Gabriel Lear

This essay examines Socrates’ Palinode in the _Phaedrus_ in order to understand why the experience of another person’s beauty plays such a central role in Plato’s account of moral development. I argue that the answer depends in part on his account of the human soul as having a nature in common with, but also falling short of, divine soul. This anthropology allows for a conception of moral progress as a matter of becoming more perfectly what one in some sense already is. The answer also depends on Plato’s conception of beauty as being, in general, the manifestation or appearing of goodness, and of human beauty in particular—both beauty of soul and beauty of body—as the splendid manifestation of godlikeness. When the lover is struck by the sight of the beloved’s beauty, he is therefore reminded of who he is and what he should aspire to become.

The introduction to this volume briefly describes its aims and its origin in the inaugural seminar of the Plato Dialogue Project. Rather than summarize each essay, the introduction tries to step back and say something about how the parts of the dialogue fit together, in part by way of reminder, in part because the dialogue’s argumentative integrity is often considered to be elusive. We refer you to the essays that follow for a stimulating and insightful guide to some of the glorious and intricate details of Plato’s _Philebus_.

Aristotle claims that the virtuous person acts for the sake of to kalon. To understand this idea, I examine the analogy he draws between craft and virtue. I argue that the kalon is a formal feature of well-ordered wholeness and that the virtuous person takes intellectual pleasure in perceiving (or remembering or imagining) the kalon-in-action, akin to pleasure in observing artworks or works of nature. However, the virtuous person’s pleasure in kalon action is primarily a pleasure of practical reason. In these ways, Aristotle’s concept of the kalon is and is not like the modern aesthetic concept of the beautiful.

This chapter asks why Aristotle insists that happiness takes time, as he does when he likens it to spring (_EN_ I 7, 1098a16–20). Rejecting an interpretation relying on Aristotle’s distinction between activity (_energeia_) and process (_kinesis_), the chapter argues that virtuous action is something habitual: only as a form of life can it amount to happiness. Furthermore, even if the parties might want to become friends more quickly, developing the knowledge of the other’s goodness in the habitual, stable sense that characterizes virtue friendship is something that takes time. Similarly, knowing one’s own stable and good qualities also takes time, and without such self-knowledge as an integral aspect of one’s activity, one is not fully eudaimôn.

Our first encounter with Socrates in the Symposium is bizarre. Aristodemus, surprised to run into Socrates fully bathed and with his sandals on, asks him where he is going “to have made himself so beautiful (kalos)” (174a4, Rowe trans.). Socrates replies that he is on his way to see the lovely Agathon, and so that “he has beautified himself in these ways in order to go, a beauty to a beauty (kalos para kalon)” (174a7–8). Why does Socrates, who in just a few moments will be lost in contemplation out on the front porch, care about being beautiful? His remark to Aristodemus is clearly in some sense ironic, but on the other hand, he really has taken unusual care with his physical appearance. Later, in his encomium to love, he will claim that beauty has this effect on lovers: the beauty of the beloved causes the lover to disdain his former way of life and “give birth” to beautiful “offspring.” Is the image of the squat and snub-nosed Socrates all freshly scrubbed and kitted out a comic foreshadowing, or a debunking, of his serious speech? Does Socrates really believe in the transformative power of beauty?

Gabriel Richardson Lear presents a bold new approach to one of the enduring debates about Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: the controversy about whether it coherently argues that the best life for humans is one devoted to a single activity, namely philosophical contemplation. Many scholars oppose this reading because the bulk of the Ethics is devoted to various moral virtues--courage and generosity, for example--that are not in any obvious way either manifestations of philosophical contemplation or subordinated to it. They argue that Aristotle was inconsistent, and that we should not try to read the entire Ethics as an attempt to flesh out the notion that the best life aims at the "monistic good" of contemplation. In defending the unity and coherence of the Ethics, Lear argues that, in Aristotle's view, we may act for the sake of an end not just by instrumentally bringing it about but also by approximating it. She then argues that, for Aristotle, the excellent rational activity of moral virtue is an approximation of theoretical contemplation. Thus, the happiest person chooses moral virtue as an approximation of contemplation in practical life. Richardson Lear bolsters this interpretation by examining three moral virtues--courage, temperance, and greatness of soul--and the way they are fine. Elegantly written and rigorously argued, this is a major contribution to our understanding of a central issue in Aristotle's moral philosophy