ABSTRACT
Here I discuss the Buddhist answers to these questions. Buddhist philosophical psychology is especially interesting to Westerners because Buddhists deny (or, so it is said) that there are any such things as persons or selves (atman) while offering advice, philosophical therapy, about how best to live a good and meaningful life as a person. How a non-person without a self lives a good human life, how a non-person with no self lives morally and meaningfully and achieves enlightenment or awakening, is deliciously puzzling. I’ll explain how non-persons ourish, and achieve, or might achieve, a stable state of what I call eudaimoniaBuddha. My interpretive strategy assumes this: Aristotle was right that all people at all times seek to ourish, to nd fulllment, to achieve eudaimonia, but that people disagree about what it is. When Aristotle said this he had in mind disagreements internal to the Greek situation about whether pleasure, money, reputation, contemplation, or virtue bring eudaimonia. And he thought that he could give an argument internal to the logic of his tradition that favored the last answer. The problem repeats, however, across traditions. Thus I use – and recommend that others doing comparative work
use – a superscripting strategy, eudaimoniaBuddha,eudaimoniaAristotle, eudaimoniaHedonist,to distinguish between conceptions of the good life. Whether there are ways to critically compare these different views according to some shared logic is something I offer no opinion about here (Flanagan 2007). The superscripting strategy allows us to draw distinctions or contrasts between conceptions of eudaimonia such as this:
• EudaimoniaAristotle 5 an active life of reason and virtue where the major virtues are courage, justice, temperance, wisdom, generosity, wit, friendliness, truthfulness magnicence (lavish philanthropy), and greatness of soul (believing that one is deserving of honor if one really is deserving of honor).
