Aristotle

Straight To Happy

One thing that often trips people up when they start thinking about what they want is that they often don’t think about the difference between something being instrumentally valuable and it being intrinsically valuable. Yes, this is a distinction that a philosopher would make, but it can make a huge difference in how we choose [...]

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You Don’t Know What You’ll Do Until You Do It

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you. – Thomas Jefferson If you’ve never been in a situation that required you to be courageous, how would you know whether you’re courageous? The comic book version of Plato’s position on ethics is “to be is to do,” [...]

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The 5As of Actualization

First we make our habits, then our habits make us. – Charles C. Noble One of the most effective ways to actualize your own potential and goals is to form habits and routines that make the actualization (almost) automatic. We see reflections of this observation in the works of Aristotle and Lao Tzu from millennia [...]

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Beyond Thinking and Doing, Towards Wisdom

A brief conversation on Twitter with Duff helped me crystallize something that’s been bothering me here lately. Bear with me on this point, because I’m going to violate my standing rule about talking directly about philosophy. (As some of you may know, I’m slowly working on finishing my Ph.D. in philosophy.) What’s been bothering me [...]

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We Are What We Repeatedly Do

We are what we repeatedly do. -Aristotle I used to just think about this quote in the positive way, such as “if I continue to write, then I am a writer.” It’s helped me get through many self-defeating ideas about what I can and can’t do, especially in regards to what I’ve been taught how [...]

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How Friends Help You Flourish

Friends and flourishing are like cookies and milk: the addition of the one makes the other so much better. But friends and flourishing are unlike cookies and milk in that you can’t have one without the other. “Friends,” Aristotle says, “are our second selves.” They help define who we are and improve our character. They [...]

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15 Ways to Practice Friendliness

credit: )3runo This post is a continuation of the Practicing the Virtues Series. This week, we’ll talk about practicing friendliness. I’ll give a brief recap of where we’re at. We become more virtuous through practice. For more information, see this post. The virtues are interconnected in a very important way. Improving one virtue tends to [...]

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Making a Habit of Changing Habits

The Global Elders, from left: Peter Gabriel, Muhammad Yunus, Mary Robinson, Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Sir Richard Branson. Taken from the Global Elders website. Some people seem to be able to script themselves to change habits almost at whim. Where most of us falter and fight, these people make [...]

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12 Ways to Practice Courage

In my overview of Aristotelian ethics, I noted that we become more virtuous through practice. This post gives activities and suggestions that help you practice courage. The virtues are interconnected in a very important way. It turns out that working on one virtue has reciprocal effects on other virtues. You’ll see the reciprocal virtues listed [...]

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