Plato's "laches" is an investigation into the nature of courage with the intention of demonstrating the difficulty of singling out one virtue, namely courage, and defining it separately from the other cardinal virtues such as bravery, wisdom, justice, temperance, and piety. As the dialogue proceeds it becomes evident that socrates not only relates courage with the battlefield, but also with other spheres of life. Of special interest is his reference of being courageous regarding desires and pleasures where an overlap of (...) virtues is anticipated. This extension of the range of manifestations of courage indicates that his conception of courage transcends the traditional one in which he hints at a new sort of unity of courage and temperance, and on the other of courage and justice. One of plato's main aims in writing this dialogue was to mark out the intellectual limits of the two generals' positions, especially that of nicias, whose philosophical position could appear to be deceptively similar to the socratic one which he did not fully understand. (shrink)

Aristotle on the Perfect Life may be viewed as part of such a detailed study. In this book, Kenny discusses a series of topics relating to the central Aristotelian concept of the supreme good, and compares the treatment of these topics in the two treatises. He devotes separate discussions to the notions of finality, perfection, and self-sufficiency as attributes of the supreme good. He also considers the way in which friendship and good fortune relate to happiness. A theme which recurs (...) throughout the book is the divergent ways in which the EE and the NE conceive the relationship between moral excellence, contemplation and happiness. In some cases Kenny suggests that the EE offers a subtler treatment than the NE; in other cases he argues that the EE presents a more coherent, more plausible, position. Are we in a position, then, to conclude with confidence that the EE is the later, more authoritative, treatise? Kenny does not draw such a conclusion. One comes away with the impression that although he leans towards this conclusion, he also believes that still more work, especially on the EE, is needed. (shrink)

ARISTOTLE thought his predecessors in general, and Plato in particular, made a serious mistake in failing to mark the boundaries separating the different sciences and branches of philosophical inquiry. All of them failed to grasp the fundamental distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge. Ethics and politics, the prime examples of practical knowledge, differ from such theoretical sciences as metaphysics and physics not only in their aims but in their methods and subject matter as well. Indeed, Aristotle thinks the differences are (...) such that we cannot regard practical and theoretical knowledge as two species of a single genus, for there is no common definition of knowledge which applies to both. (shrink)

The paper offers an interpretation of Aristotle's discussion of the active and contemplative lives in the Nicomachean Ethics. In the first section I outline an interpretation recently set out by John Cooper in his book Reason and Human Good in Aristotle. Through criticism of Cooper's interpretation I attempt to develop my own. In the second section I argue that the active life is a life devoted to practical activity and does not include philosophical contemplation as one of its constituents. I (...) then take issue with Cooper's claim that the contemplative life rules out the possession of moral virtue, and try to show that Aristotle's conception of this life need not be regarded as unreasonably narrow. Finally, I note several respects in which the Nicomachean discussion represents a philosophical advance over the earlier Eudemian Ethics. (shrink)