Aristotle's Ethics Presentation

2. What Is This Sailor Looking For?

3. The Quest For Inner Self What Does it Mean? A Presentation by Christian Allaire

5. Why Is Aristotle Relevant?

7. He wrote in every field of human inquiry

8. He developed a compelling concept of happiness

10. What is personal excellence, and how do I achieve it?

11. To what extent does personal happiness entail a relationship with a community of others?

12. What is true happiness?

14. Human Flourishing

15. Happiness

19. Oriented toward the flourishing of the individual

20. Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” flows directly form Aristotle

21. All activity has a goal, purpose in mind, an end point Every action and choice, seem to aim at some good; the good therefore, has been well defined as that at which all things aim (1094a). Aristotle

23. Virtuous activity in accordance with reason

24. Activities that will be useful in life. Distinction between the pleasant, the useful and the noble

25. Cultivation of good habits

26. Virtue is the disposition to do the right thing

27. Virtuous activity lies within the mean between two extremes

29. An oxe’s salient characteristic is its strength. This what defines its “oxeness”

30. A domestic dogs highest purpose is to love its owner. Its highest good

31. A humans chief good is the ability for rational thought

33. Relative to the individual

34. Disposition of striving toward one’s maximum capability

35. Thus our aim is to fulfill our highest order human capabilities

36. The young are not capable of excellence, occurs around midlife

38. Bulls smell cows in heat and are driven by the biological urge to mount

39. Humans share these beastly tendencies tempered by reason

40. The trick is to desire the right things refined over a long period of time

41. Thus both sides of our nature needs to be developed

42. Our mind related to reason

43. Our character related to our passions or feelings

45. A Life Long Dream Gone Awry

47. I’d lost the fire in my belly for my Coast Guard career

48. It became clear to me that I was not living the pillars of eudaimonia

53. By year two my low grade anxiety at my slow progress had not abated

54. Plus there was a girl involved. That will scramble any sailors brain

55. To ease my suffering I took a job as a Charter Boat Captain in the Virgin Islands for awhile

56. I then continued to sail the Eastern Caribbean south to Grenada

57. By the end of the 2009 hurricane season I’d decided I’d had enough

59. Was not developing my highest potential. Why?

60. Sailing was no longer a challenge. I had mastered the art over many years in the Coast Guard.

61. Intellectual Stagnation. I had cut myself off from the tools and institutions of society that I require to flourish

62. Thus I could not achieve excellence impacting my happiness

64. Eudaimonia is all about the individual flourishing, but NOT for selfish reasons.

65. To truly be happy a person must flourish within a community of others

66. A gathering of losers will produce poor results

67. A gathering of flourishing individuals will produce outstanding results

68. Thus my isolation from friends and family deeply impacted my ability to live eudaimoniaSO TO FIND YOUR INNER SELF I HIGHTLY RECOMMEND CROSSING AN OCEAN ALL ALONE. YOU WILL QUICKLY FIND WHAT YOUR MADE OF

70. Questions?

71. Works Cited Aristotle, H Rackham. The Nicomachean Ethics. The Loeb classical library. London: W. Heinemann, 1926. Print. Kraut, Richard, "Aristotle's Ethics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), O'Toole, James. Creating the Good Life: Applying Aristotle's Wisdom to Find Meaning and Happiness. Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale, 2005. Rand, Ayn, and Harry Binswanger. The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z. New York, N.Y.: Meridian, 1986.