Extract
The Happiness Turn
This special issue represents the first cultural stuthes collection on the question of happiness and the modalities of its various affects. Happiness has long been at the centre of philosophy, posed as the moral question of what counts as the good life. Different traditions within philosophy have offered very different arguments about happiness, from classical Greek models of eudaimonia as a good and virtuous life, to utilitarian models of happiness as the greatest good.1 The papers in this special issue offer fresh perspectives on this intellectual history of happiness.
Rather than begin with the question 'what is happiness?' a cultural stuthes approach asks: 'what does happiness do?' To what do we appeal to when we appeal to happiness? It is certainly the case that happiness is appealing. Happiness is consistently described as the object of human desire, as being what we aim for, as what gives meaning and order to human life. As Bruno S. Frye and Alois Stutzer argue in their economics of happiness, 'Everybody wants to be happy. There is probably no other goal in life that commands suc...See the full content of this document
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