In this brief history, philosopher Nicholas White reviews 2,500 years of philosophical thought about happiness. Addresses key questions such as: What is happiness? Should happiness play such a dominant role in our lives? How can we deal with conflicts between the various things that make us happy? Considers the ways in which major thinkers from antiquity to the modern day have treated happiness: from Plato’s notion of the harmony of the soul, through to Nietzsche’s championing of conflict over harmony. Relates questions about happiness to ethics and to practical philosophy.

A step by step, passage by passage analysis of the complete Republic. White shows how the argument of the book is articulated, the important interconnections among its elements, and the coherent and carefully developed train of though which motivates its complex philosophical reasoning. In his extensive introduction, White describes Plato's aims, introduces the argument, and discusses the major philosophical and ethical theories embodied in the Republic. He then summarizes each of its ten books and provides substantial explanatory and interpretive notes.

Long-hailed for skilled editing that enables students to explore many seminal and complex primary sources that contribute to the canon of ethical theory, GREAT TRADITIONS IN ETHICS has become the standard historical anthology for introducing ethical theory. Combining informative chapter introductions that provide biographical, historical, and theoretical contexts; well-placed comments inserted within the readings; and ample, but not overwhelming, reading selections, GREAT TRADITIONS IN ETHICS constructively challenges students to critically engage the most crucial ideas, thinkers, and readings in the history of ethical theory. With the Twelfth Edition, the authors focus on supplementing the readings with discussions of applying ethical theories'within the chapters and in the text's expanded Appendix.

Nicholas White opposes the long-standard view that ancient Greek ethics is fundamentally different from modern ethical views, especially those prevalent since Kant. Since the eighteenth century, and indeed since before Hegel, moral philosophers wishing to oppose the dualism of rationality-cum-morality vs. inclination, especially as it is manifested in Kant, have looked to Greek thought for an alternative conception of ethical norms and the good life. As a result, Greek ethics,particularly in the so-called Classical period of the fourth century BCE, has for more than two centuries been standardly thought to be fundamentally eudaimonist, and to have the character of what is nowadays normally called the ethics of virtue.White argues that although this picture of Greek ethics is not without an element of truth, it nevertheless seriously distorts the facts. In the first place, Greek thought is far more variegated than the picture suggests. Secondly, it contains many elements -- even in the Classical thinkers Plato and Aristotle -- that are not eudaimonist and also not suitable for an ethics of virtue.Greek thinkers were not as a group convinced of the possibility of a harmony of one's happiness with full regard for the happiness of others and with conformity to ethical norms. On the contrary, Greek thinkers were well aware of,and took seriously, the idea that ethical norms can possess a force that does not derive from conduciveness to one's own happiness. Indeed, even Plato and Aristotle took it that under certain circumstances there can even be a clash between ethical standards and one'sown well-being. The project of completely eliminating the possibility of such a clash came to full development not in the Classical period but rather in the ethics of the Stoics in the third century.Individual and Conflict in Greek Ethics argues that throughout Greek thought the concept of ethics as a source of obligations and imperatives can, in unfavorable circumstances, run counter to one's own happiness. In this sense Greek ethics has a shape similar to that of modern Kantian and post-Kantian thinking, and should not be seen as opposed to it.