Michael Foley was educated at St Columb’s College and Queens University, Belfast, where he took degrees in Chemistry and Computer Science. He was a teacher for 23 years at the University of Westminster, lecturing in Information Technology. His first poems were published in 1969 in The Honest Ulsterman, a magazine he went on to edit with Frank Ormsby, and his first prose in a satirical column in the magazine Fortnight, which also serialised his first novel, The Passion of Jamesie Coyle. After retirement from teaching he wrote his first nonfiction book, The Age of Absurdity, followed by Embracing the Ordinary, Life Lessons from Bergson, and Isn’t this Fun: Investigating the Serious Business of Enjoying Ourselves.
Zan Boag: When determining what is important in living a flourishing life, in what way is it related to how one should live and who one should be?
Michael Foley: The first problem is that flourishing is like originality, wisdom, authority, and goodness in that it cannot be pursued directly but emerges as an accidental by-product of a combination of factors. The second problem is that the necessary combination may be different for everyone. Philosophy tends to offer one-size-fits-all recommendations that ignore context – the culture of the society and individual temperament and circumstance. And the third problem is that what encourages flourishing at one stage of life may not work at another.
Referring to the Ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia, do you think the notion of individual flourishing and living a good life has
