Improving interdisciplinary research in wel-being - A review with further comments of Michael Bishop’s The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of Well‑Being

Michael’s Bishop’s The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of Well-Being hopefully represents a turning point in the study of well-being. It adopts and advocates for a strongly interdisciplinary and integrative approach to well-being scholarship. Interdisciplinarity is not new to the field. Economists, for example, have been working closely with subjective well-being scholars for many decades. But well-being cuts across many fields, and their differing contexts tend to result in intellectual competition rather than collaboration. Bishop also focuses on philosophers and positive psychologists, and here interdisciplinarity is relatively novel. As many commentators have noted (Ryff 1989; Argyle 2001; Alexandrova 2017), positive psychology has proceeded in a largely atheoretical manner and been reluctant to engage with the philosophical literature on well-being. This is at least in part because the philosophical literature has rarely made itself especially useful to these scholars. It has focused on the normative dimensions of well-being and, consequently, underserved many subjects of interest to positive psychologists, such as subjective well-being and hedonism. In The Good Life, Bishop explains why this limited cross-disciplinary dialogue is pernicious to both fields, advocates for an interdisciplinary paradigm for well-being studies that he calls the inclusive approach, and develops a theory of well-being that unifies the philosophy and positive psychology literature: the network theory of well-being.