reality. (As you compare the other traditions on our handout, you will find that this strategy applies to Christianity as well (though we haven't gotten to this discussion yet).) Indeed, in the philosophies of the Mediterranean cultures we plan to look at (Classical Greek and Hellenistic thought), you will find a similar strategy. The point I omitted last night was to look at these traditions in terms of a general "happiness strategy". We'll be building on this in the next few weeks.

The Argyle reading is new this time around, and I'm worried that too many of you didn't get to it or found it impenetrably difficult, so I would value your feedback on that. The reason I put it in the course is that it seemed like a really concise and tightly organized summary of the research, but let me know if you had trouble with it. The main point I want to underscore about this research is that, as philosophers, we use research like this to build our own theories of happiness. So, for example, when you read about the strong correlation (likely, cause) between intimacy and happiness, you have a couple of theoretical questions to answer: Why is intimacy so important to happiness? What makes for successful intimate relationships? Given that intimacy is not equally important to everyone, do you see yourself as an exception to the pattern? Remember, the overall goal of looking at all of this material is the formation of your own "philosophy of happiness." As we discussed last night, finding patterns in our actual experience is relevant to this, but we should also be open to the possibility that happiness lies in "separating ourselves" from the culture's larger patterns. So, for example, when you read about the hedonic treadmill, you have an example of a phenomenon that could defeat our happiness. The obvious response might be: Am I an exception to the treadmill effect? If not, how do I avoid this effect? Where do I see this in my experience?

That's it for now. Please start putting your grading schemes together, especially if you're going to do journal entries. We'll talk about grading schemes in class next week. Also, let's shoot for a higher level of reading preparation. Many of you were able to refer effectively to the readings, but some of you clearly couldn't. The higher the level of preparation, the higher the level of philosophical practice we can achieve. But you all know that already, right?

Alfino

Jan 29th - Gilbert - Prospection, Objectivity of Happiness, and Large Numbers

Well, if Gilbert is presuading you then you woke up today less sure of the relationship between your predictions about what will make you happy and the actual things (whatever they turn out to be) that will influence your well being. I thought we gave this a good discussion last night, and your small group discussions sounded productive. Now, the next morning, I'm wondering if Gilbert's research is good news or bad news. It's good news to know that I'm likely to tell a story of my life in which I conclude that I'm happy, but it's bad news if you're worried (as every good Happiness philosopher should be) that this complicates the the distinction between "genuine" and "false" happiness. If we "synthesize" happiness in the narrative we invent for our lives, which stories are to be preferred and why? Should we (could we) really avoid the illusions of prospection?

I also hope we were able to demonstrate something about "philosophical method" with Gilbert last night. If you go back to those basic questions from the first week, you could say that your job as philosophers is to develop an overall view of happiness that gives the best answers to those questions that you can. To get there, of course, we break the job down, in this case by asking what must be true (or is more likely to be true) about happiness theories (at least at the experiential level) on a particualar interpretation of Gilbert's "skeptical perspectivism"

Next week we get to look at two clear, well-developed answers to the problem of happiness: epicureanism and stoicism. Again, it's a different sort of evidence than recent cognitive psychology, but I hope to show that these ancient "graceful life" philosophies have interesting relevance to the problems Gilbert raises. Does this help the plot thicken?

Thanks for getting your grading schemes together. Drop by the office (office hours MW 10-11, TH 11-12) if you have time.

Alfino