I've been keeping up with my reading, but haven't done a good job keeping up with my blogging. I hope to get back in gear.
This has been my favorite reading up to this point. I won't go into much detail (so as to allow me to catch up), but here is a quote from the reading:
"He is happy who is active in accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some chance period but throughout a complete life. Or must we add 'and who is destined to live thus dies as befits his life?' Certainly the future is obscure to us, while happiness, we claim, is an end and something in every way final. If so, we shall call happy those among living menin whom these conditions are, and are to be, fulfilled -- but happy men." (p. 346)
Thus, for Aristotle, happiness is a moral virtue. Somebody who leads a good life and not necessarily somebody who has a good time. The good life takes a lifetime and is not easy to attain.
I've been reading a lot of articles lately on "happiness," and my favorite is "What Makes Us Happy" in the June 2009 Atlantic by Joshua Wolf Shenk.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/7439/
I would recommend it to anybody who wants to live 'the examined life."
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