The Arts, the Humanities, and the Science of Well-Being: Toward a Culture of Human Flourishing
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Afternoon Presentation
Coffee/Tea Reception: 2:30pm
Presentation: 3:00pm
Close: 4:00pm
The field of positive psychology was founded nearly 20 years ago when Martin Seligman along with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi observed that psychology focused much more on pathology than on well-being. Today, there is a similar overemphasis on pathology and ill-being throughout much of the arts and humanities. This presentation introduces the nascent field of the positive humanities, which calls for an explicit emphasis on well-being to balance current approaches in literature, music, art, movies, philosophy, history, religion and other cultural domains. A strategic collaboration between the positive humanities and positive psychology can benefit both fields in their ability to understand, cultivate and measure well-being. More broadly, such a collaboration can benefit humanity by creating new approaches to human flourishing.
James O. Pawelski, Ph.D., is Director of Education and Senior Scholar in the Positive Psychology Center and has received an appointment as adjunct associate professor of religious studies in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Having earned a doctorate in philosophy, he is the author of The Dynamic Individualism of William James and of articles on the history of philosophy and its application to human development. He has served as editor of the philosophy section of the Oxford Handbook of Happiness, co-editor of The Eudaimonic Turn: Well-Being in Literary Studies and co-editor of On Human Flourishing: A Poetry Anthology. For the last 10 years, he has served as the founding director of Penn’s Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program, where he teaches courses on positive interventions and the humanities and human flourishing. He has been featured in major U.S. and international media, including The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, People’s Daily (China), El Norte (Mexico) and Perfil (Argentina). He has also appeared on various television networks such as NBC (The Today Show), Globo, Univisión and Toronto Public Television.
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