What distinguishes man from animals or plants is his capacity to reason. Animals seek pleasure for pleasures sake while human beings have the capacity to reason and, therefore, determine what pleasures to seek that are appropriate. This process of seeking the appropriate pleasures such as heath, wealth, knowledge, etc. allows a human being to enrich his life and lead eventually to a state of happiness. Reasoning allows one to develop good character. Doing the virtuous thing may not always be easy and require a strong effort but it will, according to Aristotle, result in a happy life. The essential element of Aristotle's approach was his belief that happiness is the ultimate end of human existence. He did not view happiness as a pleasure, but rather, it is the result of a lifetime of exercising virtue. It takes an entire life of living virtuously to attain happiness and, therefore, it is not possible for children or young adults to be considered happy. According to Aristotle, they have simply not lived long enough to develop the level of virtue necessary to...
Individual actions were not the source of pleasure but it was a pattern of living that brought a reasonable person happiness. Aristotle looked unfavorably upon pleasure seeking behaviors. For him, happiness was attained through a long-term process that was only possible through the accumulation of virtue and the accumulation of virtue required reason and contemplation. For Aristotle, happiness requires living a life where one continuously chooses the proper course of action and this cannot be accomplished without contemplation. Therefore, Aristotle viewed the human capacity to contemplate as the highest, and most valuable of activities.
Aristotle and Happiness What is the point of life? Happiness? Virtue? Power? All of these? The ancient Greek philosophers would have pushed us gently in the direction of virtue, although they would also have argued that both happiness and power derive from virtue and so the quest for a fulfilled life does not have to be seen in terms of a trade-off between doing good and doing well. This paper examines
Aristotle's Happiness and the Virtues. Aristotle's ideal of happiness and virtues has been drawn to a large extent from his mentor and teacher, Plato. The context of his ideas is firstly that ethics and politics are closely intertwined, together forming the concept of Political Science. Secondly, virtue according to Aristotle is an innate human quality, which can be enhanced and developed by practice. Since it is innately human to be virtuous,
It is therefore important to understand first off Aristotle's thoughts on human nature in order to understand his opinions on ethics and virtue. That human beings are social beings is something familiar to us nowadays as it was in Aristotle's time. Consequently, ethics and virtue were part of human nature and so every living being was supposed to live by what is righteous. This is another characteristic separating us from
Aristotle thought happiness was longer in coming, it was the manner of being actualized and fulfilling one's true potential using their own individual gifts: Again, if the virtues are concerned with actions and passions, and every passion and every action is accompanied by pleasure and pain, for this reason also virtue will be concerned with pleasures and pains. This is indicated also by the fact that punishment is indicated by
Happiness is perhaps the most illusive, but most sought after mental state in life. Like all human experiences, happiness is also a very subjective state; different things make different people happy. This is why it is so difficult to say what happiness is, and why there has been so much disagreement among philosophers, who have nonetheless not been deterred from attempting to describe this elusive emotion. Both Plato and Aristotle
As any successful marketing campaign, this needs to have the appropriate communication instruments and the most important of these would be the right channels: your own bosses, other employees (some who have no problem in recognizing the employee's qualities) or friends. Friends would hereby be included in the first category of Aristotle's friendships, the friendship of utility: one develops friendships with fellow colleagues in order to ensure that these friends
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