Outline of Complete Thyself

Last Updated: 2023-09-18

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Fulfillment

• The four lives: making money, having fun, giving back, seeking knowledge.
• Why Aristotle skips over the life of making money.
• Having fun: satisfying the natural self’s unreflective and unlimited desires.
• Giving back: contributing to the shared goals and activities of community life.
• Seeking knowledge: adding to human knowledge and wisdom through inquiry and reflection.
• Fundamentally, living is activity (energeia).
• Types of aliveness and levels of flourishing in plants, animals, and human beings.
• The "difference of man" and the difference it makes.
• Core human capacities: conceptual understanding, valuation, intentionality, sociality, etc.
• Fulfillment is not a feeling of satisfaction but the activation and development of capacities.
• Maturation as a process of developing ever greater unity and integration and coherence.
• The self as an achievement.
• Taking life seriously.
• The task of living a fully human life.

Chapter 2: Character

• Character is the most complete development of the capacities for action and emotion.
• Taking goodness seriously.
• Learning to be good, educating your desires.
• Building character as a process of internalization.
• Character applies to both feeling and doing.
• Virtues moderate both pleasure and pain.
• Balance, the mean, what's appropriate, what's beautifully right.
• Internal order and disorder; unity, integration, and coherence.
• How the virtues foster order in our emotional lives, esp with respect to pleasures and pains.
• Excellence of character vs self-restraint and unrestraint.
• Virtues as acquired traits and consistent practices.
• Beyond virtue: virtuosity in living.
• Aristotle's lists of virtues.
• Justice as a unifying principle.
• Virtue subsumes and supersedes pleasure and pain.
• The limits of virtue.

Chapter 3: Wisdom

• Wisdom as the most complete development of the capacity for making decisions.
• Taking deliberation seriously.
• The example of humaneness as a wise adjustment to justice.
• Situational thinking and practical truth.
• Maintaining awareness of the good in action.
• The process of deliberation.
• Action with and without deliberation.
• Beyond choice: commitment.
• Wisdom and the unity of the virtues.
• Wisdom as a practice.
• Wisdom subsumes and supersedes virtue.

Chapter 4: Love

• Love as the most complete development of the capacity for forming relationships.
• Taking relationships seriously.
• The importance of socialityn in human life.
• The three forms of philia.
• The activity of loving is better than being loved.
• Marriage, family, friendship, brotherhood, community.
• Philia as a practice.
• Love subsumes and supersedes virtue.

Chapter 5: Love of Wisdom

• Sagacity as the most complete development of the capacity for understanding.
• Taking truth seriously.
• The active life vs the contemplative life.
• Beyond contemplation: the examined life.
• Serious leisure.
• Cultivating wonder.
• The higher pleasures.
• The higher reaches of what's beautifully right.
• Self-knowledge.
• The many ways in which human life is suffused with thought and awareness.
• The importance of insight and understanding the why.
• Philosophy as a practice.
• The love of wisdom subsumes and supersedes all else.

Chapter 6: Aristotle for Moderns

• How life has changed in the last 2400 years.
• The four lives revisited.
• The necessity and centrality of work in modern life.
• What if anything does Aristotle have to say about the realm of work?
• The status of women.
• The impact of the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the Enlightenment.
• Individualism and instrumentalism in modern life.
• The snares and attachments and distortions of modern society.
• The continuing relevance of Aristotle's philosophic insights.
• Toward a society of fulfillment.
• Fulfillment through the stages of life.
• Making your life complete.

End Matter

Brief Biography of Aristotle

Glossary

Abbreviations

Bibliography

Index of Passages

Index of Greek Words

Index of Names

Index of Subjects

Peter Saint-Andre > Writings > Complete Thyself