Education and the good life: Petrarch’s insights and the current research on well-being

ABSTRACT

According to Petrarch, the main goal of the liberal arts is to help us live a good life and become wise, virtuous, and serene. This is also something achieved via true Christian faith. In this paper, my goal is twofold. First, I review Petrarch’s general attitude to the good life and the ways to live it, along with his advice on how to remain content or regain peace in the face of difficulties. As a devout Christian, Petrarch emphasises that faith suffices for a person to have a virtuous and contented life, but the combination of a liberal arts education and a Christian education is ideal. Second, I highlight the importance of Petrarch’s insights, by taking a closer look at the contemporary research on the universal psychological needs and how their satisfaction relates to the overall sense of well-being of people across different cultures. Studies show that people who feel more autonomous generally have an increased sense of well-being. Furthermore, those who are ‘mindful’, that is those who can precisely identify their own psychological states and the situation they are in, tend to feel more autonomous. I place Petrarch’s insistence that an education combining the liberal arts and religion helps us become serene and peaceful within the context of these results. I call for further research on the relations between autonomy, mindfulness, and education and show that some centuries-old insights can direct our research and, as such, prove valuable today.

KEYWORDS:

• Petrarch
• liberal arts
• religious education
• mindfulness
• basic psychological needs
• well-being

Acknowledgments

The work on this paper has been supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia through the project Dynamic systems in nature and society: philosophical and empirical aspects, number 179041. I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their thorough and very helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I use G. Zak’s translation of the paragraphs from Familiar letters and The Secret as quoted in Zak (2010), except for the paragraphs from the letter to Gibarto that I quote independently.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministarstvo Prosvete, Nauke i Tehnološkog Razvoja [179041].

Notes on contributors

Ljiljana Radenovic

Ljiljana Radenovic is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. Her main research interests fall into the field of philosophy and history of cognitive science, history of emotions, developmental psychology, and philosophy of biology.

BA: Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade

MA: Department of Philosophy, York University, Toronto, Canada

Ph.D: Department of Philosophy, York University, Toronto, Canada