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