niquely human functions with excellence and skill. Aristotle believed that our rational soul gave us the ability to perform such activities. Therefore, according to Aristotle, the function of human beings is to live a life filled with activities that require the exercise of our reason or intelligence. And a happy life will be one that such activities are performed wellallowing for the person to reach their own specific human potential. Happiness is something that all humans strive to attain and once we have exercised the most important and highest of these excellences, it can finally be attained as the chief good.Like Socrates, Aristotle believed that the most pleasant life was that of the philosopher. The philosopher was one to quest endlessly after knowledge for no other sake but that of the knowledge itself. Aristotle reinforces this idea of superiority by saying that activities done for the sake of the activities themselves are much more valuable than those that are done as a means to something else. Like the philosopher, a person wishing to attain true happiness must first learn how to use his unique human gift of intellectual thought to its greatest extent. A way of doing this would be to perform the activity of studying. A person who studies for the love of gaining priceless knowledge is following in the footsteps of the philosopher and will live the most pleasant life. There are two types of human virtues and they are virtue of thought and virtue of character. Virtue of character comes from the tendencies we have acquired to respond to certain situations in different ways. These responses soon become habitual and we then tend to respond to things in a patterned way. Our psyches decide the correct way to act in any situation that requires a choice to be made. After some time and experience, we begin to develop our own rules that dictate how we respond to choices made by allowing us to classify new situations from wh...
