Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

The Art of Living

The Goal of Life is Happiness

Massimo Pigliucci surveys the views of ancient schools.

As we all know, the telos of life is eudaimonia. Or to use English, the goal of life is happiness. This immediately leads to two crucial questions: How do we achieve happiness? And what is happiness, anyway?

Together with my friends Greg Lopez and Meredith Kunz, I have tried to navigate all the answers to these questions that were articulated by the ancient Greco-Romans, in Live Like a Philosopher—What the Ancient Greeks and Romans Can Teach Us About Living a Happy Life (2025). The result is a conceptual map featuring three main ‘ports’, which we’ll now briefly visit: the port of pleasure, the port of character, and the port of doubt.

Our first stop is the port of pleasure – home of the hedonistic philosophies of the Cyrenaics and the Epicureans.

…