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Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world.

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Well, thank you all for coming.

I checked out the weather before coming down here, and I was deceived somehow somehow so I feel like an idiot because I'm

wearing corduroy pants and it's like 75 degrees but anyway I'm here today I'm going to talk about

something that people think philosophers talk about all the time but which philosophers actually

don't talk about very much, at least not nowadays.

That's the question of what life is all about.

I will first sketch out a possible answer to that question that is very commonly accepted in our society,

even if almost no one formulates it explicitly.

Second, I will sketch out a key competitor to that view,

roughly the view proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

Third, I will complicate things a bit by drawing on the Catholic theological and

spiritual tradition to raise questions about the Aristotelian answer. In the end, I won't claim to

have settled the question of what life is all about. That's way too much for a 40-minute talk.

But perhaps I will have made it clearer what some of the issues are and what a good solution

might look like. Can you hear me in the back, by the way? If I start to fade, like wave or something,

okay, I won't be offended. You'll be helping me do what I want

to do. So, okay, first then, there's a certain attitude towards life that I think is now quite

common in our society. I call it feelings management. According to feelings management, the task of living consists in managing your feelings,

...