The Psychology of Happiness: Stoicism in the City of God | Prof. Sarah Byers

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2020

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on November 5, 2019.

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Sarah Byers is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. Her areas of expertise include Augustine, Hellenistic philosophy, and the history of ethics. She received a MA and PhD from the University of Toronto.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, everyone, so we're going to be talking about emotions, specifically the emotion of compassion,
0:07.0	and then the relationship between that and ethical and political life.
0:12.0	And I think it's very interesting for its own sake, but also there was something in the news yesterday.
0:18.0	I don't know if any of you saw something that happened yesterday in Oklahoma. Did anyone catch the news story? Someone in the first row was saying yes. So more than
0:26.3	500 people were given commuted sentences in the prison system in Oklahoma. And so Oklahoma
0:32.7	has the highest rate of incarceration of any state in the United States. And then the U.S.
0:37.2	has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the United States, and then the U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world.
0:40.3	So we have 2.1 million people in jail right now in the United States, and more than 500 were given shorter sentences yesterday,
0:48.3	and many of them are being released in the coming days. So it's sort of interesting to think about why we want to do that sort of thing.
0:55.7	There's always a cost calculation that can be made, but is there some reason other than
1:00.1	that type of calculation for why that might be a good idea?
1:05.0	If we go back to the ancients, they're actually interesting to look at in this regard.
1:11.8	So the Stoics in particular are sort of more sophisticated than other ancient schools of thought
1:18.4	when it comes to thinking about emotions, including the emotion of pity.
1:22.8	And what makes them sophisticated is they're able to justify claims that ancients in general usually want to make.
1:29.3	So one of the main claims they want to make is that violent or inappropriate emotions cause catastrophe at the social and political levels.
1:38.3	So if you've ever read a Greek tragedy, you've seen this, right?
1:42.3	They pick a relationship that's highly volatile and they show how rage
1:47.0	and jealousy and did strong desire, sexual desire, how these have ramifications within the family of a person,
1:55.0	but then within the wider society of the person, especially if one of them is a king or it has some type of political power.
2:03.6	So the question of how to have healthy emotions was viewed as important for the cultivation of social and civic life
2:10.6	in addition to its importance for individual psychological development.
	...

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