CAS PH 150 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Magnanimity, Nicomachean Ethics, Eudaimonia
3 Oct 2016
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Final good: value something just for its own sake (pleasure) Aristotle"s eudaimonia = not pleasure, not honor, not wealth (young kids, animals can have pleasure but not happiness) life in accordance w/rational acitivity. In order to analyze happiness in more depth, we need to figure out the function of human beings. You can figure out what a good x is by figuring out its function. According to aristotle, the good life for a human being is the life of happiness. This seems straightforwardly true, as aristotle himself notes. The only real issue is to identify the activity or activities in which human beings find happiness most of all. Aristotle tries to understand happiness in terms of the function (or way of working) peculiar to human beings. He supposes that this function consists in the exercise of reason because this is the life characteristic of human beings.
