The Good Life Method

Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning

By: Meghan Sullivan, Paul Blaschko

Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins

Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

Two philosophers ask and answer the big questions about the search for faith and happiness.

For seekers of all stripes, philosophy is timeless self-care. Notre Dame philosophy professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko have reinvigorated this tradition in their wildly popular and influential undergraduate course “God and the Good Life”, in which they wrestle with the big questions about how to live and what makes life meaningful.

Now they invite us into the classroom to work through issues like what justifies our beliefs, whether we should practice a religion and what sacrifices we should make for others - as well as to investigate what figures such as Aristotle, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Iris Murdoch, and W. E. B. Du Bois have to say about how to live well. Sullivan and Blaschko do the timeless work of philosophy using real-world case studies that explore love, finance, truth, and more. In so doing, they push us to escape our own caves, ask stronger questions, explain our deepest goals, and wrestle with suffering, the nature of death, and the existence of God.

Philosophers know that our “good life plan” is one that we as individuals need to be constantly and actively writing to achieve some meaningful control and sense of purpose even if the world keeps throwing surprises our way. For at least the past 2,500 years, philosophers have taught that goal-seeking is an essential part of what it is to be human - and crucially that we could find our own good life by asking better questions of ourselves and of one another. This virtue ethics approach resonates profoundly in our own moment.

The Good Life Method is a winning guide to tackling the big questions of being human with the wisdom of the ages.

This audiobook includes a downloadable PDF with a list of resources for further reading.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Meghan Sullivan (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“[A] wise and accessible guide . . . entertaining and insightful . . . Those pondering the perennial question of how to live a good life should start here.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A warm, empathetic guide for examining the quality and meaning of one’s own life . . . Thoughtful contemplations about thorny moral questions.”—Kirkus

“At once revolutionary and conservative . . . revolutionary in its insistence that the results of philosophical reflection be put into practice . . . positively warm, oddly free of moralizing, welcoming of disagreement and engagement. By the end, you are ready to have a beer with the authors—and you feel they would welcome the opportunity . . . boldness in embracing controversy—enabled by the calm confidence of the authors, which supports their willingness to transparently and undogmatically engage—continues throughout, to excellent effect . . . ’Find[ing] a goal proportionate to life’ (to life, not to our essential nature) is the animating project of the Good Life Method. Inviting and guiding the reader through a set of reflections—even spiritual exercises—aimed at that discovery is a very Good Thing.”—Pamela Hieronymi, Los Angeles Review of Books

Excellent

provided a lot of interesting ideas, insight, and even some revelations - for me, anyway.

Excellent read for philosophers, thinkers and the

I loved this book. As a therapist and seeker of the good life for myself, I found this book to have a wealth of thought provoking topics and questions to explore that I can use both for myself and for some clients seeking a better understanding of themselves and their lives. I found it well organized and easy to follow along with. Admittedly, I wasn't sure if I would be able to keep up without having a strong philosophy background, but the authors explained ideas and posed questions in a way that I could follow being (decades) removed from my last philosophy classes. I highly recommend this book. Also, the narrator of the audio version was easy to listen to. It felt very natural hearing his reading of the book.

Philosophy To-Go

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, the way that it packaged the philosophies of virtue ethicists from across history and delivered them to my future self wrapped in a fine paper of hard questions.

That being said, I do think the back half of this book gets a little preachy about God. I found myself tuning out. these are still important topics and questions for many people, but I don't know if I'm one of them.