It’s Not Selfish to Pursue One’s Own Happiness (Rightly Understood): Reconciling Platonic Eros with Christian Agape

Can the Christian ethic of selfless, self-sacrificial Agape be reconciled with the classical eudaemonism of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle? Thomas Aquinas attempted such a reconciliation, agreeing with the Greeks that one’s own happiness (eudaemonia/beatitude) is the ultimate end of all human action, and that self-love (eros) is the foundation of all other loves, while insisting (with the Christian tradition) that we are called to love God above self, and even to love oneself only for God’s sake. I will defend Aquinas’s harmonization against the charge of inconsistency, by distinguishing two ways in which something can be an “ultimate end." About our Scholar: Professor Robert Koons, University of Texas at Austin Professor Robert Koons specializes in philosophical logic and in the application of logic to long-standing philosophical problems, including metaphysics, philosophy of mind and intentionality, semantics, political philosophy and metaethics, and philosophy of religion. His book Paradoxes of Belief and Strategic Rationality (Cambridge, 1992) received the Aarlt Prize from the Council of Graduate Schools in 1994. He is the author of Realism Regained (OUP, 2000) and the co-editor (with George Bealer) of The Waning of Materialism (OUP, 2010). He is at work with Tim Pickavance on a textbook on metaphysics. He is working on analytic Aristotelianism and social ontology.