Good Life

• The Good Life


  The pursuit of happiness and human flourishing
• Greece, the word 'the good life' has been used to express the need to understand the world and the need to understand the self in order to live a good life
• The task of philosophy is to understand the things that are parallel to the pursuit of truly living a good life
• Plato recognized change as a process and as a phenomenon that happens in the world, that in fact, it is constant
• World of Forms


  The only real entities, the ideal and the models
• World of Matter


  Things are changing and impermanent
• Aristotle extends the 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


  The purpose that a person has
• Every human person, according to Aristotle, aspires for an end, which is happiness or human flourishing
• Materialism believes that the world, including human beings, is made up of matter
• Atomists


  • Democritus
  • Leucippus
• For Democritus and his disciple, the world, including human beings, is made up of matter
• For the materialists, life is about obtaining and indulging in pleasure because life is limited
• Hedonism


  The end goal of life is in acquiring pleasure
• Stoicism


  Happiness can only be attained by a careful practice of apathy, being indifferent to things not within our control
• For theists, the ultimate basis of happiness is the communion with God
• For humanists, man is literally the captain of his own ship, free to carve his own destiny and legislate his own laws, free from the shackles of a God
• Scientist of today are ready to confront more sophisticated attempts at altering the world for the benefit of humanity
• Technology 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
• 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 has to attain a certain balance in order to have a good life, a life of flourishing
• 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 question 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