Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) On Happiness Happiness as a rational, virtous activity  Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) was one of the most important philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. He was born in Macedonia, was a pupil of Plato, and later was a tutor of Alexander the Great. His writings are systematic, covering most aspects of reality and life. They exerted a tremendous influence on the history of philosophy. The following passages are adapted from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, an...

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was born in Germany to a Jewish family and studied philosophy at several universities. She was a student of Heidegger at Marburg University and of Husserl at Freiburg University, and wrote her doctoral dissertation at Heidelberg University under the guidance of Jaspers. Since she was Jewish, she escaped Germany in 1933, and then escaped occupied France in 1940, and ended up in the USA, where she taught at several universities until her death. She wrote on a variety...

G.E.M. Anscombe – How Wittgenstein cured me Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) (usually called G.E.M. Anscombe), was an important British philosopher in the analytic tradition. She was born in England, and at the age of 14 converted to Catholicism, to which she remained devout all her life. She married a fellow philosopher, Peter Geach, while studying classics and philosophy at Oxford. She then studied at Cambridge University and took classes with Wittgenstein, who influenced deeply her way of philosophizing. She later became a...