Human Happiness

3 credits · Undergraduate

This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to an understanding of happiness. We will first review the different treatments of happiness in the world's philosophical traditions: conceptions of the good life in classical Greek and Judeo-Christian thought, the great East Asian philosophies, and ideas about happiness that emerged in the age of Enlightenment. With these different perspectives as a framework, the course will turn to treatments of happiness in the behavioral sciences, evolutionary scholarship, and neuroscience. Special Emphasis will be given to understanding how happiness arises in experiences of the moral emotions, including gratitude, compassion, reverence and awe, and aesthetic emotions like humor and beauty.