Aristotle on Flourishing

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In this course, we will focus primarily on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle thought flourishing required not just virtue, but virtuous activity. But how can we act well if action often depends on circumstances outside our control, whether the luck of good health, peace, or a stable polity? By exercising virtue in the world, he had in mind not just acting well, but expressing emotions finely. But how do we educate emotions, such as anger and fear, so that they are rational and expressed finely? Aristotle also held that we are social creatures and that we can't flourish without friendship. How do we keep in our lives good friends that are also good? In doing ethics, why should we return to a study of good character and not just focus on what it is right to do? How does pleasure enter into a good life? And what about play?