How Can We Find Happiness?
What Aristotle can teach us
I have been thinking more about the nature of life lately. Part of this is due to my fighting stage IV cancer, which has me grappling with issues of life and death late. Part of it is simply my own natural proclivities. I am someone who can happily spend time wondering how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, for example.
I can also get easily distracted because I have a wide range of interests — which is probably reflected in my articles on Medium. Perhaps that is one reason I was drawn to Aristotle.
Who was he? Born in Greece in 384 BC, he was a writer, teacher, and philosopher. His interests included not just philosophy, but also natural science, economics, politics, math, logic, linguistics, the arts, and psychology. He is the founder of the Aristotelian tradition. He learned from Plato and taught Alexander the Great.
His views shaped Catholic and Islamic scholarship and was the one of the main drivers of Western thought until the Enlightenment despite only a third of his works suriving.
While reading about him, I came across concepts that I find useful even in the modern…
