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 > making this argument I rely on the claim that there is a strong, particular
 > sense in which other people are unknowable to us, a claim which is developed
 > in the fiction of Haruki Murakami.
+
+# Ph.D. dissertation/thesis: *Purely Dynamic Eudaimonism*
+
+In progress.
+
+Abstract:
+
+> /Purely dynamic eudaimonism/ (PDE) is a novel view according to which the
+> final end of practical reasoning is virtuous activity. This should be
+> distinguished from the view that its final end is the agent's possession of
+> virtue, as well as views according to which its final end is the obtaining
+> of some other state of affairs, or engaging in some other activity or
+> activities. The commonly-raised egoism and intellectualism objections to
+> eudaimonism have motivated eudaimonists such as Rosalind Hursthouse (1999)
+> to appeal to eudaimonia in only carefully circumscribed ways. PDE escapes
+> these objections, and so PDE enables deploying the concept of eudaimonia
+> without reservation to more satisfactorily explain how possession of one
+> virtue seems to imply possession of others, how virtue enables the virtuous
+> to respond well to very different situations, and how the aspiration to
+> develop virtue is a rational response to the challenges that arise in any
+> adult life. Against non-eudaimonist philosophies of happiness, such as Susan
+> Wolf's, PDE better accounts for how ethical improvement makes lives good; it
+> also explains how the process of integrating our practical concerns itself
+> contributes to making lives good. I defend PDE in three stages. First, I
+> provide a taxonomy of conceptions of happiness, giving precise accounts of
+> the characteristic features shared by all and only eudaimonist conceptions
+> of happiness (including a minimalist theory of virtue), while also
+> explaining how eudaimonisms can differ from one another. I then argue
+> against representative views drawn from each category of the taxonomy, other
+> than PDE’s category. Finally, I provide positive arguments for PDE by
+> expanding upon the minimal virtue theory common to all forms of eudaimonism.