Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

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 Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

So the theme for tonight is happiness.

And I thought that we could just begin by consulting our experience.

Because whatever we do, we do for happiness.

And so whether we're conscious of it or unconscious of it, we're always

tending in a kind of happy direction, or at least what we take to be a happy direction. So many

of you are students at the University of South Florida. You probably didn't come here for the excellent

football team. That's just been a pleasant surprise this year. You probably came here to obtain a degree. And if somebody were to ask you, like, why are you studying biology or why are you studying medicine or why are you studying nursing science, you'd say something along the lines of, because I'd like to work in the field. And then if somebody were to ask you, well, why do you want to work in the field? You'd say,

I don't know, it's the type of thing that maybe I'm well suited to, or it earns a significant salary, or it's the type of thing with which I can provide for myself and maybe for other people as well. It's like, well, why do you want to do that? Well, I mean, I'd like to get married. I'd like to have a family, I'd like to live a peaceful life and maybe buy a piece of property like on a laguna and occasionally spend some time floating. Hopefully not in the near vicinity of animals that'll eat me. And then I might ask you further, like, why do you want to do that? And at the end of the day, you're going to arrive at something along the lines of, I mean, because I want to be

happy. So all of us do what we do because we want to be happy. The question is whether we do it

well or whether we do it in such a way that actually leads to true happiness. So part of the,

I suppose, motivation for

tonight's lecture is to discern as to what constitutes true happiness and then how we can

organize our lives so that in patterning them on true happiness, they might prove blessed indeed.

Okay, so I have five points. I don't know if I should share with you the topic

sentences of my points because some of them are relatively obscure. You know how sometimes when you make

notes, they're just notes to yourself? And then like you're trying to communicate to other people

what you were writing in class and you're like, it's better that you don't. So point number one is

metaphysical basis.

...