The humanities represent man's interest in man and in the human world. In this interest there is no more important problem than the secular one which for the first time was systematically discussed here, in Greece, more than two thousand years ago. The problem I am referring to, which the ancient Greek philosophers thought deeply about, is this: what makes human life good, what makes it worth living, and what must we do, not just simply to live, but to live well? In the entire tradition of Western literature and knowledge, one book more than any other defines this problem for us and helps us think about it. That book of course is Aristotle's Ethics, written in the fourth century BC. Aristotle was a student of Plato. Plato had founded the Academy of Athens, which was the great university of ancient Greece. Aristotle studied and worked there for about twenty years. It was called by Plato "the intellect of the school". Unlike Socrates, Aristotle was interested in the study of nature. He was different from Socrates in another respect. When he too was accused of un-Athenian activities, he decided to flee, saying: "I will not allow the Athenians to offend philosophy twice." character, and the problems with which this book deals are the problems of character and conduct of life. The Ethics is divided into ten parts. I will only deal with the first part, in which Aristotle talks about happiness. But before we begin, let me remind you of a famous statement about happiness found in the opening paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."You have. Have you ever thought about what it means to say that it is every man's natural right not to be happy, but to engage in the pursuit of happiness? What do we mean when we say that one of the main objects of good government is to ensure that no man is interfered with and, above all, that every man must be aided by the State in his effort to lead... .middle of paper......almost finished , and to say that it was beautiful. This may seem strange to you at first, but if you think about it for a moment you will see that it is actually not. An example will make this clear to you. Go to a football match. At the end of the first half you meet your friend in the corridor. He says to you, "Good game, right?" If it's been well played so far, your natural response would be to say, "Yes." But if you stop to think for a moment, you will. Realize that everything you you can say, at the end of the half, it's becoming a good game. Only if it's played well for the whole second half, you'll be able to say, when it's all over it was a good game. Well, life is like that. Only when it really is once it's over you can say, "It was a good life," that is, if it was well lived towards the middle, or sooner you can say it's becoming a good life. Here's the way Aristotle expresses this point: "Certainly the future is obscure to us, while happiness, we affirm, is an end and something in every way definitive... If this be so, we will call happy those among living men in whom these conditions are and must be satisfied."