ABSTRACT
The aim of this Handbook of Well-Being is to offer new insights and to revisit perspectives that can move thinking radically beyond the ways in which we have thus far conceptualised well-being, particularly in the disciplines concerned with health and social care. This includes reframing how well-being is in relation to the notion of health and providing accessible philosophical grounding alongside analysis of the state of our knowledge within key disciplinary domains, including engagement with creative approaches to understanding well-being. It is my hope that this text shows and offers emerging new notions of well-being as a multidimensional resource in human life with engagement through for example, the arts, our values, our varied professional and disciplinary perspectives and other means. Well-being has a long history of philosophical exploration, including in the moral and political realm and there are many theories of well-being that span desire-fulfilment, hedonism and eudaimonism to name just a few. The purpose here is not to systematically revisit the range of continuities and discontinuities of ideas about and theories of well-being – other texts have successfully achieved that. Rather, the aim here is to point to some current developments in thinking from a range of applied disciplines that may have the potential to shift and refresh directions in the field.
