How To Live A Good Life: A Guide To Choosing Your Personal Philosophy, edited by Pigliucci, Cleary and Kaufman, is a new volume collecting together 15 philosophers’ stories of how and why they chose their life philosophies. Here, the editors explain why selecting a life philosophy is an important decision, and how they picked their own.

Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Clearly, that’s an exaggeration. Nevertheless, some philosophers have argued that if we don’t pay attention to why we live in a certain way rather than any other, we risk “misliving” our only life, getting to the end of it, on our proverbial death bed, and thinking: “shoot, I wasted it!” Or, as Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych puts it: “Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done… But how could that be, when I did everything properly?”

In order to save you from Ilych’s fate, the three of us have asked 15 philosophers to write about their own life philosophy (or religion). Not just in terms of theory and doctrine, but especially with regard to how they practice it and what kind of impact it has made on their lives. Responses included ancient philosophies from the East (Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism); ancient philosophies from the West (Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism); religious traditions (Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Ethical Culture); and modern philosophies (Existentialism, Pragmatism, Effective Altruism, and Secular Humanism).

But wait a minute: basic research in psychology clearly shows that too many choices have a paralyzing effect, so isn’t this a bit too much of a smorgasbord? To put it even more clearly: how, exactly, does one go about choosing a philosophy of life? By what criteria? How do we avoid “buyer’s regret,” if we make a choice and then are not happy with it? Speaking of happiness: how does it enter into it? Is it really the business of a life philosophy to make us happy? Does the concept of happiness even make sense? Let’s try to put some order upon the matter, and address three specific issues: the nature of a life philosophy; whether happiness is the goal of such a philosophy; and how to go about choosing one.

A philosophy of life is defined as having, at a minimum, two components: a metaphysics and an ethics. A metaphysics is an account of how the world hangs together. An ethics is an account of how we should live in the world.

A philosophy of life is defined as having, at a minimum, two components: a metaphysics and an ethics. A metaphysics is an account of how the world hangs together, so to speak. For instance, the Epicureans thought the world was made of atoms randomly bumping into each other, while the Stoics believed in an orderly, deterministic universe regulated by laws of cause and effect.

An ethics is an account of how we should live in the world. For instance, Buddhists follow the eightfold path: right view (actions have consequences, death is not the end, etc.); right intention (adopting a life that follows the eightfold path); right speech (no lying, no rude speech, etc.); right conduct (refraining from killing sentient beings); right livelihood (making one’s living in an ethical manner); right effort (preventing the arising of unwholesome states); right mindfulness (being mindful of Buddhist teachings); right samadhi (practicing meditation).