STAS WEEK 9

• People want to be healthy but many consume junk food
• People want to be happy but many do things that make themselves miserable
• Most things that taste good are probably bad for you.
• Most things that give you thrill are probably bad for you too.
• People have different ideas of what constitutes the good life.
• Correct pursuits may lead to flourishing.
• Wrong pursuits may lead to tragic consequences.
• ARISTOTLE (NICOMACHEAN ETHICS 2:2)

  All human activities aim at some good.
• Every art and human inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has been rightly declared as that at which all things aim.
• Nicomachean Ethics and Modern Concepts

  Eudaimonia-  Eu - good, daimon - spirit= good life
• Nicomachean Ethics and Modern Concepts

  Good life - happiness and virtue
• Nicomachean Ethics and Modern Concepts

  Virtue- intellectual and moral
• The 4 Pillar of the Good life

  Health, wealth, love and happiness
• THE HAPPINESS PURSUIT

  Everybody wants more happiness and success.
• THE HAPPINESS PURSUIT

  It’s good to know how to optimize happiness and success.
• There is a wide agreement that happiness is the greatest human good.
• RISK FACTORS

  1.) The happiness pursuit becomes one’s ultimate purpose in life

  2.) The happiness pursuit is not guided by a philosophy of life informed by general principles of meaning, spirituality and virtue.
• Golden Rule by Confucius: Do not do unto others what you do not want done to yourself.
• Confucius: What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.
• Aristotle: We should behave to others as we wish others to behave to us.
• Buddhism: Hurt not others with that which pains thyself.
• Christianity: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
• They make personal happiness and success their ultimate end of life without moral compass and without the desire to pursue inner goodness.
• Disillusion-  King Solomon realized the vanity of success long, long ago:  The world will never be enough: “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing” ( Ecclesiastes 1:8)
• It takes more and more to reach the same level of happiness- addiction, money etc.
• Nothing in this world can fill the spiritual vacuum within us.
• Dreams are often broken when reality strikes.
• FATE AND CIRCUMSTANCE

  Ø   Bad things happen to good people
• FATE AND CIRCUMSTANCE

  Ø  Reversal of fortune
• Poverty - For some people, most days are bad days.
• Living an authentic life means living with deep acceptance on the facticity of death resulting to a life lived - Heidegger
• The unexamined life is not worth living for - Socrates
• The Holistic Approach

  good people, good community and world peace= good life
• MATERIALISM

  A form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental aspects and consciousness are results of material interactions.
• The first materialists were the atomists in Ancient Greece.
• Democritus and Leucippus led a school whose primary belief is that the world is made up of and is controlled by the tiny invisible units in the world called atomos or seeds
• Atomos simply comes together randomly to form the things in the world.
• Classification of Materialism

  1.      Naive materialism

  2.      Dialectical materialism

  3.      Metaphysical materialism
• Naive materialism -cap off a productive class with key summary points students can easily remember
• Dialectical materialism - you can provide this for the class as a way of wrapping up everything you've discussed