CLU44550 How to be Happy

Thanks to Thomas Jefferson, the pursuit of happiness - along with life and liberty - is a foundational right of the US constitution. And all of us want to be happy. But how many of us can define what happiness is? And since we struggle to define it how can we attain it, and why are we all so obsessed with it? Part of the answer lies in the influence of one strand of thinking about happiness (eudaimonia) that derives from Aristotle. But Aristotle’s influential view was merely one among many, so in this module, we revisit the earliest formulations of happiness in Classical literature and philosophy and compare them with other conceptions of happiness from contemporary western and non-western traditions. By so doing we’ll tell the story of how we began to think of ourselves as people who need to pursue something called happiness - even though we don’t know what it is - and reveal how odd our modern conceptions of doing well and being happy are. Texts will be read in translation.