Splash Biography

Many great thinkers have struggled with man's apparent inability to ensure his own happiness. Reflecting on this problem led a large number of thinkers to suspect that common ideas about the nature of happiness must be radically incorrect. Others, however, embraced the vulnerability of human happiness, suggesting that reconciling oneself with this vulnerability plays a key role in man's ethical life. In this class, we'll discuss several classical responses to the problem of vulnerable happiness and try to work out a response of our own. Brief excerpts from Homer, St. Augustine, and Dante will help us to join this ancient discussion.

Supposing you were an inch taller, would you still be the same person you are now? How about if you had a completely different personality, would you still be the same person then? And what if Julius Caesar had died 1,900 years before you were born instead of 1,901 years before you were born – certainly something like that couldn't make you a different person, could it? In this class, by working through questions like these, we'll attempt to figure out what exactly it is that makes this particular thing this particular thing. At the end of these discussions we will attempt to answer one final question: How might a seemingly irrelevant question like "What makes this this?" come to play an important role in philosophical accounts of love?