Deliberation and Decision in the Magna Moralia and Eudemian Ethics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Margrethe Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Ugly Duckling ◽  
Eudemian Ethics

The Magna Moralia has long been the ugly duckling in the Aristotelian pond, shunned on account of its ungainly composition, flat-footed argument, and peculiar linguistic habits. In this essay, I examine one influential argument against its authenticity, namely the hypothesis that the author of the MM was a student or a later compendium writer, attempting to reconstruct the argument of the Eudemian Ethics or Nicomachean Ethics. My test case is the analyses of deliberation (bouleusis) and decision (prohairesis) in the three ethics. I argue that the MM diverges on important points from the EE and the EN, and that even an inept compendium writer or note taker could not have extracted the analysis in the MM from the other treatises. I conclude that the MM may resemble the EE because the former is an early and immature version of the latter.

Camus's Absurd and the World of Melville's Confidence-Man

PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer
Keyword(s):  
Careful Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Ugly Duckling ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

scholarly journals A Justiça Parcial e a Ganância enquanto virtude e vício do caráter na Ética a Nicômaco: ação interpessoal, emoção e prazer

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-145
Author(s):  
André Luiz Cruz Sousa
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The People ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

The aim of this paper is to study a set of three issues related to the understanding of partial justice and partial injustice as character dispositions, namely the distinctive circumstance of action, the emotion involved therein and the pleasure or pain following it. Those points are treated in a relatively obscure way by Aristotle, especially in comparison with their treatment in the expositions of other character virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics. Building on the expression ‘capacity towards the other’ (δύναμις ἐν τῷ πρὸς ἕτερον), the paper highlights the interpersonal nature of the circumstances of just and unjust actions, and points how such nature is directly related to notions such as ‘profit’ (κέρδος) or ‘getting more’(πλεονεκτεῖν) as well as to the unusual conception of excess, defect and intermediacy in Nicomachean Ethics Book V. The interpersonal nature of just and unjust actions works also as the starting-point for the interpretation both of the pleasure briefly mentioned in 1130b4 as characterizing the greedy person and of the emotion involved in acting justly or greedy, which is mentioned in an extremely elliptical way in 1130b1-2: the paper argues, on the one hand, that the pleasure felt in acting justly or unjustly concerns not only the goods that are the object of just or unjust interactions, but also the way such interactions affect the people involved; on the other hand, it argues that the emotion actuated in just or unjust interactions relates to the agent’s concern or lack of concern with the good of those people.

Punishment and Inclusion: The Presuppositions of Corrective Justice in Aristotle and What They Imply

1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-274
Author(s):  
Randall R. Curren
Keyword(s):  
Distributive Justice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Corrective Justice ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Other Hand

There is a view of Aristotle’s conception of corrective justice which has enjoyed some following among tort theorists in recent years, according to which corrective justice is distinct from distributive justice and entirely independent of it. The distinctness of the two is, of course, asserted by Aristotle in a well-known passage in the Nicomachean Ethics, and no one could seriously doubt that he does take the forms of these two kinds of justice to be distinct:What is just in distributions of common assets will always fit the [geometrical] proportion mentioned above,... On the other hand, what is just in transactions is certainly equal in a way, and what is unjust is unequal; but still it fits numerical proportion, not the [geometrical] proportion of the other species.

Strategies for the reinterpretation of normative texts within the Hebrew Bible

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard M. Levinson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Constitutional Theory ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Original Intent ◽  
Ten Commandments ◽  
Legal Innovation ◽  
Normative Statement ◽  
The One ◽  
Individual Accountability

Abstract Contemporary constitutional theory remains divided between competing approaches to the interpretation of normative texts: between originalism or original intent, on the one hand, and living constitution approaches, on the other. The purpose of this article is to complicate that problematic dichotomy by showing how cultures having a tradition of prestigious or authoritative texts addressed the problem of literary and legal innovation in antiquity. The study begins with cuneiform law from Mesopotamia and the Hittite Empire, and then shows how ancient Israel’s development of the idea of divine revelation of law creates a cluster of constraints that would be expected to impede legal revision or amendment. The well-known Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, provides a valuable test-case, with its normative statement that God punishes sinners across generations (vicariously extending the punishment due them to three or four generations of their progeny). A series of inner-biblical and post-biblical responses to that rule demonstrates, however, that later writers were able to criticize, challenge, reject, and replace it with the alternative notion of individual accountability. The article will provide a series of close readings of the texts involved, drawing attention to their legal language and hermeneutical strategies. The conclusions stress the remarkable freedom to modify ostensibly normative statements available to ancient judicial interpreters, despite the expected constraints of a formative religious canon attributed to divine revelation.

scholarly journals I FATTORI DELLA VIRTÙ E LA CRONOLOGIA DELLE ETICHE DI ARISTOTELE

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierluigi Donini
Keyword(s):  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Joint Effect ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Eudemian Ethics ◽  
Made In

In this paper the author summarizes the main contentions made in his new book Abitudine e saggezza. Aristotele dall’Etica Eudemia all’Etica Nicomachea. In the Eudemian Ethics Aristotle makes moral virtue as the joint effect of reason and the gifts of nature, but in the Nicomachean Ethics, on the contrary, he does not even name nature and sees virtue as the product of habits and education. On this very point the NE quotes and praises Plato’s Laws, which Aristotle did not know when writing the EE. It seems clear, then, that in the interval between the two Ethics he had known Plato’s last work.

Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Aristotle's Great-Souled Man

2007 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carson Holloway
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Greatness Of Soul ◽  
The One ◽  
Moral Convictions

This paper seeks to illuminate magnanimity by examining Shakespeare's Coriolanus in light of Aristotle's account of greatness of soul in the Nicomachean Ethics. I contend that contemplation of Coriolanus's similarity to Aristotle's magnanimous man allows us to harmonize two apparently discordant elements of the magnanimous man's character: his seriousness about the good, on the one hand, and his apparently status-oriented intolerance of insult, on the other. Nevertheless, Coriolanus falls short of Aristotle's standard; reflection on his defects reveals that genuine magnanimity requires prudence and a philosophic detachment from the city's moral convictions that Shakespeare's hero lacks.

Conclusion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Rojas ◽  
Andrea Bachner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Study ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Cultural Comparison ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
New Methodologies

As conclusion to theHandbook, this chapter reflects on the ways in which Chinese literary studies can and does inform the broader fields of literary studies and the humanities as such. In the past decades, Chinese literary studies has been experiencing a double perspectival shift: on one hand it has extended and expanded the scope of the field with ever more complex definitions of “Chineseness,” on the other, it has striven to integrate itself into broader intercultural, global, and comparative frameworks. From this vantage point, the chapter critically probes the role Chinese literary studies plays within world literary, comparative, and area studies approaches. Instead of constituting merely another object of world-literary theories formulated elsewhere, or an exceptional test case for cultural comparison, Chinese literature—as the chapters in theHandbookpropose—can be read as a rich reservoir of models that formulate new methodologies and inspire new insights for literary and cultural study as such in dialogue and contestation with existing local, regional, national, intercultural concepts and frameworks.

On the So-Called Common Books of the Eudemian and the Nicomachean Ethics

Phronesis ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-116
Author(s):  
Dorothea Frede
Keyword(s):  
Self Control ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Theoretical Reason ◽  
The Common ◽  
Eudemian Ethics ◽  
Aristotle's Ethics

AbstractIn recent decades the view that the disputed central books of Aristotle’s ethics are an integral part of the Eudemian rather than of the Nicomachean Ethics has gained ground for both historical and systematic reasons. This article contests that view, arguing not only that the Nicomachean Ethics represented Aristotle’s central text throughout antiquity, but that the discussion in the common books of such crucial concepts as justice, practical and theoretical reason, self-control and lack of self-control, are more compatible with the undisputed books of the Nicomachean Ethics than with those of the Eudemian Ethics.

The Sabbatian Who Devoured His Son: Jacob Emden's Anti-Sabbatian Polemics of Cannibalism

AJS Review ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (01) ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Shai A. Alleson-Gerberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Human Flesh ◽  
Political Weapon ◽  
Modern Era

In an era when cannibalism occupied the European imagination and became a political weapon that could be effectively aimed against the Other within or elsewhere, as well as a test case for the concept of humanity, it is hardly surprising to find similar rhetoric in internal Jewish discourse of the early modern era. This article shows Rabbi Jacob Emden's contribution to this discourse in the eighteenth century, and extends the boundaries of the scholarly discussion beyond establishing Jewish-Christian proximity. Emden's halakhic position on the question “Is it permissible to benefit from the cadaver of a dead gentile?” (She'elat Ya‘aveẓ) connects cannibalism and theological heresy springing from an overly literal reading of the rabbinical canon, as well as ties it to the concept of the seven Noahide laws. For Emden, the consumption of human flesh, literally and particularly metaphorically, distinguishes between the sons of Noah and heretics, as well as between humanity and savages. Emden advanced this concept in his polemical writings against the Sabbatian heresy in the 1750s, when he became embroiled in controversy with Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz and the Frankists.

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