Excerpt / Summary In Nicholas White’s A brief History of Happiness, White addresses context from famous philosophers on happiness dating back towards Aristotle. This book addresses key questions such as: what is happiness? Should happiness play such a dominant role in our lives? How can we deal with conflicts between the various things that make us happy? It considers the ways in which major thinkers from antiquity to the modern day have treated happiness. It then relates questions about happiness to ethics and to practical philosophy. White explains the conflicts, perspectives, and identification of happiness, pleasure, hedonism, measuring happiness, happiness as a structure and harmony, morality, and much more. As White quotes Aristotle, “happiness consists in achieving, through the course of a whole lifetime all the goods—health, wealth, knowledge, friends, etc., that lead to the perfection of human nature and to the enrichment of human life.” White addresses many key philosophies and ideas that have constructed in essence how philosophers and people alike research and view happiness in todays world. This book addresses many good subsections of happiness research and draws well from pivotal research to give an in depth analysis of past into present. Not only does it explain how people need to live in order to be happy, but it addresses some current issues that are making it difficult for so many to be happy in the modern world we live in.
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