In Life's Values Alan H. Goldman seeks to explain what is of ultimate value in individual lives. The proposed candidates include pleasure, happiness, meaning, and well-being. Only the latter is the all-inclusive category of personal value, and it consists in the satisfaction of deep rational desires. Since individuals' rational desires differ, the book cannot dictate what will maximize your own well-being and what in particular you ought to pursue. However it can tell you to make your desires rational (that is, informed and coherent) and it can also explain the nature of these states that typically enter into well-being: pleasure, happiness, and meaning being typically partial causes as well as effects of well-being. All are by-products of satisfying rational desires and rarely successfully aimed at directly. Pleasure comes in sensory, intentional, and pure feeling forms, each with an opposite in pain or distress. Happiness in its primary sense is an emotion, not a constant state as some philosophers assume, and in secondary senses a mood (disposition to have an emotion) or temperament (disposition to be in a mood). Meaning in life is a matter of events in one's life fitting into intelligible narratives. Events in narratives are understood teleologically as well as causally, in terms of outcomes aimed at as well antecedent events. So, in the briefest terms, this book distinguishes and relates pleasure, happiness, well-being, and meaning, and relates each to motivation and value.

About the Author
Alan H. Goldman earned his B.A. at Yale and his Ph.D. at Columbia. He has taught at the University of Miami for 25 years and at the College of William & Mary for 15 years. Prior to this, he worked at Columbia, Ohio University, and University of Idaho, held visiting positions at University of Michigan, University of Colorado, and University of Auckland, and also a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton. Goldman is the author of nine books, the most recent being Practical Rules, Reasons from Within and Philosophy and the Novel, and of roughly 150 articles in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics.

Reviews
a wonderful book ... This book is a valuable handbook for any lay person who wants to find a meaning in his/her life, and has not found the clue for how to pursue it elsewhere. It is also a useful tool for students and scholars especially in philosophy and psychology. I believe it will be a very useful tool for classroom discussions from any introductory course in psychology and philosophy to ethics, metaphysics, psychological and philosophical counseling. * Kamuran Elbeyoglu, Metapsychology Online Reviews *
Alan Goldman's book is an important contribution to the philosophical literature on the topics listed in the subtitle. It is carefully written and argumentatively rich, and I highly recommend it. * Steward Goetz, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198829737
Author Alan H. Goldman
Format Hardback
Page Count 198
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Dimensions(mm) 220mm * 147mm * 17mm