ask a question

recent responses

all topics

info

⚲

Happiness
Value

I enjoy playing lots videogames, listening to (and DJing) lots of various styles of electronic dance music, and frequently smoke marijuana. These things are hobbies of mine that usually make me happy. It seems, however, that most philosophical thought says to disregard things like this because they instill a false sense of happiness in us; that they are temporary, material things that satisfy the senses and should be discarded in favor of supposed "real" things that have a lasting value. Take Plato's cave allegory, for example. Are the things that I like simply shadows, fooling me from real happiness? Because I fill my free time with these things, am I living in ignorance of what real happiness could be? Is there any value from engaging in these activities at all?

An excellent question, it is important to reflect upon the things we invest our lives into. I think there are three very different concerns you might have about investing life into these activities: 1: Perhaps, these activities aren't happiness at all, but merely distract you from genuine happiness. 2: Perhaps, these activities are genuinely good to a degree, but distract you from more important things that are more central to happiness. 3: Perhaps, these activities are genuinely good because you find them pleasurable (or fulfill your desires). And pleasure (or fulfilled desire) is the only thing that is genuinely good, but these ways of pursuing pleasure are only effective short-term and are likely to undercut your total amount of long-term pleasure. Since you ask whether there is any value in these things at all, you seem to be more concerned about the first potential problem. However, the good news for you is that Plato's view is a minority view (even among philosophers) since it...
Feminism
Happiness
Value

I am reading some philosophy and psychology about happiness, and much of the work proclaims that we must act in order to be "happy" (Aristotle, William James, as well as more popular writers such as Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie and Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi). As you will notice, they are all men. Are there difference in how female philosophers describe and prescribe "happiness" (or subjective well-being or flourishing)? Thank you.

The four major views of happiness (aka subjective well-being) are that happiness is constituted by: 1) Pleasure (and the absence of pain) 2) Fulfilled Desires 3) Virtue 4) A number of different sources that form an objective list of some sort: usually including things like pleasure, fulfilled desire, virtue, but also friendship, knowledge, or beauty. Of course, this list of theories is an oversimplification since each of the theories has a number of variations. I'm not aware of any correlation between gender and preferred theories. I think theories one and two are the most dominant theories among philosophers and psychologists. Theory four seems to be the 'common-sense' theory that most people intuit...(but academics are often drawn to theories one and two because they attempt to reduce all the sources of well-being posited in theory four to a single value). Theory three enjoys a lot of classical support and still has contemporary supporters as well. I should also point...