Nature, reason, and the good life: ethics for human beings

2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (12) ◽  
pp. 49-6822-49-6822
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings

The Measure of Greatness

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
Complex Trajectory ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Excellence ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.

5. Ethics

2018 ◽  
pp. 65-76
Author(s):  
Brad Inwood
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Self Control ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Wise Person ◽  
The Family

Ethics is the part of the Stoics’ legacy that is most prominent and influential today. Their theory of the good life for human beings falls into the family of theories associated with Socrates and his followers. This tradition includes Plato and most Platonists, Xenophon, the Cynics, Aristotle, and later Aristotelians, all of whom share the view that virtue, the excellence of a human being, is the highest value and is its own reward. ‘Ethics’ discusses the Stoics’ views on human nature and rationality; the four basic virtues: justice, courage, wisdom, and moderation or self-control; and the doctrine that the fully rational and wise person will be free of passions.

Introduction

Good Lives ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Samuel Clark
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Father And Son

Reasoning with autobiography is a way to self-knowledge. We can learn about ourselves, as human beings and as individuals, by reading, thinking through, and arguing about this distinctive kind of text. Reasoning with Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son is a way of learning about the nature of the good life and the roles that pleasure and self-expression can play in it. Reasoning with Siegfried Sassoon’s ...

Virtue and the “Good Life” in the Book of Job

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Patricia L. Vesely
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Living Well ◽  
Presence Of God ◽  
Human Happiness ◽  
External Goods

Abstract In this article, I argue that Job 29 provides an eudaimonic depiction of human happiness whereby virtue, combined with a number of “external goods” is held up as the best possible life for human beings. I compare Job’s vision of the “good life” with an Aristotelian conception of εὐδαιμονία and conclude that there are numerous parallels between Job and Aristotle with respect to their understanding of the “good life.” While the intimate presence of God distinguishes Job’s expectation of happiness with that of Aristotle, Job is unique among other eudaimonic texts in the Hebrew Bible in that expectations of living well are expressed in terms of virtue, rather than Torah piety. In the second portion of the article, I assess Job’s conception of human flourishing from the perspective of the divine speeches, which enlarge Job’s vision of the “good life” by bringing Job face-to-face with the “wild inhabitants” of the cosmos.

scholarly journals The Modernity of Aristotle’s Ethics

MANUSYA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Charles Freeland
Keyword(s):  
Political Discourse ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Aristotle's Ethics ◽  
The Many ◽  
Theoretical Science

Aristotle understood ethics to be a practical rather than a theoretical science. It is a pragmatics, if you will, concerned with bringing about a good life . But the problem and the question from which Aristotle’s ethics begins arid to which it constantly returns concerns the relation of the theoretical to the practical: his concern is for the type or mode of discourse one could use in providing an account of the good life (Eudaimonia). Is this a propositional, apophantic discourse, a discourse claiming to represent the truth and what is true and from which one could then go on to prescribe a course of action, or, and this may be closer to Aristotle, is the philosophical discourse on ethics rather a descriptive one which takes humankind for what it is, not what it ought to be? This relation between theory and practice, between description and prescription, between science and action, is a question and a problem for Aristotle. It is my purpose to take up this question in connection with Aristotle’s texts on Eudaimonia. Another question shall be raised here: What is the relevance of Aristotle’s treatment of Eudaimonia to our contemporary, “modern” concern for ethics and the good life? I would assume, naively perhaps, that even today we are not indifferent to this question of what is a good life, and that we are not indifferent to the many ways in which the “good life” has been described. It would seem, then, that Aristotle’s texts have a particularly striking importance for us today insofar as we prolong the philosophical questioning of the possibilities for ethical and political discourse today and continue to ask who and what we are as human beings.

Nationalism in Rabindranath Tagore Plays

IJOHMN ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 8-45
Author(s):  
G. Sankar
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Group ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Foreign Companies ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Creative Art ◽  
Indian Contribution

History reveals that institutions or artifacts produced by human beings can lead to the exploitation or the loss of freedom of other human beings. Thus the celebration of the good life of an Athenian citizen in Plato‟s time can hide the wretchedness of vast numbers of slaves whose labor made it possible for the few free citizens to enjoy that good life. Our criteria then must apply to all, or at least the vast majority of the vast of the human group concerned, if they are to lay claim to universality. Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage1 The story of Indo-Anglican literature is the story of yesterday, of a little more than a century, and today. One of the natural results of the British rule in India is the rise and development of literature. The term “Indo-Anglican” was first used in 1883 when a book published in Calcutta that bore the title Indo-Anglian Literature. After the publication of two books by Dr.K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar, the term “Indo-Anglian” has not only acquired considerable currency, but also has come to stay as a familiar and accepted term applied to Indian contribution to literature in English. This has come to be known as Indo-Anglian writing and has been quite an active school of didactic and creative art for at least a century. The first theatre offering English language drama in 1776, Indian drama in English has never achieved the same status as Indian fiction and poetry in English. As in other colonies such as Canada, the Indian theatrical scene was dominated by foreign companies, touring plays drawn mainly from

FROM IRONY TO ENIGMA: DISCOVERING DOUBLE IGNORANCE AND SOCRATES’ DIVINE KNOWLEDGE

Méthexis ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
DANIELLE A. LAYNE
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Divine Knowledge ◽  
Nuanced Understanding

To dismiss the problems of Socratic moral intellectualism as well as Socratic irony (with respect to his claims of ignorance) in the following we shall first discuss how there are different forms of not-knowing in the Platonic dialogues. By referencing various passages throughout Plato’s entire corpus we shall see that like his nuanced understanding of knowledge, Plato also delineated between kinds of ignorance with only one denying virtue and the good life to individuals. This will prove that Socrates does not associate with a reprehensible state when he claims ignorance and thus there is no need to appeal to irony when he makes such avowals of not-knowing. In the second half of this essay I will also suggest that the knowledge to which Socrates appeals is not an “ironic” appeal to human knowledge, as various scholars have argued, but is a sincere appeal to divine knowledge, i.e. immediate wisdom, which all human beings possess and rely on in their daily lives. In other words, Socratic knowing is a kind of enigmatic knowing which must be understood as a pre-theoretical, unexamined or innate wisdom. For Socrates all individuals “possess” such wisdom but in order to do the work that is “properly” human, i.e. the work allowing for virtue, one must enigmatically marry this “knowledge” with recognized ignorance.

Homo religiosus: does spirituality have a place in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics?

2015 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID MCPHERSON
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Form Of Life

AbstractIn this article I seek to show the importance of spirituality for a neo-Aristotelian account of ‘the good life’. First, I lay out my account of spirituality. Second, I discuss why the issue of the place of spirituality in the good life has often either been ignored or explicitly excluded from consideration by neo-Aristotelians. I suggest that a lot turns on how one understands the ‘ethical naturalism’ to which neo-Aristotelians are committed. Finally, I argue that through a deeper exploration of the evaluative standpoint from within our human form of life as ‘meaning-seeking animals’ we can come to better appreciate the importance of spirituality for human beings throughout recorded history up to the present and why we can be described ashomo religiosus.

On Valuing and the Good Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 87-111
Author(s):  
L. Nandi Theunissen
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Behavioral Disposition ◽  
Human Value ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
In Virtue Of

Theunissen develops the emerging positive proposal by specifying that in virtue of which human beings are relationally valuable. Her starting point is that human value depends on the distinctive relationship we bear to objects and activities of value. In her view this is the capacity for having final ends: roughly, the capacity for pursuing interests, projects, relationships, and self-ideals for their own sake. She offers a new account of this complex cognitive, affective and behavioral disposition, and the analysis contributes to discussions of valuing and care. How does the capacity for having final ends ground our value? By identifying connections between valuing and the good life, Theunissen defends the claim that it grounds our value by making us relationally valuable in the sense that it makes us able to lead a good life—a life that is of value, in the first place, for the person who leads it.

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