STS

• The Good Life


  The need to understand what it means to live a good, happy, and flourishing life
• Greece, the word 'the good life' has been used to express the need to understand what it means to live a good life
• The task of philosophy is to understand the things that will lead to human flourishing
• Plato recognized change as a process and as a phenomenon that happens in the world, that in fact, it is constant
• Plato's "World of Forms"


  The only real entities, the ideal and the models
• Plato's "World of Matter"


  Things are changing and impermanent
• Aristotle disagreed with Plato's analysis from the external world into the province of the human person and declares that even human beings are potentialities who aspire for their actuality
• Telos


  A function of the purpose
• Every human person, according to Aristotle, aspires for an end, which is happiness or human flourishing
• The first materialists were the atomists in Ancient Greece
• Atomos


  The tiny indivisible units in the world that the world, including human beings, is made up of
• For Democritus and his disciple, the world, including human beings, is made up of matter
• For the materialists, in terms of human flourishing, matter is what makes us attain happiness
• The mantra of the materialist school of thought is the famous, "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die"
• Hedonism


  The view that the end goal of life is in acquiring pleasure
• Apatheia


  To be indifferent, the stoics' view that happiness can only be attained by a careful practice of apathy
• Stoicism


  The view that we should adopt the fact that some things are not within our control
• Most people find the meaning of their lives using God as a fulcrum of their existence
• For theists, the ultimate basis of happiness is the communion with God
• For humanists, man is literally the captain of his own ship, espousing the freedom of man to carve his own destiny and to legislate his own laws, free from the shackles of a God that monitors and controls
• As a result of motivation of the humanists currents, scientists eventually turned to technology in order to ease the difficulty of life
• Humanists see themselves not merely as stewards of the creation but as individuals who are in control of themselves and the world outside them
• Technology has allowed us to tinker with our sexuality, such as sexual reassignment surgery, breast implants, and hormone injections
• The balance between the good life, ethics, and technology has to be attained
• Whether or not we agree with these technological advancements, these are all undertaken in the hopes of attaining the good life
• Summary


  • Man is constantly in pursuit of the good life
  • Every person has his perspective when it comes to what comprises the good life
  • Throughout history, man has worked hard in pointing out what amounts to a good, happy life
  • The soul, as the seat of our humanity, has been the focus of attention of this end goal
  • The soul has to attain a certain balance in order to have a GOOD LIFE, A LIFE OF FLOURISHING
  • It was only until the seventeenth century that happiness became a centerpiece in the lives of people, even becoming a full-blown ethical foundation in John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism
  • At present, we see multitudes of schools of thought that all promise their own key to finding happiness
  • Science and Technology has been, for the most part, at the forefront of man's attempts at finding this happiness
  • The only questions at the end of the day is whether science is taking the right path toward attaining what it really means to live a good life