Since the late 1990s, anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’, a field of study long dominated by moral philosophers, social psychologists, and welfare economists. This chapter reviews anthropological approaches to happiness and well-being, and their engagement with ideas from virtue ethics, value theory, and capabilities approaches to development. Across a range of ethnographic cases in which the concepts have been applied as well as from which analogous concepts have been drawn, we highlight the analytical tension between (a) a search for objective measures that can be used to guide efforts aimed at increasing well-being and reducing global inequities and (b) the exploration of cultural worlds in which different peoples conceive of and pursue ‘the good life’ in varied and sometimes incommensurate ways. This multidisciplinary analytical field has been productive for anthropological theory, but scepticism remains around the implications of its evaluative impulses and ambitions.

This chapter surveys different aspects of the theme of love (erōs) in Plotinus’ philosophy. Starting with what Plotinus finds significant in the human experience of love, we consider Plotinus’ nuanced evaluation of various types of earthly love (including sexuality), moving then to love as a desire of the beautiful expressing the very nature of soul in its relation to its origin in a divine transcendent Intellect, itself constituted in a relation of love to the ultimate first principle, the One/Good. Plotinus’ claim that the One is love/self-love is examined and two aspects of love, as expressing deficiency and as a generosity manifesting fulfilment, are discussed in relation to the One and as found in Intellect and in soul.

Arthur Jan Keefer discusses the relationship of wisdom literature and virtue ethics. Posing questions of both method and substance, the chapter proposes how interpreters might make use of virtue theories for reading biblical wisdom literature. Of foremost importance are precise definitions for concepts of ‘virtue’, a selection of particular texts that set out an understanding of virtue, and an appreciation of traditional methods of biblical interpretation, all of which guards against vague conclusions and artificial comparison. Within the last decade, several scholars have pioneered the study of virtue ethics and wisdom literature, most notably through Proverbs and Job. Keefer presents this work and then suggests some inroads for similar studies of Ecclesiastes and Ben Sira, which have received less attention with respect to virtue. Lastly, he considers how the possibilities of virtue within each of these books link up with notions of ‘the good’ and a teleological orientation for ethics.

This chapter describes Gadamer’s initial understanding of the nature and significance of Platonic philosophy in terms of dialogue and dialectic. It then provides a brief account of Gadamer’s own interpretive method as presented in Truth and Method. The chapter then shows how Gadamer changed his understanding of Plato, particularly in relation to Aristotle. The chapter shows how this new understanding of Plato provides the ontological foundation for Gadamer’s own “hermeneutics.” Finally, we see how Gadamer’s readings of ancient philosophers constitute a fundamental challenge and correction to the mode of interpretation still dominant in Anglo-American philosophy.

This chapter uses Aristotle’s account in the Nicomachean Ethics to reconstruct Eudoxus’ argument for the thesis that pleasure is the good. He sets out and explains Eudoxus’s argument from universal pursuit: pleasure must be the good because all animals pursue pleasure in all natural and fitting choices. Eudoxus’ naturalism is an important background assumption here. He assumes that each animal, by nature, successfully chooses in all situations what is good for itself. This allows him to move from an observation about the universal pursuit of pleasure to the claim that pleasure is a feature of all natural and good choices. The pleasure that features in such choices is overall pleasure. Thus, Eudoxus can allow that animals sometimes naturally choose things that are painful, provided that what they choose contains more pleasure than pain overall. Aufderheide ends by suggesting how Eudoxus might defend the claim that pleasure is not merely a good, but moreover the good. This is not to claim that pleasure is the only thing that is good, but rather that pleasure plays a unique role in relation to choice: it is the only thing that features in all natural and good choices as a good.

The topics of Part 1, an introductory chapter, include: the form of the good; dialectic; the possibility of Plato's 'Callipolis'; the nature of the true philosopher; the philosopher-rulers' intellectual task; the 'most important thing(s) to learn'; the virtues; the meaning of the 'longer way'; the good as a reference point for distinguishing true from false accounts of virtues and virtuous things; and the definability (or not) of the good.