Abstract

Concomitant to the renaissance of the concept of virtue in contemporary moral philosophy was the return to the traditional theories of virtue. The author offers a comparison of the theories of virtue with Aristotle, Spinoza and Hume, focusing on two questions: First, what do such diverse conceptions as Aristotle's eudaimonism, Spinoza's ethical rationalism and Hume's theory of moral sense have in common? Her argument is, that in spite of different principles and different conceptual means these conceptions could be covered by the same moral - philosophical tradition in which that, what ought to be is not strictly separated from that, what is. Thus the good and the virtue are not seen as divergent objectives or two mutually alienated worlds - as the Kantian tradition later tried to suggest. The second question conerns some of the specific incentives of the contemporary theories of virtue, especially the concept of character and its philosophical interpretation.