Pleasure and Flourishing — Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
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July 5 - Chapters 1 through 3 will cover the prevailing opinions about pleasure: On the one hand, (1) pleasure is the supreme good. All things see pleasure and shun pain, and seek pleasure as an end in itself. On the other hand, (2) no pleasure is good. What all things seek is not necessarily good; the opposite of pain may also be bad (or at least neutral); some pleasures are disgraceful.
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Which opinion, if any, is Aristotle's own view about pleasure?
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We are live-reading and discussing Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, book X, which is about pleasure and human flourishing.
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The prerequisite to this book is our answering for ourselves these questions from the prior books, to which we will briefly review:
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1. What is the full-time job of being a human being?
2. What is the systematic structure of the human potential?
3. What is a virtue of character {ēthikē aretē}?
4. How does one come to acquire any of it? (E.g. pride, ambition, bravery, gentlemanliness, generosity, candor, fairness, friendliness, …)
5. How does one formulate right desires?
6. How is one to recover from being bad to becoming a good person?
7. What is entailed in and what is required of being a friend?
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The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.