How to Avoid Being Unhappy: Vices that Undermine Human Flourishing | Prof. Scott Cleveland
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 9 May 2019
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This talk was given the University of Oklahoma on April 2nd, 2019. For more information about upcoming TI events, visit: thomisticinstitute.org/events-1
About the speaker:
Dr. Cleveland received his B.A. in philosophy and biblical studies from Taylor University, his M.A.R. in philosophical theology & philosophy of religion from Yale Divinity School, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Baylor University (2014). Before coming to UMary, he conducted postdoctoral research at Saint Louis University on the virtue of intellectual humility.
His research interests are in ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of religion. He is especially interested in the study of virtues and emotions, the relation between the two, and the role of each in the moral and intellectual life. For example, he has defended an account of the virtue of courage with focus on its emotional excellences. He also has broad interests in metaphysics, theology, the history of philosophy, and the thought of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I look forward to sharing this talk with you for the conversation to follow. |
| 0:04.0 | The title is How to Avoid Being Unhappy Vices that Undermine Human Flourishing. |
| 0:11.0 | As you can tell from the title, this talk has a practical aim. |
| 0:16.0 | The aim is to help us learn how to avoid being unhappy. |
| 0:20.0 | That may seem a bit unambitious. |
| 0:23.3 | We should be satisfied with merely avoiding unhappiness. |
| 0:26.6 | We won't achieve happiness by backing into it or by chance. |
| 0:30.8 | We should aim for happiness. |
| 0:33.5 | This talk serves this greater aim by targeting common obstacles to happiness. |
| 0:39.3 | The focus of this talk will be obstacles to happiness called vices. |
| 0:44.3 | The avoidance of vices helps us to avoid unhappiness. |
| 0:48.3 | Aristotle writes in the second book of his Nicomachean, that the purpose of his study is to help his listeners |
| 0:55.8 | or readers become good. I hope this talk serves the same purpose. To begin, I'm going to say |
| 1:03.3 | something about happiness and unhappiness. I'll then say what advice is and how it may undermine |
| 1:10.1 | human flourishing. I'll introduce a what a vice is and how it may undermine him flourishing. |
| 1:12.3 | I'll introduce a class of vices that St. Thomas Aquinas, following the long line of Christian |
| 1:18.0 | reflection, calls the capital vices. I'll then turn to three specific capital vices that will |
| 1:25.3 | receive the bulk of this talk's attention. What I'll say comes |
| 1:29.9 | mainly from Aristotle and Aquinas. In particular, the central text underlying the bulk of this |
| 1:35.5 | talk is Aquinas' disputed questions on evil. I've also benefited from many scholars of Aquinas |
| 1:42.5 | on vices, and especially Robert Cushwitz |
| 1:45.6 | and Rebecca Kanondike de Young, whose short book, Blittering Vices, has provided me with |
... |
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