Happiness, Philosophy and Science

The New York Times:

Philosophy was the origin of most scientific disciplines.   Aristotle was in some sense an astronomer, a physicist, a biologist, a psychologist and a political scientist.  As various philosophical subdiscplines found ways of treating their topics with full empirical rigor, they gradually separated themselves from philosophy, which increasingly became a purely armchair enterprise, working not from controlled experiments but from common-sense experiences and conceptual analysis.

In recent years, however, the sciences — in particular, psychology and the social sciences — have begun to return to their origin, combining data and hypotheses with conceptual and normative considerations that are essentially philosophical.  An excellent example of this return is the new psychological science of happiness, represented, for example, by the fundamental work of Edward Diener.

Read the full story: The New York Times