scholarly journals Charakter (Character)

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Bell
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Political Rationality ◽  
Political Resource ◽  
Virtuous Character ◽  
European Thought

The lexeme Charakter denotes the set of innate or acquired dispositions that make an individual or a nation distinctive, determine its behaviour, and give it psychological and moral strength. Charakter plays a central role in Goethe’s moral psychology and his ethical thought in general, as well as in his thinking on culture. His psychological and ethical thought is notoriously hard to classify or to align with the main traditions of European thought. His concern with Charakter could be said to belong to the broad classical tradition of virtue ethics, in the sense that Goethe placed moral character at the heart of ethics. However, in contrast to the classical tradition of virtue ethics, which holds that both the rational and the non-rational parts of humans contribute to a virtuous character, and that virtues can be conceptualized clearly, Goethe resists the claims of reason on our moral character. His early writings on culture and the drama Egmont have a Rousseauian flavour: Charakter represents a natural force that is endangered by civilization. After the French Revolution and in opposition to the emergence of liberalism, Goethe came to see Charakter as a political resource that was superior to political rationality. In his most sustained engagements with philosophical ethics—his essays on Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1805) and Isaac Newton (1810)—Goethe argues, in deliberate opposition to Kant, that natural Charakter has at least as much ethical force as reason and that naturalistic descriptions of human behaviour are at least as valid as moral ones. Moreover, Charakter has the advantage of leading us by a more direct and reliable route to morally good outcomes. In this sense, it can be said without risk of exaggeration that Charakter displaces rationality in Goethe’s ethical thought.

Ancient Revolutions in the Literature of Polish Romanticism

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-226
Author(s):  
Maciej Junkiert
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
European Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
Classical Traditions ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
Literary Reception

This article aims to examine the Polish literary reception of the French Revolution during the period of Romanticism. Its main focus is on how Polish writers displaced their more immediate experiences of revolutionary events onto a backdrop of ‘ancient revolutions’, in which revolution was described indirectly by drawing on classical traditions, particularly the history of ancient Greeks and Romans. As this classical tradition was mediated by key works of German and French thinkers, this European context is crucial for understanding the literary strategies adopted by Polish authors. Three main approaches are visible in the Polish reception, and I will illustrate them using the works of Zygmunt Krasiński (1812–1859), Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849) and Cyprian Norwid (1821–1883). My comparative study will be restricted to four works: Krasiński's Irydion and Przedświt (Predawn), Słowacki's Agezylausz (Agesilaus) and Norwid's Quidam.

Virtues and Capabilities

2018 ◽  
pp. 586-599
Author(s):  
Steven Torrente ◽  
Harry D. Gould
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Capabilities Approach ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
International Political Theory ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Ethical Systems

After a long dormancy in the modern era, virtue-based ethical thought has once again become a subject of serious consideration and debate in the field of philosophy. The normative orientation of most International Political Theory, however, still comes primarily from principles-based (deontological) or outcome-based (consequentialist) ethical systems. Virtue ethics differs from focus deontological and consequentialist ethics by emphasizing character, context, and way of life, rather than rule-governed action. This chapter reviews the emergence of contemporary virtue ethics as a challenge to overly abstract, language-based analysis of moral concepts, and its development into a broad and nuanced ethical theory. It then connects virtue ethics to the capabilities approach to human development, which is similarly focused.

Virtue Ethics vs. Rule-Consequentialism: A Reply to Brad Hooker

Utilitas ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind Hursthouse
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Character Trait ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Rule Consequentialism ◽  
Virtuous Character ◽  
My Criterion

In On Virtue Ethics I offered a criterion for a character trait's being a virtue according to which a virtuous character trait must conduce to, or at least not be inimical to, four ends, one of which is the continuance of the human species. I argue here that this does not commit me to homosexuality's being a vice, since homosexuality is not a character trait and hence not up for assessment as a virtue or a vice. Vegetarianism is not up for such assessment either, for the same reason, but, as a practice, may well be required by the virtue of compassion, and sacrificing one's life for an animal or alien may be required by courage. The clause about the continuance of the human species in my criterion does not specify a foundational value, because, following McDowell, I reject foundationalism.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
John Skorupski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
East European ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Late Modern

This is a critical study of late modern ethical thought in Europe, from the French Revolution to the advent of modernism. I shall take it that ‘late modern’ ethics starts with two revolutions: the political revolution in France and the philosophical revolution of Kant. The contrast is with ‘early modern’. Another contrast is with ‘modernism’, which I shall take to refer to trends in culture, philosophy, and politics that developed in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and lasted into the twentieth century—perhaps to the sixties, or even to the collapse of East European socialism in the eighties....

VIRTUE ETHICS AND THE PUBLIC CALLING OF REFORMATIONAL THOUGHT

2006 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Richard J. Mouw
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
Time Magazine ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
John Howard Yoder ◽  
The Public ◽  
Stanley Hauerwas ◽  
The People ◽  
Duke University ◽  
John Howard

In 2001 the leading American newsweekly, Time magazine, ran a series featuring the people who (according to the magazine’s researchers) were considered to be the most influential in their fields of leadership. The religious thinker who was given the title “America’s Best Theologian” was Stanley Hauerwas, who teaches ethics at Duke University. There is an element of irony in the fact that one of the leading arbiters of cultural popularity would choose to honor Hauerwas in this manner. While Hauerwas is officially a Methodist, he identifies closely with the Anabaptist tradition of ethical thought, often citing the late Mennonite theological ethicist John Howard Yoder as the primary influence on the development of his ethical thought. The Anabaptists, as we all know, make much of the need to form communities of radical disciples of Jesus who stand over against the dominant cultural patterns, and Hauerwas, like his mentor Yoder, is not shy about calling for this over-against-ness.

Aristotelian Virtue and Its Limitations

Philosophy ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 69 (269) ◽  
pp. 291-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christipher Cordner
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Living Well ◽  
The World ◽  
Good Will ◽  
The Will

‘Virtue ethics’ is prominent, if not pre-eminent, in contemporary moral philosophy. The philosophical model for most of those urging a ‘virtues approach’ to ethics is of course Aristotle. Some features, at least, of the motivation to this renewed concern with Aristotelian ethical thought are fairly clear. Notoriously, Kant held that the only thing good without qualification is the good will; and he then made it difficult to grasp what made the will good when he denied that it could be its preoccupation with or attention to anything in the world. The idea of the good will then seems to be an idea of something which transcends the world, and therefore to be no easier to make sense of, or to believe in, than Plato′s form of the good is usually thought to be. The first obvious attraction of Aristotle′s ethics, then—at least to those of an empiricist or worldly cast of mind—is that it promises an understanding of the ethical which locates that robustly within the world. Aristotle′s virtues are real this-worldly existences. They are, moreover, qualities whose place in our lives seems to be explained readily, and attractively, in Aristotelian terms. Moral virtue is essentially connected with eudaimonia, a concept variously construed as happiness, as living well, or even as flourishing. Morality is important because of the contribution it makes to the living of a fully human life. And a ‘fully human’ life is characterizable in what modernity calls ‘humanist’, or sometimes ‘naturalistic’, terms: it requires no invocation of transcendence or other-worldliness.

Human Nature and Aristotelian Virtue Ethics

2012 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 169-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind Hursthouse
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
Ethical Thought

Given that it relies on claims about human nature, has Aristotelian virtue ethics (henceforth AVE) been undermined by evolutionary biology? There are at least four objections which are offered in support of the claim that this is so, and I argue that they all fail. The first two (Part 1) maintain that contemporary AVE relies on a concept of human nature which evolutionary biology has undercut and I show this is not so. In Part 2, I try to make it clear that Foot's Aristotelian ethical naturalism, often construed as purporting to provide virtue ethics with a foundation, is not foundationalist and is not attempting to derive ethics from biology. In Part 3, I consider the other two objections. These do not make a misguided assumption about Aristotelian ethical naturalism's foundational aspirations, nor question AVE's use of the concept of human nature, but maintain that some of AVE's empirical assumptions about human nature may well be false, given the facts of our evolution. With respect to these, I argue that, as attempts to undermine AVE specifically, they fail, though they raise significant challenges to our ethical thought quite generally.

Virtue Ethics in Psychotherapy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Laney ◽  
Adam Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Effective Therapy ◽  
Virtue Theory ◽  
Ethical Perspective ◽  
Virtuous Character

The ethical pressures on a therapist are great, particularly since effective therapy demands that we become deeply and affectively involved in a patient’s life as told to us such that we become part of their stories and conflicts as well. While deontology and consequentialism provide guidance with respect to a therapist’s acts in themselves or in their consequences, another ethical perspective focuses squarely on the character of the therapist him or herself. This chapter reviews this perspective—called virtue theory—and applies it to the work of therapy, especially how a virtuous character and the virtuous actions that emanate from it are more than just moral prescripts but necessary to and partly constitutive of effective therapy itself.

Freedom and Spirit

2021 ◽  
pp. 200-279
Author(s):  
John Skorupski
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Freedom Of Conscience ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Life Issues

This chapter traces the development of Hegel’s thought from his early reactions to the French Revolution and the Enlightenment crisis of religion, through the Phenomenology of Spirit, to the Philosophy of Right. Hegel’s ethical thought propounds two deep theses. First, what he calls Moralität, the individualistic modern standpoint of freedom of conscience, can only survive within ethical life (Sittlichkeit), in which individuals are realized through their service and self-understanding in various social wholes. Second, ethical life realizes the life of spirit. Absolute idealism is the metaphysics of spirit: its fundamental concept is the dialectical identity, or unity-in-difference, of self and other. This conception of ethical life issues in a deep rethinking of religion and politics: a reconciling vision of being and freedom in the modern age.

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