Aristotle Research Paper

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Aristotle took a different view on what the meaning of life is, he separated his views from the typical human of his time. Aristotle believed that life had an overall purpose, something to live for, that you should achieve by the end of your life. He believed the end goal for life, was the pursuit of happiness. Happiness, not your average happy for a couple hours, then back to normal. He believed that happiness was a lifelong pursuit to achieve by the time you die. For Aristotle, virtue was fulfilling your life goal of happiness. Aristotle places us different from animals for one simple fact, we have reasoning skills. We have the ability to attain a life long goal, and our unique function that sets us apart from the rest of nature is our ability to reason. This is why pleasure is not happiness, because animals seek pleasure as well, and as humans we have the higher brain capacity to do more than simple pleasing ourselves. The…show more content…
This friendship is without utility but genuinely being happy for your friend that he or she is succeeding in life. Aristotle believes you cannot have very many of these types of friends in your lifetime because these friendships take work, thus meaning you would be spending all your energy on maintaining more than just a few of these friendships. He believes that this type of friendship is the most enjoyable since it combines both pleasure and virtue, therefore helping fulfill our lifelong goal. Aristotle’s believes happiness relies on moral characteristics which are: courage, generosity, justice, friendship, and citizenship. These characteristics are ethical, and should be produced throughout one’s life, perfecting having a mean, which is not too much of the character and not too little. However justice encompaces all the virtues, into one moral, without justice you cannot have these

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