Searching for Happiness: Pathfinding and Pitfalls | Prof. W. Scott Cleveland

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2020

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on February 18, 2020 at the University of Kansas.

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Prof. W. Scott Cleveland is Director of Catholic Studies and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mary (Bismarck, ND). His research interests are in ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of religion. He is especially interested in the study of the virtues and emotions, the relation between the two, and the role of each in the moral and intellectual life. His work has appeared in journals such as American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Res Philosophica, Religious Studies, Oxford Bibliographies Online, and the Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you very much. Good evening, everyone. Thank you, Maggie, and the officers of the Domestic Institute chapter here at KU for having me. I look forward to sharing this talk with you and the conversations to follow. For ease of listening, I'll generally omit references, but you can ask me about them later. The title of the talk is searching for happiness, pathfinding, and pitfalls.
0:23.1	We are all searching for happiness. I'll use happiness in this talk in the sense of a good life.
0:32.6	Who of you would not say that you want a good life? When I refer to a good life, I'm not speaking like your
0:39.5	professors do if they give you a B and say your work is good. For our purposes, the good
0:45.9	life lacks nothing. It's the A plus life, the best human life. Who of you would not say
0:53.9	that you want to live your best life?
0:57.0	Given we are all searching for happiness in this sense, and given its nature isn't obvious,
1:03.0	it's important that we think carefully about what happiness is and how to get it.
1:08.0	The claim the Greek philosopher Aristotle advances is that there is just one path to it.
1:13.6	This may sound strange to you. You might object that happiness is different for each person
1:20.6	and that it's up to each person to find his or her own happiness. But what if your best life is also everyone's best life? Aristotle thinks so,
1:31.5	and it's worth our seeing why he thinks so. I'll explain Aristotle's account of the path to
1:37.8	happiness, as well as how we might respond to this objection that his view doesn't account
1:42.5	for the diversity of ways to happiness.
1:45.7	Along the way, I'll also explain some alternative views of happiness, or supposed paths to reach it,
1:51.2	that he rejects. I'll then press Aristotle's account and argue that while his view is on the
1:56.4	right track, we can modify it to make it more plausible. I'll also present a critique of his view
2:02.0	from the philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas,
2:04.8	who argues that our happiness, astonishingly,
2:08.6	requires an even higher standard than Aristotle thought.
2:12.2	I'll present his view as well.
2:14.3	Well, it goes beyond Aristotle's view, it builds on it. With a clear view of this path to happiness, I'll discuss how to walk down this path and avoid some pitfalls.
	...

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