Book Launch: Human Flourishing - A Conceptual Analysis

Human Flourishing: A Conceptual Analysis challenges current mainstream approaches to understanding the concept of ‘human flourishing’. It addresses the central problems in a number of fields including psychology, education, policy and science and highlights the broad nature of conceptual confusions in the use of the concept of human flourishing (e.g., scientism, reductionism, essentialism, and subjectivism) and outlines why we should pay closer attention to context, purpose and use.

Crucially, it considers:

• How to evaluate claims to knowledge about the concept in terms of how we can know that a person is flourishing (or not) i.e., relevant criterial implications.

• Whether flourishing can be ‘measured’, as is commonly claimed, and, where the concept of human flourishing can be meaningfully deployed in research programmes.

• Where the proper domain of this kind of inquiry lies (i.e., conceptual work as opposed to empirical research).

Taken together this book is a comprehensive undermining of much of the literature on human flourishing. It is a redirection of attention away from generalisations that are informed by woolly, scientific, technicalized and detached conceptions of flourishing, and back to the solid ground of complex human contexts, human purposes and human uses.

This book is a ground-breaking work and an essential read for postgraduate students, budding philosophers, educators, policy-makers, scientists, psychologists, coaches and others interested in how to make sense of the concept of human flourishing (and related normative concepts such as happiness or well-being) and how to meaningfully deploy such terms in their respective contexts.