This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

If there was a happiness machine rented out by the hour to which you could connect your

brain and which gave you a feeling of elation, would you hook up?

Happiness is becoming highly fashionable as an area of study, but contemporary accounts of happiness tend to stress psychological states, how we feel at a moment of time.

In ancient Greece, two and a half millennia ago, Aristotle had an entirely different view of happiness.

Miles Boniet is a distinguished Aristotelian scholar.

Miles Boniet, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you for inviting me.

Now the topic we're going to focus on today is Aristotle's view of happiness.

Aristotle said something quite remarkable, he said that children can't be happy happy what on earth did you mean by that?

Well one of the things he meant is that happiness is something that you can attribute to a person

only in respect of their whole life.

And children of course have not yet had or you couldn't even say they are having a complete

life.

An adult may be in the middle of a life they've chosen and they're now being

political or being in business or being intellectual in the university and you can

say this is their life you can't say that about children because they're still not embarked upon a life and God forbid that they should think of themselves as being embarked on a life as the present government keeps trying to make them think when they do cvies at the age of eight and

other such ridiculous things. So if children can't be happy at what age can you start to

be happy or is it just something which people can say about you when you're

dead? That is a important question about which Aristotle

agonises. He acknowledges that however successful you may be in your life,

...