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Print Price: $27.50

Format:
Paperback
272 pp.
156 mm x 234 mm

ISBN-13:
9780198868729

Publication date:
December 2020

Imprint: OUP UK

The Quality of Life

Aristotle Revised

Richard Kraut

The Quality of Life: Aristotle Revised presents a philosophical theory about the constituents of human well-being. The principal idea is that what Aristotle calls "external goods" - wealth, reputation, power - have at most an indirect bearing on the quality of our lives. Starting with Aristotle's thoughts about this topic, Kraut increasingly modifies (and occasionally rejects) that stance. He argues that the way in which we experience the world is what well-being consists in. A good internal life comprises, in part, pleasure but far more valuable is the quality of our emotional, intellectual, social, and perceptual experiences. These offer the potential for a richer and deeper quality of life than that which is available to many other animals.

A good human life is immeasurably better than that of a simple creature that feels only the pleasures of nourishment; even if it felt pleasure for millions of years, human life would be superior. In opposition to contemporary discussions of well-being, which often appeal to a thought experiment devised by Robert Nozick, Kraut concludes that the quality of our lives consists entirely in the quality of our experiences. While others hold that we must live in "the real world" to live well and that one's interior life has little or no value on its own, Kraut's interpretation of this thought experiment supports the opposite conclusion.

Readership : PG; Scholars, researchers, and advanced students in philosophy.

1. The Oyster and the Experience Machine: Two Puzzles in Value Theory
2. Well-Being and Ethical Virtue
3. Experientialism and the Experience Machine
4. Well-Being and Time
5. Variations on Aristotelian Themes

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Richard Kraut was educated at the University of Michigan and Princeton University. He has taught in the Philosophy Departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Northwestern University, where he is Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Humanities. His recent books in value theory are Against Absolute Goodness (Oxford 2011) and What is Good and Why (Harvard 2007).

Making Sense - Margot Northey
Against Absolute Goodness - Richard Kraut
Republic of Equals - Alan Thomas

Special Features

Provides a philosophical theory about the constituents of human wellbeing.
Written to be accessible to a broad audience.
Presents a topic that is of general interest - the quality of life.