Download pdf
Refining the Concept of Eudaimonia
- 1 Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy, 400 Baihua Street, Xuhui District, Shanghai, 200233, China
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
There have been different views about " happiness " since ancient Greek times. By combining subjectivism and objectivism, in his philosophical work “Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle tried to tackle the science of happiness. His work led to the creation of Eudaimonia, which roughly translates to “happiness.” However, some of his principles inevitably resulted in controversy. This paper will analyze two philosophers' views on ultimate happiness and the difference between their views and Aristotelian claims. Richard Kraut and Laura Sizer are two prominent figures who have dedicated their lives to reviewing Aristotelian works. Richard Kraut criticized Aristotle’s doctrine for being overwhelmingly rigid and with a distorted objective, while Laura Sizer tried to reconcile both the objectivist and subjectivist ideals embedded into the concept of Eudaimonia using affect theory. Then, the paper will demonstrate my thoughts on these two authors' claims in Aristotle’s concept of eudaimon. Finally, the paper will conclude with my definition of “eudaimonia."
Keywords
virtue ethics, Aristotle, eudaimonia, Nicomachean Ethics
[1]. Kraut, R. (1979). Two Conceptions of Happiness. The Philosophical Review, 88(2), 167–197. https://doi.org/10.2307/2184505
[2]. Chambers, S., & Kopstein, J. (2001). Bad Civil Society. Political Theory, 29(6), 837–865. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3072607
[3]. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. (2020, December 8). Documenting numbers of victims of the holocaust and nazi persecution. Holocaust Encyclopedia. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution
[4]. Sizer, L. (2010). Good and Good For You: An Affect Theory of Happiness. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 80(1), 133–163. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2009.00313.x
[5]. Frankfurt, H. G. (1971). Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person. The Journal of Philosophy, 68(1), 5–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/2024717
[6]. Kekes, J. (1982). Happiness. Mind, 91(363), 358–376. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2253226
[7]. Downs, A. (1957). An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy. Journal of Political Economy, 65(2), 135–150. https://doi.org/10.1086/257897
[8]. Shields, C. (2003). Classical Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy) (1st ed.). Routledge.
[9]. Aristotle, A., & Irwin, T. (2019). Nicomachean Ethics (Third Edition, third edition). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
[10]. Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state, and utopia (Vol. 5038). new york: Basic Books.
[11]. Nozick, R. (1990). Examined Life: Philosophical meditations. Simon and Schuster.
[12]. Levenson, R. W. (2011). Basic emotion questions. Emotion Review, 3(4), 379-386.
Cite this article
Wei,Z. (2023). Refining the Concept of Eudaimonia. Communications in Humanities Research,4,432-437.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
Disclaimer/Publisher's Note
The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.
About volume
Volume title: Proceedings of the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication Studies (ICIHCS 2022), Part 2
© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who
publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this
series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published
version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial
publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and
during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See
Open access policy for details).