Usually translated “happiness”, which misleads: eudaimonia is not a feeling but a way of living and acting, judged over a whole life. “One swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day.” — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.7.
Sententiae
phrases in the originalEudaimonia
Origin. Aristotle’s term for the highest human good (Nicomachean Ethics I). — Aristotle
When “happiness” is too thin a word.
Summum bonum
Origin. Cicero’s Latin for the Greek ethical question — what is the final end of life? For Kant, the union of virtue and happiness.
For debates about the purpose of life.
Explore Next
related by shared connections
Simone de Beauvoir
French existentialist philosopher and novelist whose The Second Sex (1949) — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — founded modern feminist philosophy, and whose ethics of ambiguity argued that my freedom requires the freedom of others.
Sophocles
The Athenian tragedian of Oedipus and Antigone — the poet of human blindness, unbending will and the collision of laws — whom Aristotle took as the model of tragedy.
Confucius
The teacher of Lu whose sayings on goodness, ritual, learning and right relationships shaped Chinese civilization for two and a half thousand years.
Being vs. Becoming
The first great quarrel in Western philosophy — is reality one and changeless (Parmenides) or everlasting flux (Heraclitus)?
Thomas Aquinas
Dominican friar and the greatest of the scholastics, who wove Aristotle’s philosophy and Christian theology into a single vast system — the Summa Theologiae — with five ways to prove God.
What Is Justice?
From Thrasymachus’s “advantage of the stronger” to Rawls’s veil of ignorance — the question of what we owe each other and who should rule.