Using ancient philosophy to cope with your modern problems

What It Covers

Notre Dame philosophy professor Megan Sullivan connects ancient Greek philosophy — from Socrates through Aristotle — to modern challenges including career traps, AI ethics, love, religion, and capitalism, arguing that 2,400-year-old frameworks for eudaimonia (flourishing) remain the most practical tools for navigating contemporary life.

Key Questions Answered

• •Moral Imagination Over Information: Socrates' core teaching method — asking questions rather than delivering answers — expanded students' awareness of options they didn't know existed. Sullivan replicates this in her Notre Dame course by structuring 10 escalating questions, starting with political disagreement and ending with mortality essays, to break students free from narrow, socially-prescribed visions of success.
• •Aristotle's Eudaimonia Framework: Aristotle taught that flourishing requires two parallel practices: building healthy communities and training habits of reason and self-control. Unlike Plato's political revolution approach, this is a personal development system anyone can apply now — Sullivan describes it as the original self-help methodology, one that works regardless of external circumstances or systemic conditions.
• •Love as Strategic Vulnerability: Sullivan's "love pill" thought experiment — would you take a pill causing you to love everyone equally — reveals that genuine love requires exclusivity and vulnerability. A student's insight that feeling that level of concern for everyone would be unbearable captures Aristotle's point: love is the one virtue whose strength derives specifically from making a person weaker and more exposed to loss.
• •AI Lacks the Core Requirement of Friendship: Real friendship requires engaging with another self — a distinct inner life capable of disagreeing, challenging, and caring independently. AI systems are designed to validate users and protect self-image, making them structurally incapable of genuine love or friendship. Sullivan warns against placing vulnerable people — elderly or young adults — in situations where AI substitutes for human relationships.
• •User Agency as Ethical Lever in AI: Sullivan argues that AI companies only maintain business models if users adopt their products, meaning consumers hold meaningful power. Applying philosophical frameworks to AI means actively deciding which products to use, how to vote on AI regulation, and what to permit in schools and workplaces — treating these as values-based decisions rather than inevitable technological defaults.