The Humanities represent man's concern with man and with the human world.
In that concern there is no more important problem than the age-old one which was first discussed systematically here, in Greece, more than two thousand years ago.
The problem I refer to, which the ancient Greek philosophers thought deeply about, is this one: What makes a human life good -- what makes it worth living and what must we do, not just merely to live, but to live well?
In the whole tradition of Western literature and learning, one book more than any other defines this problem for us and helps us to think about it. That book of course is Aristotle's Ethics, written in the fourth century before Christ. Aristotle was a student of Plato. Plato had founded the Academy of Athens, which was the great university of ancient Greece. Aristotle studied and worked there for about twenty years. He was called by Plato "the intellect of the school."
Unlike Socrates, Aristotle was interested in the study of......
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