Exam 1 essay questions Essays - Philosophy, Ethics,

Exam 1 essay questions Due: 9/29/17 Essay 1: "How does Aristotle say we should live a virtuous life?" Probably Aristotle's best known work on ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics explores the question: How should a man go about in order to live a happy and virtuous life? Well, Aristotle had said that in order for a person to really attain happiness, then the possession and exercise of a moral as well as intellectual virtue is the core constitutive element to happiness and living well. A formal definition of happiness or Eudaimonia as Aristotle would have described it as is "A complete and sufficient good. This implies that it is desired for itself, that it is not desired for the sake of anything else, that it satisfies all desire and has no evil mixed in with it, and that it is stable." Aristotle said that the attainment of certain goods or sets of goods is to be living well. There is a certain division of goods that one can attain or lose: external goods; things like wealth or fame or power, goods of the body; life, health, good looks, athletic ability, dexterity, etc., and goods for the soul; virtue, education, creativity, friendship, among other things. Certain good are without a doubt necessary preconditions for happiness, things like life of health, while other goods are merely embellishments to fill out an already good life for a person whom is already virtuous. One must survey the goods that we desire in order to know which goods are really related to true happiness and promote living a virtuous life. So, as Aristotle puts it, virtuous actions express correct reason. These actions are acquired by an individual through practice and habituation. Or in other words: practice makes perfect - one becomes virtuous by acting virtuously! So by acting in the way that a virtuous person should, one will become to take pleasure in being a virtuous person. It is simply forming a habit, and by that same token one can fall victim to allowing certain defective and vicious ways of acting to become habitual. Virtue is difficult to attain, since if we simply follow our inclinations, we become vicious. Even though we have a natural desire for happiness, the nature of humans often lead us away from our true happiness. This is why it is imperative for a good upbringing as a child. If habits are developed from the beginning, and we learn how to both act and feel correctly, then living a virtuous life is more easily attainable. He said that a virtuous person takes pleasure in what is fine and noble and is pained from that which is shameful. Through education and habit Aristotle believed that one can attain the knowledge and understanding of what it means to live a virtuous life, and in that one would find true happiness.

Girl Interrupted essays

Girl Interrupted essays Have you ever watched a movie and then found out it was created from a book? Thats what happened to me, I saw the movie Girl Interrupted, starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. I then heard that it was made from a book itself. So for this assignment, I decided to read the book and compare and contrast it from the movie. The movie, Girl Interrupted is about an eighteen-year-old girl, named Susanna Kaysen. She spent two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clients-Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles. The movie clearly defines the worlds perceptive of a mental hospital, and what goes on there. The yelling, screaming, and carrying on with the patients and nurses, is all of what is perceived to happen at a psychiatric hospital. In the book, its more in detail, the words carefully chosen, effectively creates a mental picture as you read the book. Susanna was put there on request by her doctor, to rest, and to get better mentally. She was hallucinating, and was depressed and suicidal at times. There isnt much difference between the movie and the book. I was expecting there to be a world of difference, but there wasnt. In the movie, there was racial difference, where as the head nurse in the book was small and white, and in the movie, it was Whoopi Goldberg, now everyone knows she is big and black. The detail that was in the book wasnt necessarily shown in the movie. The story line was the same, in the book and in the movie. The story of Girl Interrupted, was basically this, its about a girl who is admitted into a psychiatric hospital. Its about all the things she experiences there and the people she meets. While reading the book, you the reader, really get a sense of how someone in that situation is feeling. Where as in the movie, you couldn ...