Gil Hersch Speaks at Wellbeing Research Seminar (Virtual Event)

Gil Hersch, PPE Core Faculty member and Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, will give a talk titled “Well-being Between Philosophy and Social Science” at the McGill and University of Toronto Wellbeing Research Seminar. 

This virtual talk will take place on January 12, 2026, at 12pm. Registration is required for this event. Please follow this registration link.

Here is the abstract of the talk: Broadly speaking, the central philosophical theories of well-being are mental state theories, desire satisfaction theories, and objective list theories. Philosophers of well-being have tended to adopt a foundationalist approach to the question of theory and measurement, according to which their theories are conceptually prior to well-being measures. By contrast, social scientists have tended to adopt operationalist commitments, according to which they develop and refine well-being measures independently of philosophical foundations. These include objective indicators, measures of life evaluation, and affective measures, among others. Unfortunately, neither approach helps us overcome the problem of coordinating between how we characterize well-being and how we measure it. Instead, we should aim to better integrate insights from different normative and descriptive disciplines by adopting a coherentist approach to the study of well-being science.

(Photograph by Holly Belcher for Virginia Tech)