Online research in philosophy

What is it like to be a good person? I examine and reject suggestions that this will involve having thoughts which have virtue or being a good person as part of their content, as well as suggestions that it might be the presence of feelings distinct from the virtuous person’s thoughts. Is there, then, anything after all to the phenomenology of virtue? I suggest that an answer is to be found in looking to Aristotle’s suggestion that virtuous activity is pleasant to the virtuous person. I try to do this, using the work of the contemporary social psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and his work on the ‘flow experience’. Crucial here is the point that I consider accounts of virtue which take it to have the structure of a practical expertise or skill. It is when we are most engaged in skilful complex activity that the activity is experienced as ‘unimpeded’, in Aristotle’s terms, or as ‘flow’. This experience does not, as might at first appear, preclude thoughtful involvement and reflection. Although we can say what in general the phenomenology of virtue is like, each of us only has some more or less dim idea of it from the extent to which we are virtuous—that is, for most of us, not very much.

[David Charles] Aristotle, it appears, sometimes identifies well-being (eudaimonia) with one activity (intellectual contemplation), sometimes with several, including ethical virtue. I argue that this appearance is misleading. In the Nicomachean Ethics, intellectual contemplation is the central case of human well-being, but is not identical with it. Ethically virtuous activity is included in human well-being because it is an analogue of intellectual contemplation. This structure allows Aristotle to hold that while ethically virtuous activity is valuable in its own right, the best life available for humans is centred around, but not wholly constituted by, intellectual contemplation. /// [Dominic Scott] In Nicomachean Ethics X 7-8, Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of eudaimonia, primary and secondary. The first corresponds to contemplation, the second to activity in accordance with moral virtue and practical reason. My task in this paper is to elucidate this distinction. Like Charles, I interpret it as one between paradigm and derivative cases; unlike him, I explain it in terms of similarity, not analogy. Furthermore, once the underlying nature of the distinction is understood, we can reconcile the claim that paradigm eudaimonia consists just in contemplation with a passage in the first book requiring eudaimonia to involve all intrinsic goods.

I reject the traditional picture of philosophical withdrawal in the Hellenistic Age by showing how both Epicureans and Stoics oppose, in different ways, the Platonic and Aristotelian assumption that contemplative activity is the greatest good for a human being. Chrysippus the Stoic agrees with Plato and Aristotle that the greatest good for a human being is virtuous activity, but he denies that contemplation exercises virtue. Epicurus more thoroughly rejects the assumption that the greatest good for a human being is virtuous activity. He maintains that the greatest good for a human being is the tranquility that virtuous activity always and contemplative activity sometimes brings about.

Aristotle's requirement that virtuous actions be chosen for themselves is typically interpreted, in Kantian terms, as taking virtuous action to have intrinsic rather than consequentialist value. This raises problems about how to reconcile Aristotle's requirement with (a) the fact that virtuous actions typically aim at ends beyond themselves (usually benefits to others); and (b) Aristotle's apparent requirement that everything (including virtuous action) be chosen for the sake of eudaimonia. I offer an alternative interpretation, based on Aristotle's account of loving a friend for herself, according to which choosing a virtuous action for itself involves choosing it on account of those features of it that make it the kind of action it is, where these features include its intended consequences (such as the benefits it seeks to provide to others). I then suggest that Aristotle may take these consequences (including benefits to others) as contributing (and contributing non-instrumentally) to the agent's own eudaimonia, and that there is no conflict here with Aristotle's view that eudaimonia is an activity of the soul. For just as my activity of teaching is actualized in my students (provided they learn from me), so too my virtuous activity can be actualized in its beneficiaries. If this is right, then Aristotle's view is far from the Stoic (and proto-Kantian) view often attributed to him.

Most of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics discusses the life of moral virtue, exercised in accordance with practical reasoning, a life taken in the opening passages to be necessary for happiness or eudaimonia, though not sufficient, since some measure of external goods is also required. This is the position regarded as Aristotelian in ancient ethical debate throughout the following period. Our text of the Nicomachean Ethics, however, ends with a passage urging that a life of human happiness lies in contemplation or study (theoria) of the highest objects of the intellect.

Are you happy? This question is asked of people by friends, parents and psychiatrists alike. What happiness consists of for each person seems, at first glance, to be entirely subjective in that is it up to each individual person to define what the happy-making ingredients of her life are. This dissertation centrally involves an interpretation of Aristotle’s eudaimonia, often translated as ‘happiness’. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is an inquiry into the chief good for human beings, and according to Aristotle everyone agrees that this chief good is ‘happiness’, however there is major disagreement about what ‘happiness’ consists of. What follows critically interprets Aristotle’s eudaimonia through a close reading of his arguments. Once Aristotle’s eudaimonia is explicated, it is used to question the supposedly subjective conception of happiness that the happiness literature argues is pervasive. Finally, Aristotle’s eudaimonia is defended as a theory of well-being against a charge of perfectionism. It is argued that Aristotle’s eudaimonia commits its adherents to maximising virtuous activity at all times, that is, to perfect themselves. It is this interpretation of Aristotle that seeks to undermine eudaimonia as a plausible theory of well-being, and I end this dissertation by providing a response to the objection from perfectionism. This project attempts, fundamentally, to show that Aristotle’s eudaimonia is not simply an intellectual curiosity: studying eudaimonia can help change the way we live our lives, and for the better.

At the beginning of the Nichomachean Ethics , Aristotle announces his intention to discover what is the good, or the chief good (book I, chapter 2). In the rest of the work, however, there follow such a multitude of answers to this question endorsed by Aristotle, that at its conclusion one may understandably wonder what the upshot of Aristotle's ethics was. One might wonder whether the good, as Aristotle saw it, was that at which all things in fact aim (as he says in I.1), or rather that at which all things ought to aim if they can (as seems more commonsensical), or happiness (I.4), or the realization of one's function (I.7), or activity of the soul in accordance with virtue (I.7), or activity in accordance with reason (I.7), or pleasure of some kind (VII.13), or the exercise of our faculties (VII.13), or contemplation (X.7). One might wonder how the good could simultaneously be identical with all of these different things. In this essay, I aim first to explain the general purport of Aristotle's ethics and second to criticize it.

This review of John Cooper's fine collection of essays Reason and Emotion focuses mainly on his paper "Contemplation and Happiness: A Reconsideration". In this article, Cooper alters his view -- found in his book Reason and Human Good in Aristotle - on the relation between the accounts of happiness in Books I and X of the Nicomachean Ethics. He now aims for an interpretation which avoids inconsistency between the accounts of happiness in Books I and X, an interpretation which does not see Book X as allowing that the morally vicious thinker can be happy. I argue that Cooper does not succeed. For, on the one hand, he has Book I emphasise that all kinds of virtuous activity, and especially intellectual activity, are necessary for happiness. But in explaining how, for Aristotle, the unintellectual but morally virtuous kind of happy life can be happy, he asserts that Book X affirms that activity with a kinship to divine activity - for example, morally virtuous behavior on its own -- is sufficient for happiness. Hence, his interpretation has Book I assert and Book X deny that all kinds of virtuous behavior, and especially intellectual activity, are necessary for happiness. Also, by making activity with a kinship to divine activity sufficient for happiness in Book X, he commits Aristotle to happiness for the morally vicious thinker, since human intellectual activity on its own has a greater kinship to divine activity than morally virtuous action on its own.

Aristotle describes human happiness as a life of virtuous activity in Book One of the Nicomachean Ethics but as a life of contemplative activity and a life of ethically virtuous activity in Book Ten. In which kind of life does Aristotle ultimately believe that happiness consists? The answer lies in the role of philosophical wisdom within ethically virtuous activity. I argue that philosophical wisdom has a dual role: its exercise is the end of ethically virtuous activity and the virtue by which that end is rationally apprehended. Just as ethically virtuous activity depends on the exercise of philosophical wisdom in this dual way, so human happiness can be understood as a single life of virtuous activity whose end is the exercise of philosophical wisdom in contemplative activity. The exercise of philosophical wisdom will include ethically virtuous activity as an end that includes what is desired for its sake.

presents a puzzle as to whether Aristotle views morally virtuous activity as happiness, as book 1 seems to indicate, or philosophical contemplation as happiness, as book 10 seems to indicate. The most influential attempts to resolve this issue have been either monistic or inclusivist. According to the monists, happiness consists exclusively of contemplation. According to the inclusivists, contemplation is one constituent of happiness, but morally virtuous activity is another. In this essay I will examine influential defenses of monism. Finding these accounts superior to inclusivism, but still deficient, I will present and defend a dualistic account of happiness in which two different types of happiness, one divine and one human, are present in Nicomachean Ethics. When Aristotle commends contemplation as a happiness that humans can attain, he is careful to specify that this activity corresponds to a capacity (nous) that is not, properly speaking, human, even though humans can exercise it. Contemplation, the divine good, is the highest good that humans can obtain, but it is not the characteristic human good. The characteristic human good corresponds to the specifically and merely human function, which is an activity of the compound of human reason and emotions.