Happiness and the Good Life

Happiness and the Good Life
Author: Mike W. Martin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2012-03-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199930082

What is happiness? How is it related to morality and virtue? Does living with illusion promote or diminish happiness? Is it better to pursue happiness with a partner than alone? Philosopher Mike W. Martin addresses these and other questions as he connects the meaning of happiness with the philosophical notion of "the good life."

Creating the Good Life

Creating the Good Life
Author: James O'Toole
Publisher: Rodale Books
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2005-05-06
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1609616332

Professionals and business people in midlife are increasingly asking themselves "what's next?" in their careers and personal lives. Creating the Good Life draws on the wisdom of the ages to help contemporary men and women plan for satisfying, useful, moral, and meaningful second halves of their lives. For centuries, the brightest people in Western societies have looked to Aristotle for guidance on how to lead a good life and how to create a good society. Now James O'Toole--the Mortimer J. Adler Senior Fellow of the Aspen Institute--translates that classical philosophical framework into practical, comprehensible terms to help professionals and business people apply it to their own lives and work. His book helps thoughtful readers address some of the profound questions they are currently struggling with in planning their futures: • How do I find meaning and satisfaction? • How much money do I need in order to be happy? • What is the right balance between work, family, and leisure? • What are my responsibilities to my community? • How can I create a good society in my own company? Bridging philosophy and self-help, O'Toole's book shows how happiness ultimately is attainable no matter one's level of income, if one uses Aristotle's practical exercises to ask the right questions and to discipline oneself to pursue things that are "good for us." The book is the basis for O'Toole's new "Good Life" seminar, where thoughtful men and women gather to create robust and satisfying life plans.

The Good Life Method

The Good Life Method
Author: Meghan Sullivan
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1984880314

Two Philosophers Ask and Answer the Big Questions About the Search for Faith and Happiness For seekers of all stripes, philosophy is timeless self-care. Notre Dame philosophy professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko have reinvigorated this tradition in their wildly popular and influential undergraduate course “God and the Good Life,” in which they wrestle with the big questions about how to live and what makes life meaningful. Now they invite us into the classroom to work through issues like what justifies our beliefs, whether we should practice a religion and what sacrifices we should make for others—as well as to investigate what figures such as Aristotle, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Iris Murdoch, and W. E. B. Du Bois have to say about how to live well. Sullivan and Blaschko do the timeless work of philosophy using real-world case studies that explore love, finance, truth, and more. In so doing, they push us to escape our own caves, ask stronger questions, explain our deepest goals, and wrestle with suffering, the nature of death, and the existence of God. Philosophers know that our “good life plan” is one that we as individuals need to be constantly and actively writing to achieve some meaningful control and sense of purpose even if the world keeps throwing surprises our way. For at least the past 2,500 years, philosophers have taught that goal-seeking is an essential part of what it is to be human—and crucially that we could find our own good life by asking better questions of ourselves and of one another. This virtue ethics approach resonates profoundly in our own moment. The Good Life Method is a winning guide to tackling the big questions of being human with the wisdom of the ages.

The Virtues of Happiness

The Virtues of Happiness
Author: Paul Bloomfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2016-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190612002

As children, we learn life is unfair: bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. So, it is natural to ask, "Why play fairly in an unfair world? If being immoral will get you what you want and you know you can't get caught, why not do it?" The answers, as argued herein, begin by rejecting the idea that morality and happiness are at odds with one another. From this point of view, we can see how immorality undermines its perpetrator's happiness: self-respect is necessary for happiness, and immorality undermines self-respect. As we see how our self-respect is conditional upon how we respect others, we learn to evaluate and value ourselves, and others, appropriately. The central thesis is the result of combining the ancient Greek conception of happiness (eudaimonia) with a modern conception of self-respect. We become happy, we life the best life we can, only by becoming virtuous: by being as courageous, just, temperate, and wise as can be. These are the virtues of happiness. This book explains why it is bad to be bad and good to be good, and what happens to people's values as their practical rationality develops.

Happiness in Action

Happiness in Action
Author: Adam Adatto Sandel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre: Self-actualization (Psychology)
ISBN: 9780674287310

Adam Sandel revives one of the oldest philosophical questions: What constitutes a good life? Drawing on thinkers ancient and modern, as well as his own experience as a record-setting athlete, he argues that fulfillment lies not in achieving goals but in forging a life journey that enables us to see our struggles and triumphs as an integrated whole.

Happiness and the Good Life in Japan

Happiness and the Good Life in Japan
Author: Wolfram Manzenreiter
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2017-03-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317352726

Contemporary Japan is in a state of transition, caused by the forces of globalization that are derailing its ailing economy, stalemating the political establishment and generating alternative lifestyles and possibilities of the self. Amongst this nascent change, Japanese society is confronted with new challenges to answer the fundamental question of how to live a good life of meaning, purpose and value. This book, based on extensive fieldwork and original research, considers how specific groups of Japanese people view and strive for the pursuit of happiness. It examines the importance of relationships, family, identity, community and self-fulfilment, amongst other factors. The book demonstrates how the act of balancing social norms and agency is at the root of the growing diversity of experiencing happiness in Japan today.

The Good Life

The Good Life
Author: Michael A. Bishop
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2015
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199923116

Science and philosophy study well-being with different but complementary methods. Marry these methods and a new picture emerges: To have well-being is to be "stuck" in a positive cycle of emotions, attitudes, traits and success. This book unites the scientific and philosophical worldviews into a powerful new theory of well-being.

The Path

The Path
Author: Michael Puett
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-04-05
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1476777853

For the first time, an award-winning Harvard professor shares his wildly popular course on classical Chinese philosophy, showing you how ancient ideas—like the fallacy of the authentic self—can guide you on the path to a good life today. Why is a course on ancient Chinese philosophers one of the most popular at Harvard? Because it challenges all our modern assumptions about what it takes to flourish. Astonishing teachings emerged two thousand years ago through the work of a succession of Chinese scholars exploring how humans can improve themselves and their society. And what are these counterintuitive ideas? Transformation comes not from looking within for a true self, but from creating conditions that produce new possibilities. Good relationships come not from being sincere and authentic, but from the rituals we perform within them. A good life emerges not from planning it out, but through training ourselves to respond well to small moments. Influence comes not from wielding power but from holding back. Excellence comes from what we choose to do, not our natural abilities. In other words, The Path “opens the mind” (Huffington Post) and upends everything we are told about how to lead a good life. Its most radical idea is that there is no path to follow in the first place—just a journey we create anew at every moment by seeing and doing things differently. “With its…spirited, convincing vision, revolutionary new insights can be gleaned from this book on how to approach life’s multifarious situations with both heart and head” (Kirkus Reviews). A note from the publisher: To read relevant passages from the original works of Chinese philosophy, see our ebook Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi: Selected Passages, available wherever books are sold.

Happiness, Flourishing and the Good Life

Happiness, Flourishing and the Good Life
Author: Garrett Thomson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2020-09-24
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0429875258

Well-being studies is an exciting and relatively new multi-disciplinary field, with data being gathered from different domains in order to improve social policies. In its reliance on a truncated account of well-being based implicitly on neoclassical economic assumptions, however, the field is deeply flawed. Departing from reductive accounts of well-being that exclude the normative or evaluative aspect of the concept and so impoverish the attendant conception of human life, this book offers a new perspective on what counts normatively as being well. In reconceptualising well-being holistically, it presents a fresh vista on how we can consider the meanings of human life in a manner that also serves as a source of constructive social critique. The book thus undertakes to invert the usual approach to the social sciences, in which the research is required to be objective in terms of methodology and subjective with regard to evaluative claims. Instead, the authors are deliberately objective about values in order to be more open to the subjectivities of human life. Happiness, Flourishing and the Good Life thus seeks to move away from economic considerations’ domination of all social spaces in order to understand the possibilities of well-being beyond instrumentalisation or commodification. A radical new approach to the human well-being, this book will appeal to philosophers, social theorists and political scientists and all who are interested in human happiness.