Diversity Reading List

Content: Wolf argues that "moral perfection, in the sense of moral saintliness, does not constitute a model of personal well-being toward which it would be particularly rational or good or desirable for a human being to strive."

Abstract:
A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy covers the entire historical development of Chinese philosophy from its ancient origins to today, providing the most wide-ranging and authoritative English-language anthology of Chinese thought available. This superb book brings together key selections from all the great thinkers and schools in every period—ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary—and presents these texts in their entirety. Each selection is accompanied by explanatory aids and scholarly documentation that shed invaluable light on all aspects of Chinese thought. Featuring elegant and faithful translations of some of the most important classical writings, some translated here for the first time, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy is an indispensable resource for students, scholars, and anyone interested in Chinese philosophy and culture.

Abstract:
According to the desire-satisfaction theory of well-being, your life goes well to the extent that your desires are satisfied, and your life goes badly to the extent that your desires are frustrated. Some have objected to this theory by arguing that there are some cases of depression in which the person is negative in well-being even though they altogether lack desires. In this paper, I give a solution to this problem. I first argue that the problem arises only in cases of affectless depression in which the person has no affective experiences, and that once we realize this, the force of the objection is weakened. I then argue that, even in cases of affectless depression, depressed people plausibly have dispositional desires—ones defined by dispositions to act or feel in certain ways—that are masked by their depression, and that the frustration of these masked desires is bad for them.