What Can Aristotle Do For You?

2017 | Philosophy, Psychology & Social Sciences

Aristotle was an extraordinary thinker who was preoccupied with an ordinary question: how to live a good life?

His achievements, experiences and philosophical musings all strive to answer the one crucial problem of how to be happy - a question that is as relevant today as it was then. How exactly should a human approach daily existence? How do we find individual and collective happiness?

Classicist and citizen of the modern world, Professor Edith Hall will take us through twelve of Aristotle's key ideas to try to answer this timeless question; from the importance of art, to the art of persuasion; and from mindful decision-making to confronting our own mortality.

In this pursuit of happiness, we get to know Aristotle the man, the scientist, the statistician, the soldier, the philosopher, the astronomer and the poet. And we see how his theories, which were advanced for their time, are even more relevant to us now as 21st-century global citizens than they were for any ancient civilization.

Edith Hall is one of Britain's foremost classicists, having held posts at the universities of Royal Holloway, Cambridge, Durham, Reading and Oxford. In 2015 she was awarded the Erasmus Medal of the European Academy, given to a scholar whose works represent a significant contribution to European culture and scientific achievement. She is the first woman to win this award.

Hall regularly writes in the Times Literary Supplement, reviews theatre productions on radio, and has written and edited more than a dozen works on the ancient world. She teaches at King's College London and lives in Gloucestershire.

Edith Hall (Author)