Is it Selfish to Pursue One's Own Happiness Above All Else? | Prof. Robert Koons

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 5 October 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at Louisiana State University on April 21, 2022. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website: www.thomisticinstitute.org About the speaker: Robert C. (“Rob”) Koons is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught for 33 years. M. A. Oxford, Ph.D. UCLA. He is the author or co-author of four books, including: Realism Regained (Oxford University Press, 2000), and The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics, with Timothy H. Pickavance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017). He is the co-editor (with George Bealer) of The Waning of Materialism (Oxford University Press, 2010), and co-editor (with Nicholas Teh and William Simpson) of Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (Routledge, 2018). He has been working recently on an Aristotelian interpretation of quantum theory, on defending and articulating Thomism in contemporary terms, and on arguments for classical theism.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:02.8	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:11.1	So yeah, I'm going to talk about Aquinas' views on happiness and human happiness in particular.
0:18.2	And I'll start talking about Swedish theologian, a very influential 20th century
0:23.7	called Andrews Nygren. We're a big fat, actually two-volume work called Eris and Agape. And I think
0:30.5	he was when I was younger. So he argued that there was a deep incompatibility between the Greek philosophical tradition and Christian theology
0:40.5	on the nature of human happiness and healthful human health. So in Greek philosophy, especially
0:46.8	in Plato, let's say, you have the sense on Eros, which is desiring of God, right, as someone good for us to have it, so to speak.
0:56.1	The emphasis, Nagin says it's a kind of selfish love, right?
1:01.0	I've got this God shape vacuum, right?
1:03.0	I need to fill and God's going to be good.
1:05.1	And Anders contrasts that with Agape in the New Testament,
1:08.4	which he says this absolutely selfless love. We love God for his
1:12.4	own sake, completely oblivious to whether it satisfies any need that I might have. And then
1:19.0	Nybrun argues that Augustine, in the later Aquinas especially, attempted to synthesize
1:25.6	these two incompatible traditions.
1:28.3	Augustine using the Latin word keratos as a way of blurring the distinction
1:34.3	message between the Platonic eras and Christian Agape.
1:39.3	So I'm going to, he's not going to sort of my, that noir here, right?
1:43.3	He sees the object of my criticism for this talk.
1:47.1	I'm going to argue that, in fact,
1:49.6	there isn't a deep incompatibility here
	...

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