Research

Greek Translation

In the summer (and fall) of 2007 I undertook, along with a student of mine, Ryan Pack, to translate Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates' Defense (also known as Apology), Crito and the death scene from Phaedo. A main reason for doing so was that no good translation of these most popular texts is available on-line. Most commonly, one finds Jowett's translations from the 1890's. These are very loose and their age by itself means the language is often unrecognizable to contemporary English speakers. Furthermore, these translations are typically (though not always) found without Stephanus pagination and in html. Because of variation in printing, readers discussing the dialogues together (as in a class) have no common means of reference. Other translations can be found but none more recent that from the 1910s. Thus, we humbly present the following translations for the internet era.

Further information about the project can be found in the front matter, but we should note here that these files are distributed under Creative Commons License (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works). For more information, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. These are .pdf files.

Socrates of Athens: Euthyphro, Socrates' Defense, Crito, and the death scene from Phaedo by Plato, Translated by Cathal Woods and Ryan Pack, 2007. (That is, all four pieces, together with front matter.)
Euthyphro by Plato, Translated by Cathal Woods and Ryan Pack, 2007
Socrates' Defense (aka Apology) by Plato, Translated by Cathal Woods and Ryan Pack, 2007
Crito by Plato, Translated by Cathal Woods and Ryan Pack, 2007
Phaedo (death scene only) by Plato, Translated by Cathal Woods and Ryan Pack, 2007

At Amazon.com, Kindle versions are now available (for purchase - books cannot be free at Amazon):
All 4, with introduction | Euthyphro | Socrates' Defense | Crito and the death scene from Phaedo

You can read more about the project by looking at these PowerPoint slide (.ppt) and reading the accompanying text (.pdf).

Aristotle's Politics

Aristotle's Greece is a long way from modern Western political circumstances but his Politics is still worth reading. Indeed, Aristotelian political theory and virtue ethics has been undergoing a revival of late. This is because of the similarities to our own times, rather than the differences. Among the most important similarities are the following: Aristotle's ethics does without a god; Aristotle's ethics goes well beyond feeling good in its conception of happiness; Aristotle's politics combines community and liberty in a way that many of us long for. In short, some of the dimensions of material and intellectual culture shaping Aristotle's political thought are those that shape ours, descriptively or normatively. After a long history, when it comes to happiness we find ourselves, unnervingly, focused more on feeling good than being good, becoming economic rather than political, narrow in our knowledge rather than broad. Aristotle offers a vision that seems to combine dependence with independence, thinking with action, individual with community, locality with transcendence. I have been trying to understand the contours of Aristotle's political theory, and in particular the minimal qualities that individuals need in order to be good citizens. I say 'minimal' because Aristotle's descriptions of the excellent human being and of the best regime(s) of kingship and aristocracy are both beyond us and, in some ways, repugnant to us. Thus I have been focusing on the regime of polity, a regime of ordinary people.

The differences, however, are substantial. Among the main differences are the following: Aristotle's different weighting of communal values vs. individual liberty; the less-than-categorical rejection of accidental slavery; the denigration of women; the denigration of material interdependence. The latter is important because Aristotelian liberty involves almost complete freedom from activities that are not an exercise of intellect: the flourishing person is one who is active in politics -- where he considers the common good -- and/or science -- where he considers the underlying nature of the world. Aristotle grants that it is possible, in addition, to be a farmer, adding work to political activity. But Aristotle is not allowing just any work, but the work of an independent person. So it looks like the vast majority of us - folks working for other folks - are screwed. Why could Aristotle not conceive of a community that was inter-dependent not only politically but materially? Why did he think that material inter-dependence (and even dependence) was objectionable but political inter-dependence was not? Why must we share rule, but not share production? Then, if we decided that he was wrong about this, we should try to understand why.

The most recent versions of the chapters of my disseratation are available upon request - cathalwoods at gmail dot com .

Happiness

Having said all of the above about Aristotle's politics, it's not a giant leap to my interest in happiness. There's lots of work being done related to happiness and in the last few years some of it has broken through into the popular culture due to a slew of popular texts, written in some cases by those who have conducted research, or, in other cases, by those who see the impact that the new science of happiness has for their fields. Much of the research has concerned the measurement of happiness or given close attention to the aspects of life which increase or descrease happiness. Many of these results might not be unexpected, but they are now the subjects of empirical research.

Sociologists such as Ruut Veenhoven have been gathering data on happiness across countries; economists such as Richard Easterlin have been analyzing the impact of wealth; Ed Diener has done a lot of work on the assessment of happiness (among many other things); Daniel Nettle has combined his work in evolutionary psychology with studies of brain chemistry to explain why humans are always mostly happy but never quite satisfied; Richard Layard, an economist, agrees with scholars such as Robert Frank (author of Luxury Fever) who think that economics has missed much in its understanding of human motivations, and proposes various social measures (such as taxation, tackling chronic unemployment, funding mental health research, and so on) based on the new research into happiness; Bruno Frey & Alois Stutzer, however, caution against centralized activity because of the importance of self-determination, which they studied in Switzerland; Darrin McMahon (an historian) has reviewed the cultural history of happiness in the West, while Nicholas White has taken a philosophical survey.

Psychologists, of course, are in the forefront. There has been some particularly noteworthy work on

adaptation - human beings adapt to their experiences, so that neither the effect of (moderately) good and (moderately) bad experiences are not long-lasting)
hedonic comparison - the effect of income on happiness depends on the wealth of those we compare ourselves to, whether it is our past selves, our expectations, our peers around us, or those in advertisements and in other counties
genetic contribution to happiness - David Lykken applied his work on genetic heritability of traits in twins to happiness to argue for a happiness 'set point'

Other recent works: Jonathan Haidt (a social psychologist who studies elevation and transcendence) has written a book on happiness which describes 10 key questions and topics that have been present in human experience since ancient times; Barry Schwartz's research into how variety in one's options can be distressing has led to the book The Paradox of Choice; Daniel Gilbert now has a book called 'Stumbling on Happiness' in which he attempts to describe how we can overcome the results from his research showing the difficulties humans have in knowing what effect future events will have on our happiness. Most notably, Martin Seligman has taken his research into learned helplessness and optimism and broadened it into Positive Psychology. Seligman has enfolded the idea of flow, developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi whom Seligman calls his 'co-conspirator'. One of the main thrusts of the project at present is to test empirically various exercises for increasing happiness.

(For a large list of books and articles, see the Bibliography at the World Database of Happiness.)

(See 'teaching' for my class on happiness.)

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