What does it mean to be human? What constitutes the good life, and how can I find it? What makes an action right? Is the rightness or wrongness of an action determined by the consequences of the action, the motives behind doing the action, or is there something about the action itself that makes it right or wrong? How have the greatest thinkers of human history tried to answer these questions? Classical Curriculum & Western Ethics seeks to investigate these perennial issues of the human condition through a survey of western philosophy. This philosophy reader features selections from Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and C.S. Lewis, so that students may read what the greatest philosophers of the Western canon have had to say about the nature of the ‘good life’ and the nature of human happiness. As great men stand on the shoulders of giants, so “Classical Curriculum & Western Ethics” preserves many of the giants of the Western canon for students to stand upon and make sense of the world in which they live.
