Investigating the world

Epicurus, born in Greek year of 341BC, asked a different question the oldest did at that time: what makes us happy instead of “good”? Studying happiness, he concluded some remarkable things: 1) The friendship is better than the romantic or sexuality because many people are jealous or fight a lot in this type of relationships, 2) Working alone or in small groups improving the world and felling we help others is more satisfying that working long hours to make money and 3) Changing luxury by a calm and pure mind and a simple way of life. So, we need three things to be happy in our life: to have the friends around, to stop working to other people and take care of our own staffs and become calm being alone reflecting, reading and meditating. These insights spreaded and motivated the creation of a lot of communities in Mediterranean that were later transformed in monasteries by Christians. For SoL, even Karl Marx with his concept of communism, can be considered a version o...

SoL (School of Life) worked with the eudaimonia concept in this video: a word that comes from Plato and Aristotle. Basically, SoL compares eudaimonia with a contemporaneous word - happiness - saying that the ancient philosophers didn’t propose us to have a happy life. The purpose of our life is not avoid suffering or be unhappy – the way the word is used today, but overcome the daily and simple challenges that come every day under pressure. For SoL, eudaimonia should be associated with the word fulfilment that is distinguished by happiness by pain. So, the word eudaimonia is able to accommodate happy and unhappy and, instead of pursuing a pain free existence, we need to go further and we can make the difference. In short terms, we need to do what is really important more than to smile all the time. Follows eudaimonia recommendation means that we can spend our whole life fighting in our job, relationship and political engagement but finishing our days feeling these tasks wer...

          According to SoL (School of Life), the debate between free will and determinism has been crossing the Philosophy History since the beginning until our time reaching even the neuroscientists. It concerns about whether the human being is able to dominate their actions by themselves or they are determined by forces beyond their control, like fate and politics. SoL argues that the long running arguments in favor or against both sides are not conclusive because they are based on objective variables when they should be thought as what is relevant to me (to me… to me?). Also, they vary from person to person guided by two psychological aspects: defeatism and aspiration.           Does the course of our life belong to the others, like our parents, bosses and so on or can we change our life and our relationships based on our strenght and free will? The second should be even better but more difficult, of course. So moving far from the o...