Welcome to The Art of Living. This course is going to take you on a journey through some of the most profound, surprising, and practically useful ideas human beings have ever produced. We are going to ask the questions that philosophers, religious thinkers, and ordinary people have wrestled with for thousands of years. Questions like: What does it mean to live a good life? What is happiness, really? And what does it mean to be a good person? These are not abstract puzzles for dusty academics. They are the questions that lie beneath almost every important decision you will ever make.

Before we dive in, let us be honest about something. These questions do not have easy answers. In fact, some of the greatest minds in history have disagreed violently about them. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus thought the good life was essentially about pleasure and the absence of pain. His near-contemporary Aristotle thought that was far too shallow, and that the good life required the active exercise of virtue and reason. The Stoics thought both of them were missing the point, and that the good life was about inner freedom and self-mastery, regardless of your circumstances. A Buddhist monk, a Christian saint, and a modern existentialist would each give you a completely different answer. This course is not going to tell you who is right. What it is going to do is give you the tools to think clearly about these questions yourself, and to start building your own philosophy of life.

So what exactly is philosophy? The word itself comes from ancient Greek. It is made up of two parts: philos, meaning loving, and sophia, meaning wisdom. Philosophy is literally the love of wisdom. But that is a broad definition. More precisely, philosophy is the practice of asking fundamental questions and following the argument wherever it leads, even when the destination is uncomfortable. It is the discipline of thinking carefully, questioning assumptions, and refusing to accept easy answers just because they are convenient or traditional. Socrates, the founding father of Western philosophy, famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Whether or not you agree with that, it captures something essential: philosophy is about taking your life seriously enough to actually think about it.

Now, within philosophy, there is a specific branch that deals with questions about how to live, what is right and wrong, and what we owe to each other. That branch is called ethics. Ethics is the philosophical study of morality. It asks questions like: What makes an action right or wrong? What kind of person should I be? Do I have obligations to others, and if so, where do they come from? Throughout this course, ethics will be one of our central concerns. But we will also be asking a related but distinct question: not just what is right, but what is good. What is a good life for a human being? These two questions overlap, but they are not the same, and the tension between them is one of the most interesting threads we will follow.