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 Beautiful in Aristotle’s Ethics

2022 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-163
Author(s):  
David H. Little
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
Aesthetic Reading ◽  
Aristotle's Ethics

Abstract This article argues for an aesthetic reading of to kalon, primarily as it appears in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle uses to kalon to indicate that, to the morally serious, virtue is attractive and productive of a kind of pleasure. Read aesthetically, to kalon mitigates the tension between one’s own good and the common good. Aristotle shows how his students’ understanding of to kalon can be refined and thus preserved as an important and salutary feature of moral and political life.

Kalokagathia and the Unity of the Virtues in the Eudemian Ethics

Apeiron ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-57
Author(s):  
Giulia Bonasio
Keyword(s):  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Strong Version ◽  
The Common ◽  
Eudemian Ethics ◽  
Theoretical Thinking ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

AbstractIn this paper, I argue that in the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle proposes a strong version of the unity of the virtues. Evidence in favor of this strong version of the unity of the virtues results from reading the common books within the EE rather than as part of the Nicomachean Ethics. The unity of the virtues as defended in the EE includes not only practical wisdom and the character virtues, but also all the virtues of practical and theoretical thinking. Closely related, in the EE, Aristotle proposes a different best agent from the one of the NE. The best agent of the EE is the kalos kagathos. The person who is kalos kagathos has “all” the virtues. Kalokagathia is a whole and the virtues are its parts. I investigate how we should understand this whole and the relation between the individual virtues within this whole.

scholarly journals Aristotle on Attention

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Cagnoli Fiecconi
Keyword(s):  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Musical Piece ◽  
Loud Sound ◽  
Geometrical Problem ◽  
Physiological Processes ◽  
Perceptual Attention ◽  
Specific Selectivity ◽  
Cognitive Activities ◽  
The Common

Abstract I argue that a study of the Nicomachean Ethics and of the Parva Naturalia shows that Aristotle had a notion of attention. This notion captures the common aspects of apparently different phenomena like perceiving something vividly, being distracted by a loud sound or by a musical piece, focusing on a geometrical problem. For Aristotle, these phenomena involve a specific selectivity that is the outcome of the competition between different cognitive stimuli. This selectivity is attention. I argue that Aristotle studied the common aspects of the physiological processes at the basis of attention and its connection with pleasure. His notion can explain perceptual attention and intellectual attention as voluntary or involuntary phenomena. In addition, it sheds light on how attention and enjoyment can enhance our cognitive activities.

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.

scholarly journals ὁμόνοια: The Hinge of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics?

Dialogue ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-30
Author(s):  
THORNTON C. LOCKWOOD
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Aristotle's Ethics ◽  
Ethics And Politics

Scholarship on the political ramifications of Aristotle’s account of friendship has focused on “political friendship” and has lost sight of the importance of his account of “like-mindedness” or “concord” (ὁμόνοια). Such a focus is mistaken for a number of reasons, not least of which is that, whereas Aristotle has a determinate account of like-mindedness, he has almost nothing to say about political friendship. My paper examines the ethical and political aspects of like-mindedness in light of a disagreement between Richard Bodéüs and René Gauthier about the autonomy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as a work of ethical theory.

scholarly journals ‘Your Womb, The Perfect Classroom’: Prenatal Sound Systems and Uterine Audiophilia

2020 ◽  
pp. 014177892095867
Author(s):  
Marie Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Development ◽  
Common Point ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Reproductive Politics ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Child ◽  
The Common ◽  
Culture Technology ◽  
Maternal Obligation

In this article, I explore the auditory technopolitics of prenatal sound systems, asking what kinds of futures, listeners and temporalities they seek to produce. With patents for prenatal audio apparatus dating back to the late 1980s, there are now a range of devices available to expectant parents. These sound technologies offer multiple benefits: from soothing away stress to increasing the efficiency of ultrasonic scans. However, one common point of emphasis is their capacity to accelerate foetal ‘learning’ and cognitive development. Taking as exemplary the Babypod and BabyPlus devices, I argue that prenatal sound systems make audible a particular figuration of pregnancy and gestational labour that combines divergent notions of responsibility and passivity. Contra the equation of neoliberalism with self-control and individualism, I argue that prenatal sound systems amplify neoliberal capitalism’s elision of personal, maternal and familial responsibility. As reproductive sound technologies, prenatal sound systems facilitate maternal–familial investment in the pre-born as future-child. Consequently, financialised notions of inheritance are substituted for biological inheritance. Drawing attention to the common rhetorical figuration of the sonic as womb-like, furthermore, I argue that prenatal sound systems exemplify what I refer to as uterine audiophilia. By treating the womb as ‘the perfect classroom’, prenatal sound systems imply an intense maternal obligation to invest in and impress upon the future-child, while also envisioning the pregnant person’s body as an occupied, resonant space. Cohering with a fidelity discourse that posits the reproductive medium as passive container and a source of noise that is to be overcome, uterine audiophilia relies upon politically regressive conceptualisations of pregnancy. I thus argue that these devices mark the hitherto under-theorised convergence of auditory culture, technology and reproductive politics.

scholarly journals HOW STRICTLY DID THE ATHENIAN COURTS APPLY THE LAW? THE ROLE OF EPIEIKEIA

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
EDWARD HARRIS
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
General Rule ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Principles Of Justice ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Positivist Approach

Abstract H. Meyer‐Laurin has claimed that the Athenian courts took a stricti iuris approach to the law and did not take extenuating circumstances into account. Other scholars (Mirhady, Todd) have claimed that the courts sometimes ignored the law and took extra‐legal considerations into account, which was called ‘fairness’ (epieikeia). The essay begins with a careful reading of Aristotle's analysis of ‘fairness’ (epieikeia) in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric and draws on an important essay by J. Brunschwig. Fairness was not a doctrine that attempted to undermine the authority of the law or placed the law of the city in opposition to the unwritten laws or the common law of mankind. Nor did the application of fairness introduce non‐legal factors into adjudication. Rather, fairness dealt with the problem of treating exceptions to the general rule contained in a specific written law. The essay then shows how litigants used arguments based on fairness and how the courts sometimes took extenuating circumstances into account. When Athenian judges swore to decide according to the laws of Athens, they did not just consider the law under which the accuser had brought his case. They could also take into account general principles of justice implicit in the laws of Athens as a whole. In this way, they avoided a rigid positivist approach to law. Finally, the essay sheds some light on the relationship between Aristotle's Rhetoric and the arguments used in the Athenian courts.

scholarly journals Understanding Aristotle's Notion of the Mean: A Case Study in Anger

Labyrinth ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 139
Author(s):  
Heather Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Salient Feature ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Quantitative Understanding ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Aristotle's Ethics ◽  
The Right ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Shed Light

In this paper, I argue that purely quantitative understandings of Aristotle's concept of "the mean" (as presented in Nicomachean Ethics) are oversimplified, and I make this argument by analyzing the particular emotion of anger. Anger, I contend, helps to complicate the purely quantitative understanding of the mean, insofar as, I argue, the amount of anger experienced is not the morally salient feature in determining whether or not the anger is virtuous. Rather, anger is one example of an emotion or trait for which other, non-quantitative parameters of the mean are more salient, giving us a more nuanced understanding of what the mean is. Anger is virtuous not when it is in the right measurable degree, but rather when it is directed at the proper target. In this way, the virtue-making property of anger is distinctly qualitative. Examining anger provides insight into the concept of the mean and its role in Aristotle's ethics, and also helps to shed light on contemporary debates about political anger.  

The Role of Information Technology in Managing the Conflicts of Long-Distance Partners

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gremil Alessandro Naz
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
Text Messages ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
The Common ◽  
Communication Practices ◽  
Study Participants ◽  
Role Of Information

This study sought to understand the role of information technology (IT) in managing the conflicts of Filipinos in long-distance relationships (LDRs). Specifically, it aimed to know the conflicts Filipinos in LDRs usually experience, how these conflicts are managed with the help of IT, their conflict communication practices, and the values necessary for LDR maintenance. Ten Filipinos in LDRs were interviewed in depth. Results showed that the common conflicts identified by the study participants were on childrearing, failure to communicate on the appointed date and time, delayed and unsent text messages, the husband’s drinking, and gossips related to the husband’s alleged infidelity. IT was a big help in managing these conflicts because it allowed effective communication, with video telephony as the most preferred technology. According to the study participants, the personal characteristics that contribute to LDR maintenance are cool-headedness, self-control, patience, and humility.

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