Book contents
- Aquinas and the Ethics of Happiness
- Aquinas and the Ethics of Happiness
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Aquinas on Individual Happiness
- Chapter 1 Three Kinds of Perfectionism
- Chapter 2 The Heart of Happiness
- Chapter 3 Perfect Happiness
- Chapter 4 Natural Imperfect Happiness
- Chapter 5 Graced Imperfect Happiness
- Part II Aquinas, Happiness, and the Unity of Ethics
- Bibliography of Works by Thomas Aquinas with Abbreviations
- General Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - The Heart of Happiness
Enjoying Good Activities
from Part I - Aquinas on Individual Happiness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2025
Book contents
- Aquinas and the Ethics of Happiness
- Aquinas and the Ethics of Happiness
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Aquinas on Individual Happiness
- Chapter 1 Three Kinds of Perfectionism
- Chapter 2 The Heart of Happiness
- Chapter 3 Perfect Happiness
- Chapter 4 Natural Imperfect Happiness
- Chapter 5 Graced Imperfect Happiness
- Part II Aquinas, Happiness, and the Unity of Ethics
- Bibliography of Works by Thomas Aquinas with Abbreviations
- General Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Aquinas recognizes a number of wildly different kinds of individual happiness. What fundamentally unifies these various kinds of happiness so that they all count as varieties of happiness to begin with? This chapter gives a novel answer to this question and thereby identifies a new heart of happiness in Aquinas, which the author calls the Enjoying Good Activities Reading. On that reading, in every case, happiness is exclusively constituted by engaging in and enjoying a genuinely good activity. After giving a brief textual case in favor of reading Aquinas this way, the bulk of this chapter explains Aquinas’s understanding of enjoyment and his account of what it takes for an activity to be genuinely good. This makes clearer what this new reading amounts to and reveals something of its philosophical interest.
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- Aquinas and the Ethics of Happiness , pp. 37 - 59Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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