Volume 26, Issue 3, July 2009
John M. Connolly
Pages 274-296
Eudaimonism, Teleology, and the Pursuit of Happiness
Meister Eckhart on “Living Without a Why”
Recent interest among both philosophers and the wider public in the tradition of virtue ethics often takes its inspiration from Aristotle or from Thomas Aquinas. In this essay I briefly outline the ethical approaches of these two towering figures, and then describe more fully the virtue ethics of Meister Eckhart, a medieval thinker who admired, though critically, both Aristotle and Aquinas. His related but distinctively original approach to the virtuous life is marked by a striking and seemingly paradoxical injunction to “live without why.”