Abstract
Before academic disciplines were invented, philosophers were teaching their students about the good life. These days, academics from a broad range of disciplines, including philosophy, teach their students about various aspects of well-being or quality of life. This chapter discusses the methods, topics, and perspectives that characterise a philosophical approach to teaching well-being or quality of life, focussing especially on how to create and critique a theory of well-being. While discussing these features of the philosophical approach, key differences with other mainly social scientific approaches to teaching well-being and quality of life will be highlighted. Then the chapter discusses some ideas about how to teach well-being and quality of life in a methodologically informed way, one that enables students to critique the methods used by a range of well-being and quality of life researchers, especially those used by philosophers. The chapter concludes with some suggestions on how to harness the subject matter in a way that creates an engaging undergraduate-level course on well-being and quality of life.
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Notes
- 1.
There is huge diversity within philosophy. The claims in this chapter refer mainly to the philosophical tradition known as Western Analytic Philosophy, which, now prominent in the Anglophone Western world, traces most of its heritage through Europe to Ancient Greece.
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Weijers, D. (2020). Teaching Well-Being/Quality of Life from a Philosophical Perspective. In: Tonon, G. (eds) Teaching Quality of Life in Different Domains. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 79. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21551-4_2
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