• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Daniel Gilbert

Why I’m getting married

08 Tuesday Sep 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Buddhism, Death, Epicureanism, External Goods, Family, Flourishing, Friends, Greek and Roman Tradition, Grief, Happiness, Jainism, Monasticism, Pleasure, Sex, Social Science, Virtue

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Daniel Gilbert, Lucretius, Martha Nussbaum, New Testament, Pali suttas, Śāntideva

I’ll begin with happy news: I’m engaged! This weekend I proposed to my beloved Caitlin, and I’m delighted to say she accepted.

Now, I’ve tried to be explicit that this is a philosophy blog, not a personal blog – while a great deal here is autobiographical, the purpose of even those entries is to point to bigger questions, questions that I hope my life story can help illuminate in some way. So I’m going to talk today a little bit about my reasons for deciding to marry. The particular reasons, of course, are all about my sweetheart herself, a beautiful, smart, funny, playful, charming, sexy, adventurous, responsible, virtuous woman. But there are more general reasons that tie to the blog’s bigger concerns.

Above all, my action this weekend is not one that Śāntideva, or the Buddha of the Pali suttas, would view as a part of the highest, best, most fully virtuous life. They speak at length of the disadvantages of the household life, the life spent among family with a paid job in the everyday world. The life of a monk is a higher and better one to pursue. Eros keeps us mired in the suffering of everyday life, enslaved to the desires and craving that only cause us yet more suffering. The monk, by contrast, devotes himself or herself fully to the development of virtue, much more able to rise above craving and suffering.
Continue reading →

Stumbling on happiness

30 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Family, Flourishing, Happiness, Psychology

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Daniel Gilbert, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham

Rare is the philosopher who doesn’t give happiness a significant place in the good life. Even Kant, often caricatured as making no room for happiness, still says both that it is a duty to secure one’s own happiness in this world, and that one needs to hope for happiness in the afterlife. Happiness, then, is a topic of key philosophical importance, whether by “happiness” we mean the pleasant mental state aimed at by Bentham or the broader conception of human flourishing in Aristotle’s eudaimonia; and most accounts of the latter include some element of the former.

We would do well, then, to pay attention to the burgeoning field of psychologists’ empirical research on happiness. The field faces a number of methodological problems, but comes to interesting insights in spite of these. One deservedly popular book in the field is Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, a well written and engaging summary of current research. Gilbert does a good job of summarizing many psychologists’ counterintuitive findings about happiness.

The problem is that some of Gilbert’s conclusions contradict not only common sense – which isn’t a problem, because contradicting common sense is the point – but each other. He concludes at the end that we are not as different from other people as we think we are, and that therefore in order to be happy we should ask other people what makes them happy. Yet elsewhere in the book he acknowledges that people don’t themselves know what makes them happy. The most obvious example is children: ask anyone who has children and they will tell you their children are their key source of joy, yet every study on the subject concludes we get less happy when children are born, and happier again when they leave. Which is to say that according to Gilbert’s own data, other people’s self-report is not the best place to find out what will make you happy.

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Nathan on Where race and gender overrode everything
  • Polemarchus on Where race and gender overrode everything
  • Paul D. Van Pelt on What should we call the movement?
  • Amod Lele on What should we call the movement?
  • Amod Lele on Where race and gender overrode everything

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada conferences Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson expressive individualism Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber law Martha Nussbaum modernity music mystical experience Pali suttas pedagogy Plato race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (14)
  • Applied Phil (342)
    • Death (42)
    • Family (50)
    • Food (19)
    • Friends (18)
    • Health (28)
    • Place (31)
    • Play (16)
    • Politics (209)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (44)
  • Asian Thought (438)
    • Buddhism (315)
      • Early and Theravāda (133)
      • Mahāyāna (129)
      • Modernized Buddhism (97)
    • East Asia (95)
      • Confucianism (59)
      • Daoism (19)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (140)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (16)
      • Jainism (24)
      • Modern Hinduism (42)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (15)
      • Vedānta (39)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (28)
  • Indigenous American Thought (7)
  • Method (262)
    • M.T.S.R. (148)
    • Metaphilosophy (170)
  • Practical Philosophy (405)
    • Action (15)
    • Aesthetics (50)
    • Emotion (178)
      • Anger (37)
      • Attachment and Craving (30)
      • Compassion (9)
      • Despair (7)
      • Disgust (5)
      • Faith (20)
      • Fear (12)
      • Grief (7)
      • Happiness (49)
      • Hope (18)
      • Pleasure (33)
      • Shame and Guilt (10)
    • External Goods (52)
    • Flourishing (96)
    • Foundations of Ethics (119)
    • Karma (43)
    • Morality (75)
    • Virtue (170)
      • Courage (6)
      • Generosity (14)
      • Gentleness (6)
      • Gratitude (11)
      • Honesty (14)
      • Humility (24)
      • Leadership (7)
      • Mindfulness (20)
      • Patient Endurance (30)
      • Self-Discipline (10)
      • Serenity (35)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (135)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (41)
    • Monasticism (46)
    • Physical Exercise (4)
    • Prayer (15)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (21)
    • Therapy (11)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (374)
    • Consciousness (19)
    • Deity (73)
    • Epistemology (131)
      • Certainty and Doubt (15)
      • Dialectic (19)
      • Logic (14)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (29)
    • Free Will (17)
    • Hermeneutics (61)
    • Human Nature (32)
    • Metaphysics (107)
    • Philosophy of Language (28)
    • Self (71)
    • Supernatural (52)
    • Truth (60)
    • Unconscious Mind (16)
  • Western Thought (480)
    • Analytic Tradition (97)
    • Christianity (155)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Eastern Orthodoxy (2)
      • Protestantism (27)
      • Roman Catholicism (56)
    • French Tradition (49)
    • German Tradition (90)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (119)
      • Epicureanism (25)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (22)
    • Islam (41)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (10)
    • Judaism (35)
    • Natural Science (97)
      • Biology (29)
      • Philosophy of Science (50)
      • Physics and Astronomy (11)
    • Social Science (172)
      • Economics (42)
      • Psychology (70)

Recent Posts

  • Where race and gender overrode everything
  • What should we call the movement?
  • Yes, there is a movement
  • Why we sometimes need to deadname
  • Checks and balances are only as good as their enforcers

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2009-2024 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2009-2024 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.