Meaning, Flourishing, and the Good Life

Course Description

We all want our lives to go as well as possible. But how can we tell when things are going well for us? Perhaps the answer is to figure out what it is for any life to go well—to formulate standards for the good human life—and then measure our lives and the lives of others against those standards. Of course, to formulate useful standards for the good human life, we’ll need to have some idea of what kind of beings we are, human nature, and, given our nature, the kinds of things that contribute to our well-being at the most basic level; i.e., the basic constituents of human flourishing.

In this course, we will examine a range of influential answers—embedded in major religious and philosophical traditions and emerging from scientific investigation—to what is perhaps the most important question that confronts us: just what are the basic constituents of human flourishing? Our goal will be to think broadly, deeply, collaboratively, and pluralistically about the leading and competing answers to this question. Our guides will be historically and culturally significant texts and figures that have inspired living traditions of inquiry via accounts of human flourishing that continue to win adherents. The goal will not be to convince students that any one tradition or set of answers is correct, but that the question to which they are addressed is momentous, inescapable, and worthy of continuous reflection. After all, we don’t want our lives to go poorly!

Readings may include selections from the Ancient Greeks, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, their Hellenistic successors, Stoics and Epicureans, Ancient Indians, the Upanishads and Tripiṭaka, Ancient Chinese, The Four Books/Five Classics and Tao Te Ching, the Christian tradition, the Bible, Augustine, and Aquinas, the Islamic tradition, the Koran and al-Ghazālī, the 18th century European Enlightenment, Voltaire, Rousseau, the American Founders, the 19th Century Romantics, Shelley, Schiller, Coleridge, 19th& 20th Century Existentialists, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus, and contemporary secular humanists, positive/existential psychology, the capabilities approach to well-being.

Course Materials

Reading assignments will be posted on Canvas in PDF form. To access them, students will need to visit the weekly course modules on Canvas.

Copies of the following books will be available at the reserve desk in the library:

1. Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, The Open Field, 2023.

2. Stewart Goetz and Joshua Seachrist, What is This Thing Called the Meaning of Life?, Routledge, 2020.