About
Eudaimonia
Eudaimonia is usually translated as happiness or flourishing. We use it as the app’s name because it was the central word in many ancient debates about how to live — not because every thinker agreed on what it means, or even agreed that it was the goal.
Aristotle measured a good life across its whole span. The Cyrenaics cared about the pleasure of the present moment. Epicurus called the goal pleasure, but meant something the Cyrenaics denied was pleasure at all. The Stoics said virtue alone is enough; Aristotle disagreed. And Sextus Empiricus questioned whether anyone knows what is good by nature. These are real disagreements, and we try to keep them that way.
Pre-Socratics
Heraclitus and Parmenides disagreed about whether change is fundamental or an illusion.
Pythagoreans
Number, harmony and a communal discipline of life, as reported by later sources.
Socrates
Questioning what we think we know; holding that doing wrong is worse than suffering it.
Plato
Turning the soul toward unchanging realities; a good life as a measured mixture of thought and pleasure.
Aristotle
Eudaimonia as a whole life of virtuous activity — which also needs friends and some good fortune.
Cynics
Diogenes and Hipparchia tested every convention against nature and lived with almost nothing.
Cyrenaics
Aristippus and his followers aimed at present pleasure, not happiness as the condition of a whole life.
Epicureans
Pleasure as freedom from pain and trouble — a definition the Cyrenaics explicitly rejected.
Stoics
Virtue as the only true good; outer things neither help nor harm the wise.
Pyrrhonian Sceptics
Sextus Empiricus suspended judgment on what is good by nature, and reported calm followed.
The journey here is yours to make: read a passage, notice where it clashes with another, and decide what you think. Each daily card ends with a question rather than a lesson.
How we treat the texts
Historical passages are kept separate from modern commentary: the daily card explanations are our interpretation, not the philosophers’ words. Translations come from older public-domain editions and are shown in quotation marks with author, work, section, translator and a source link. Paraphrases are clearly labelled and never placed in quotation marks. Where a translation is still awaiting an editorial check against its source, we say so.
Many ancient thinkers wrote nothing that survives, so we often rely on later reports. When a saying comes from a later source, such as Diogenes Laertius writing centuries afterwards, we note it.
Most passages are paraphrases whose wording and references are still awaiting verification against the source texts, and they are marked as such. We would rather grow slowly than present anything unverified as authentic.
Your privacy
There are no accounts. Your journal and saved passages live only in your own browser and are never sent anywhere. That also means they are not backed up, so use the export option in your collection to keep a copy — and the import option there to put a copy back. Importing only adds: it never overwrites or removes what is already in this browser.