ABSTRACT
The central concern of the Dialogue Concerning Happiness is to establish the nature of “the Sovereign Good”, and the argument falls into two broad sections: setting up the “Pre-conceptions” of a Sovereign Good; and, finding a candidate to match up to these. James Harris’s Dialogue itself is broken into two parts, corresponding to the two large sections of the argument, the setting up of the Pre-conceptions of the Sovereign Good, and the election of the candidate to match them. The first half of the Dialogue breaks off, with nice rhetorical effect, at the point where it seems that nothing can be found to match the Pre-conceptions of the Sovereign Good. Happiness is shown not to be that good, and no suitable alternative has been suggested. But we are left with an image which looks forward to the only possible alternative that could be identified with the Sovereign Good seen as Harris sees it.
