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Flourishing / Physical & Biological Sciences

Andrew Briggs

Emeritus Professor of Nanomaterials, University of Oxford

Senior Research Fellow, St. Anne’s College, Oxford

Emeritus Fellow, Wolfson College, Oxford

In 2021 Oxford UP will publish Human Flourishing: Scientific insight and spiritual wisdom in uncertain times, by Andrew Briggs and Michael J. Reiss. In the book, we identify three dimensions of flourishing as material, relational, and transcendent:

Material includes such things as having enough to eat, access to clean water, enough sleep, reasonably good health, somewhere that one considers to be one’s home and in which one feels safe, and enough money not be endless worried by financial matters.

Relational begins with other humans (starting with a baby’s mother and father), but extends beyond humans, to animals and some might say robots, and also to God.

Transcendent reaches further than both of those; it includes all sorts of things that we value in the human experience even if we cannot pin them down or necessarily measure them, such as nature, music, poetry and the other arts, and also, well, what lies beyond those.

It will be immediately obvious that although these dimensions can be distinguished for the purpose of discussing them, they cannot be separated.