From protagoras to aristotle essays in ancient moral philosophy

Preliminaries Aristotle wrote two ethical treatises:

Introduction In their moral theories, the ancient philosophers depended on several important notions.

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These include virtue and the virtues, happiness eudaimoniaand the soul. We can begin with virtue. There is the excellence of a horse and the excellence of a knife. Then, of course, there is human excellence.

Conceptions of human excellence include such disparate figures as the Homeric warrior chieftain and the Athenian statesman of the period of its imperial expansion.

From this description we can see that some versions of human excellence have a problematic relation to the moral virtues. In the ancient world, courage, moderation, and justice were prime species of moral virtue.

This settled disposition includes a practical knowledge about how to bring it about, in each situation, that each receives their due. It also includes a strong positive attitude toward bringing it about that each receives their due.

Just people, then, are not ones who occasionally act justly, or even who regularly act justly but do so out of some other motive; rather they are people who reliably act that way because they place a positive, high intrinsic value on rendering to each their due and they are good at it.

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Courage is a settled disposition that allows one to act reliably to pursue right ends in fearful situations, because one values so acting intrinsically. Human excellence can be conceived in ways that do not include the moral virtues. For instance, someone thought of as excellent for benefiting friends and harming enemies can be cruel, arbitrary, rapacious, and ravenous of appetite.

Most ancient philosophers, however, argue that human excellence must include the moral virtues and that the excellent human will be, above all, courageous, moderate, and just. This argument depends on making a link between the moral virtues and happiness. While most ancient philosophers hold that happiness is the proper goal or end of human life, the notion is both simple and complicated, as Aristotle points out.

It seems simple to say everyone wants to be happy; it is complicated to say what happiness is. We can approach the problem by discussing, first, the relation of happiness to human excellence and, then, the relation of human excellence to the moral virtues.

It is significant that synonyms for eudaimonia are living well and doing well.

Preliminaries

These phrases imply certain activities associated with human living. Ancient philosophers argued that whatever activities constitute human living — e. One can feel fear and react to dangerous situations sometimes appropriately and sometimes inappropriately; or one might always act shamefully and dishonorably.

However, to carry out the activities that constitute human living well over a whole lifetime, or long stretches of it, is living well or doing well. At this point the relation of happiness to human excellence should be clear.

From Protagoras to Aristotle: Essays in Ancient Moral Philosophy - Heda Segvic - Google Books

Human excellence is the psychological basis for carrying out the activities of a human life well; to that extent human excellence is also happiness. While the unhappy person deals with a vital and dynamic emotion like fear in an inept way, the happy person handles fear skillfully, and thereby exhibits human excellence.

So described, human excellence is general and covers many activities of a human life. However, one can see how human excellence might at least include the moral virtues.

The moral virtue relevant to fear, for instance, is courage. Courage is a reliable disposition to react to fear in an appropriate way. What counts as appropriate entails harnessing fear for good or honorable ends.

In this way, moral virtues become the kind of human excellence that is other-regarding. The moral virtues, then, are excellent qualities of character — intrinsically valuable for the one who has them; but they are also valuable for others.

In rough outline, we can see one important way ancient moral theory tries to link happiness to moral virtue by way of human excellence. Happiness derives from human excellence; human excellence includes the moral virtues, which are implicitly or explicitly other-regarding.

While some think there is a distinction between feeling happy and feeling content, still happiness is a good and pleasant feeling.

Of course, if their work is going well, they might feel contentment.Sharp fluctuations of moral absolutism and moral relativism are also among the attitudes of intellectuals revealed in this study.

The moral absolutism is reserved for the stern judgments of their own society, while a pragmatic moral relativism appears when they give the benefit of the doubt to certain dictators and their political systems as long as they find them fundamentally praiseworthy.

From Protagoras to Aristotle essays in ancient moral philosophy / This book is about Protagoras' political art, Homer in Plato's Protagoras. The meaning of Socratic intellectualism,Aristotle's Metaphysics of action, deliberation and choice in Aristotle and translation of Aristotle.

Citation Information. From Protagoras to Aristotle. Essays in Ancient Moral Philosophy. Edited by Burnyeat, Myles. Princeton University Press. Pages: ix–xviii. From Protagoras to Aristotle: Essays in Ancient Moral Philosophy [Heda Segvic, Myles Burnyeat, Charles Brittain] on regardbouddhiste.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.

This is a collection of the late Heda Segvic's papers in ancient moral regardbouddhiste.coms: 1. This is a collection of the late Heda Segvic's papers in ancient moral philosophy.

At the time of her death at age forty-five in , Segvic had already established herself as an important figure in ancient philosophy, making bold new arguments about the nature of Socratic intellectualism and the intellectual influences that shaped Aristotle's ideas.

Eudaimonia (Greek: εὐδαιμονία [eu̯dai̯moníaː]), sometimes anglicized as eudaemonia or eudemonia / j uː d ɪ ˈ m oʊ n i ə /, is a Greek word commonly translated as happiness or welfare; however, "human flourishing or prosperity" has been proposed as a more accurate translation.

[better source needed] Etymologically, it consists of the words "eu" ("good") and "daimōn" ("spirit").