The human sciences represent man's concern for man and for the human world. In this concern, there is no more important issue than the age-old problem that was first 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 a human life good -- what makes it worth living and what should we -do we do, not only to live, but to live well? In the entire tradition of Western literature and scholarship, one book more than any other defines this problem for us and helps us think about it. This book is of course Aristotle's Ethics, written in the fourth century BC. Aristotle was a student of Plato. Plato founded the Academy of Athens, which was the great university of ancient Greece. Aristotle studied and worked there for twenty years. Plato called it “the intellect of the school.” Unlike Socrates, Aristotle was interested in the study of nature. He was different from Socrates in another way. When he too was accused of non-Athenian activities, he decided to flee, saying: "I will not let the Athenians offend philosophy twice." » The subject covered in this book is called "ethics" because ethos is the Greek word for character, and the problems this book deals with are 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 that appears in the first 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: among these are life, liberty and scholarship. happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed... "Have you ever thought of what it means to say that every man has the 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 purposes of good government is to see that no man is interfered with -- moreover, that every man must be aided by the State in his efforts to lead... . middle of paper ......almost finished, and say it has been good It may seem strange to you at first, but when you. think about it for a moment, you will see that this is really not the case. An example will make this clear to you. You go to a football match. At the end of the first half, you meet one of your friends in. He says to you, "Good game, isn't it?" If the game has been played well so far, your natural response would be to say "Yes." But if you stop and think for a moment, you know that all you can say at the end of the half is that this is becoming a good game. Only if the match is played well throughout the second half can you say, when it's all over, that. it was a good game. Well, life is like that. Only when it is truly over can we say, “It was a good life,” that is, whether it was lived well toward the middle, or before. It can be said that it becomes a good life. Here is the way Aristotle makes this point: “Certainly the future is obscure to us, while happiness, we affirm, is an end and something definitive in all respects… If this is the case, we will call happy are those among living men in whom these conditions are and must be fulfilled."