Senior Lecturer, Undergraduate Advisor (Philosophy)

Qualifications: PhD Philosophy

About Dan

Office Hours:  By appointment.

Profile:
Born in England, I have lived most of my life in New Zealand. Before taking up a lectureship at University of Waikato in 2016, I was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Sacramento for two years. Prior to my California experience, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy Department at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW). I have honours degrees in marketing and philosophy from VUW, as well as an MA and a PhD in philosophy, also from VUW. I currently live near Hamilton in New Zealand with my wife Linda, and our children Eli and Asher.

Research Interests

Research Specialties:

• Normative ethics (especially hedonism, wellbeing, and experimental normative ethics)
• Applied ethics (especially the ethics of prediction markets)
• Interdisciplinary happiness/wellbeing research (especially wellbeing and public policy, philosophy of happiness science, and conceptions of happiness)

Other Areas of Interest:
Political Philosophy, Public Policy, Experimental Philosophy, Climate Justice,  Moral Psychology, Philosophy of Psychology, Bioethics, Neuroethics, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Economics, Philosophy of Law, Business Ethics, Cross-Cultural Psychology, Social Psychology, Behavioral Economics, and The Meaning of Life.

Featured Publications

1. Weijers, Dan and Richardson, Jennifer (2014). A Moral Analysis of Effective Prediction Markets on Terrorism. International Journal of Technoethics, special issue: "Military Technoethics Beyond", 5(1): 28-43. My last version. Official version
2. Weijers, Dan (2014). Optimistic Naturalism: Scientific Advancement and the Meaning of Life, Sophia, 53: 1-18. My last version. The official version
3. Weijers, Dan (2014). Nozick's Experience Machine is Dead, Long Live the Experience Machine!, Philosophical Psychology, 27(4): 513-535. My last version. The official version
4. Joshanloo, Mohsen & Weijers, Dan (2014). Aversion to happiness across cultures: A review of where and why people are averse to happiness, Journal of Happiness Studies, 15(3): 717-735. My last version.The official version
5. Weijers, Dan & Jarden, Aaron (2013). The Science of Happiness for Policymakers: An Overview, Journal of Social Research and Policy, 4(2). The free official version
6. Weijers, Dan & Schouten, Vanessa (2013). An assessment of recent responses to the experience machine objection to hedonism, Journal of Value Inquiry, 47(4), 461-482. My last version. The official version
7. Weijers, Dan (2013). Intuitive Biases in Judgements about Thought Experiments: The Experience Machine Revisited, Philosophical Writings, 41(1): 17-31. The free official version

Recent Publications

• Weijers, D. (2020). Teaching well-being/quality of life from a philosophical perspective. In G. Tonon (Ed.), Teaching Quality of Life in Different Domains (Vol. 79, pp. 15-42). Switzerland: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-21551-4_2

• Joshanloo, M., & Weijers, D. (2019). A two-dimensional conceptual framework for understanding mental well-being. PLoS ONE, 14(3), 1-20. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0214045 Open Access version: https://hdl.handle.net/10289/12671

• Buscicchi, L., & Weijers, D. (2019). The paradox of happiness: the more you chase it the more elusive it becomes. In J. Watson (Ed.), The Conversation Yearbook 2019: 50 standout articles from Australia’s top thinkers. Melbourne University Press.

• Joshanloo, M., & Weijers, D. (2019). Islamic perspectives on wellbeing. In L. Lambert, & N. Pasha-Zaidi (Eds.), Positive Psychology in the Middle East/North Africa (pp. 237-256). Springer.

View all research publications by Dan Weijers

Supervision

Lorenzo Buscicchi (PHD): Happiness and the state (Chief supervisor)

Kim Southey (PhD): Re-presenting Maori and Indigenous conceptualisations of ‘being’: Challenging notions of mental illness (On the supervisory panel)

Paul Hubble (PhD): We are what we make (On the supervisory panel)