The Virtue of Aesthetic Courage

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-469
Author(s):  
Alan T Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Future Development ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Virtuous Life ◽  
The Aesthetic

Abstract Theorists have recently been exploring the prospects for a virtue-centred approach to aesthetics. Virtue aesthetics encourages a re-focusing of philosophical attention onto the aesthetic character traits of agents, in the same way that virtue ethics and virtue epistemology have encouraged us to focus on moral and intellectual traits. In this paper, I aim to contribute to the development of virtue aesthetics by discussing aesthetic courage, the aesthetic analogue of one of the most widely acknowledged moral virtues. In addition to proposing an account of the nature of this trait, I also argue that aesthetic courage is vital for any sort of aesthetically virtuous life. It is not possible to possess any aesthetic virtue without possessing aesthetic courage. It is important, therefore, for any future development of virtue aesthetics to acknowledge the central importance of aesthetic courage.

Virtue Ethics and/or Virtue Epistemology: A Response to Anton Froeyman

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 432-446
Author(s):  
Herman Paul
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Professional Practice ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Ethical Perspective ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Intellectual Courage ◽  
Virtuous Behavior ◽  
Moral Dimensions ◽  
Ethical Approaches

Abstract In response to Anton Froeyman’s paper, “Virtues of Historiography,” this article argues that philosophers of history interested in why historians cherish such virtues as carefulness, impartiality, and intellectual courage would do wise not to classify these virtues unequivocally as either epistemic or moral virtues. Likewise, in trying to grasp the roles that virtues play in the historian’s professional practice, philosophers of history would be best advised to avoid adopting either an epistemological or an ethical perspective. Assuming that the historian’s virtuous behavior has epistemic and moral dimensions (as well as aesthetic, political, and other dimensions), this article advocates a non-reductionist account of historical scholarship, which acknowledges that the virtues cherished by historians usually play a variety of roles, depending on the goals they are supposed to serve. Given that not the least important of these goals are epistemic ones, the articles concludes that virtue ethical approaches, to the extent that they are focused on the acquisition of moral instead of epistemic goods, insufficiently recognize the role of virtue in the pursuit of such epistemic aims as knowledge and understanding.

scholarly journals Two Forms of Virtue Epistemology

Epistemology ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 140-156
Author(s):  
Ernest Sosa
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Epistemic Normativity ◽  
Intellectual Virtues ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Intellectual Courage ◽  
Virtue Reliabilism

This chapter explains how two quite distinct forms of virtue epistemology are generally recognized. One of these finds in epistemology important correlates of Aristotle's moral virtues. Such responsibilist character epistemology builds its account of epistemic normativity on the subject's responsible manifestation of epistemic character. Meanwhile, the other form of virtue epistemology adheres closer to Aristotelian intellectual virtues while recognizing a broader set of competences still restricted to basic faculties of perception, introspection, and the like. The chapter shows that because of its focus on traditional faculties such as perception, memory, and inference, such virtue reliabilism is said to overlook character traits such as open-mindedness and intellectual courage.

The Power of Everyday Aesthetics in World-Making

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuriko Saito
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Everyday Aesthetics ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter argues for the importance of cultivating aesthetic literacy and vigilance, as well as practicing aesthetic expressions of moral virtues. In light of the considerable power of the aesthetic to affect, sometimes determine, people’s choices, decisions, and actions in daily life, everyday aesthetics discourse has a social responsibility to guide its power toward enriching personal life, facilitating respectful and satisfying interpersonal relationships, creating a civil and humane society, and ensuring the sustainable future. As an aesthetics discourse, its distinct domain unencumbered by these life concerns needs to be protected. At the same time, denying or ignoring the connection with them decontextualizes and marginalizes aesthetics. Aesthetics is an indispensable instrument for assessing and improving the quality of life and the state of the world, and it behooves everyday aesthetics discourse to reclaim its rightful place and to actively engage with the world-making project.

scholarly journals Unity of the intellectual virtues

Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan T. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Intellectual Virtues ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Unity Thesis ◽  
Main Components ◽  
Future Work

AbstractThe idea that moral virtues form some sort of “unity” has received considerable attention from virtue theorists. In this paper, I argue that the possibility of unity among intellectual virtues has been wrongly overlooked. My approach has two main components. First, I work to distinguish the variety of different views that are available under the description of a unity thesis. I suggest that these views can be categorised depending on whether they are versions of standard unity or of strong unity. Standard unity claims that the possession of one virtue implies possession of all the others. Strong unity claims that the virtues are, in some sense, all the same thing. By exploring what these different versions of unity would look like when applied to intellectual virtues, I aim to provide a menu of options for future work in virtue epistemology. I then develop and defend one of these options in more detail, arguing that the initially less plausible strong unity has merit when applied to the intellectual sphere. In these two ways, I aim to show that the possibility of unity among the intellectual virtues is deserving of serious consideration.

La troisième dimension — De la fonction éthique et esthétique du décor dans le théâtre de machines français du XVIIe siècle

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-168
Author(s):  
Kirsten Dickhaut
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Optical Illusion ◽  
Stage Design ◽  
The Third ◽  
Adequate Representation ◽  
Third Dimension ◽  
Xviie Siecle ◽  
The Aesthetic

AbstractThe machine theatre in France achieves its peak in the second half of the seventeenth century. It is the construction of machines that permits the adequate representation of the third dimension on stage. This optical illusion is created by flying characters, as heroes, gods, or demons moving horizontally and vertically. The enumeration indicates that only characters possessing either ethically exemplary character traits or incorporating sin are allowed to fly. Therefore, the third dimension indicates bienséance – or its opposite. According to this, the following thesis is deduced: The machine theatre illustrates via aesthetic concerns characterising its third dimension an ethic foundation. Ethic and aesthetics determine each other in the context of both, decorum and in theatre practice. In order to prove this thesis three steps are taken. First of all, the machine theatre’s relationship to imitation and creation is explored. Second, the stage design, representing the aesthetic benefits of the machines in service of the third dimension, are explained. Finally, the concrete example of Pierre Corneille’s Andromède is analysed by pointing out the role of Pegasus and Perseus.

Justice as a Personal Virtue and Justice as an Institutional Virtue: Mencius’s Confucian Virtue Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 2019 (4) ◽  
pp. 277-294
Author(s):  
Yong Huang
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Affirmative Answer ◽  
The State ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
The Government

AbstractIt has been widely observed that virtue ethics, regarded as an ethics of the ancient, in contrast to deontology and consequentialism, seen as an ethics of the modern (Larmore 1996: 19–23), is experiencing an impressive revival and is becoming a strong rival to utilitarianism and deontology in the English-speaking world in the last a few decades. Despite this, it has been perceived as having an obvious weakness in comparison with its two major rivals. While both utilitarianism and deontology can at the same time serve as an ethical theory, providing guidance for individual persons and a political philosophy, offering ways to structure social institutions, virtue ethics, as it is concerned with character traits of individual persons, seems to be ill-equipped to be politically useful. In recent years, some attempts have been made to develop the so-called virtue politics, but most of them, including my own (see Huang 2014: Chapter 5), are limited to arguing for the perfectionist view that the state has the obligation to do things to help its members develop their virtues, and so the focus is still on the character traits of individual persons. However important those attempts are, such a notion of virtue politics is clearly too narrow, unless one thinks that the only job the state is supposed to do is to cultivate its people’s virtues. Yet obviously the government has many other jobs to do such as making laws and social policies, many if not most of which are not for the purpose of making people virtuous. The question is then in what sense such laws and social policies are moral in general and just in particular. Utilitarianism and deontology have their ready answers in the light of utility or moral principles respectively. Can virtue ethics provide its own answer? This paper attempts to argue for an affirmative answer to this question from the Confucian point of view, as represented by Mencius. It does so with a focus on the virtue of justice, as it is a central concept in both virtue ethics and political philosophy.

Imitating the Traditional Gods

Mnemosyne ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Vilius Bartninkas
Keyword(s):  
Role Models ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
The People ◽  
Additional Input ◽  
Virtuous Character ◽  
Ethical Role ◽  
Virtuous Life ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Religious Aspect ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract This paper examines moral virtues and cult practice in Plato’s Laws. It explores the symposium and the chorus and their potential to provide a recognisable cultural setting, in which the Magnesian citizens can test their responses to pleasurable and painful experiences and thus train their moral virtues. The challenge to this reading is to explain what additional input to moral habituation is provided by the religious aspect of these institutions. This paper draws attention to the relationship between the people and the patron gods of the respective institutions. It argues that the cult practices are designed to reflect the virtuous character of the traditional gods, who serve as the ethical role models for the worshipers. In this way, the worship of the traditional gods not only facilitates moral progress by exemplifying the objective of virtuous life, but also gives an egalitarian version of the ideal of godlikeness to its citizens.

Virtue as a Trait

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Miller
Keyword(s):  
Character Traits ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Empirical Issue ◽  
Mixed Traits

One of the most common assumptions about the moral virtues is that they are traits, or more specifically, traits of character. But what are character traits, and what character traits do individuals actually possess today? This chapter takes up each of these questions in turn. First it considers the metaphysics of character traits, distinguishing between three competing views: the summary view, the conditional view, and the dispositional view. Then it turns to the empirical issue of whether most people actually have character traits, and if so, what they tend to look like. Different options include the possession of traditional virtues, traditional vices, local traits, and mixed traits.

Virtue in Social and Public Life

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-66
Author(s):  
Fred Dallmayr
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
Ethical Conduct ◽  
Alasdair Macintyre ◽  
Metaphysical Realism ◽  
Societal Context ◽  
Virtuous Life ◽  
Spiritual Resources ◽  
Aristotelian Tradition

This chapter considers that, because of predatory selfishness, democracy requires the cultivation of ethical and spiritual resources for which it turns to the Aristotelian tradition of shared “virtuous” life. It begins with Alasdair MacIntyre, who profiles virtue ethics against two modern alternatives: “Morality,” a set of abstract rules anchored in the cogito, and “expressivism,” the pursuit of selfish preferences. By contrast, virtue ethics focuses on the concrete, character-related conduct nurtured by prudent judgment in a societal context, though there are some drawbacks to this view, especially the legacy of “naturalism” and essentialism. The chapter next presents the “little ethics” of Paul Ricoeur and his effort to link Aristotle with Kant, “teleology” with “deontology.” The chapter finally turns to Gadamer’s ethics which purges Aristotle of metaphysical “realism” or naturalism and presents ethical conduct not as a factual endowment but as “process of ongoing self-transformation” and (spiritual) “humanization.”

The Kantian Sublime and Greatness of Mind

2019 ◽  
pp. 197-214
Author(s):  
Emily Brady
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Other Regarding

This chapter explores Kant’s discussion of the sublime in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), in which the aesthetic subject becomes aware of a certain kind of greatness of mind. Kant’s scheme emphasizes respect for the moral capacities of the self as part of humanity, as well as admiration for greatness in the natural world. More broadly, his views show how ideas about greatness—if not magnanimity in the narrower sense—flow into philosophical approaches that lie beyond virtue ethics, moral thought, and human exceptionalism. The chapter argues that a comparative relation between self and sublime phenomena is central to understanding greatness of mind. Drawing out this comparative relation supports a deeper understanding of how both self-regarding and other-regarding attitudes feature within sublime experience, and just how this greatness might express itself within an aesthetic context.

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