The topic of human happiness or felicity has a long history.
From Plato and Aristotle to the cynics, stoics, epicureans and
skeptics, there have been no end of philosophical treatises
defining happiness and describing different ways of attaining
it. Faith, too, speaks of human happiness within the context of
a religious tradition. In theistic religions, human happiness is
achieved through living a ‘godly’ life here on earth in the
hopes of eternal felicity after death. The topic is huge and the
angles are many, but, until now, there has been no concerted
effort to organize our thoughts about happiness into an
empirical science. Philosophers and theologians can only
speculate, the new idea is to bring philosophy into an
interdisciplinary arrangement containing both fairly hard and
rather softer social scientific theories. Richard Layard, in his
book “The New Science of Happiness” brings philosophy,
psychology, economics and neurophysiology to bear on the
question of human happiness, what it is, and what we can