A Philosophical Approach to Theorising about Post-Traumatic Growth

Michael Brady (University of Glasgow) is a philosopher who has greatly contributed to recent debates within philosophy about how suffering and adversity can be valuable along a number of dimensions, and in particular for character development. Of course, philosophy as a discipline has a long history of thinking about a phenomenon that research psychologists in the past twenty-five years have come to study under the label of post-traumatic growth (PTG). Until recently there unfortunately has been little contact between the disciplines of philosophy and psychology regarding PTG. In this talk co-organized by the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of Health Sciences and Medicine of the University of Lucerne, Prof. Brady presents findings from a pioneering paper he co-authored with psychologist Eranda Jayawickreme that will be published in the coming months. On the one hand, Brady discusses how philosophical thinking can profit from psychologists providing sources for potential empirical support when theorising PTG from a philosophical perspective. On the other hand, he shows how philosophy can help to address substantive critiques (e.g. regarding validity) levelled at psychologists’ study of PTG and clarify the shape that research into PTG should take in the future.