Al-Farabi's Concept of Happiness and Perfection: An Analytic Study

摘要

This paper is an examination of the concept of Happiness Al-farabi's philosophy. In recent times there has been growing interest in the study of happiness and its impact on individuals and members of the society, within various disciplines: such as psychology, social sciences, literary studies, and as well as in popular culture. This shift can be characterized as eudemonic turn. Within philosophy, historically the concept of happiness has been examined from various dimensions by various scholars. For instance, Aristotle argues that happiness is the supreme practical good because it is perfect, final, self –sufficing and complete in itself, that is, happiness is an end. By this Aristotle mean that happiness is an activity leading to virtue. The Stoic see happiness as the moral desire of any individual leading to the good of his well-being, the Hedonist on the other hand sees happiness as the balance of individuals pleasant over unpleasant experience. The study aim at examining Al-Farabi's notion of happiness and its contemporary relevance, to achieve this, the conceptual analytic method was adopted, method to enable us analyze selected relevant texts. The paper discovered that Al-Farabi'shasa bifocal notion of happiness, that cannot be said to be morally isolating but be integrated into ontological correlations, and that except perfection is attained through this correlation happiness can only be desired but not attained.