Daniel Maher

The Dutch mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin (1548–1620) wrote a political handbook, Vita politica (1590), in which he provided essential guidance for civic life amidst the religious and political turbulence of the Eighty Years War. Descartes was certainly influenced by Stevin in mathematics, and this paper examines the possibility that some aspects of Stevin’s political thought influenced Descartes in his formulation of the provisional morality in the Discourse on Method. The evidence is circumstantial, but the intellectual affinity between Stevin and Descartes is striking nonetheless. In any case, given Stevin’s importance in the emergence of the mathematical science of nature, his political thought deserves more consideration than it customarily receives from those interested in early modern philosophy.

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s two forms of human happiness correspond to two forms of human virtue (moral and intellectual) and, I argue, to two forms of virtuous friendship (active and contemplative). I propose that the most properly human form of happiness is achieved in contemplative friendship. This friendship is a genuinely contemplative approximation of divine life and still a specifically human life consisting in discursivespeech with others. Contemplative friends wish the good to one another as human beings and thus fulfill what friendship is more completely than do friends occupied with moral virtue. Aristotle’s text shows, first, that discussion and thinking can be shared more perfectly than can moral action and, second, that intellectual virtue completes human nature more fully than does moral virtue.

This paper examines prenatal diagnosis as tending to disrupt the natural relation between parents and children. Parents naturally wish for a perfect child, but they accept and love the child they get. Prenatal diagnosis, when it is followed not by therapeutic intervention but by abortion, allows parents to evaluate some traits in their child before deciding whether to love such a child. By nature, parents are called to provide generously whatever their child may need, but prenatal diagnosis asks parents to decide whether the child satisfies their own desires.

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses the relation between teachers and students during his treatment of “non-uniform friends.” These friends exchange goods differing in kind . Such friendships depend on the needs of the friends, and we are invited to ask whether some need induces a philosopher to teach a not-yet-philosophical student. In this paper I argue that the philosophical teacher does not approach his pupil out of need nor as he would approach a contemplative friend who is an equal. The teacher chooses to benefit students as a morally virtuous human being would, although not as if his happiness depends upon their success in learning. A teacher is not an ordinary benefactor, intent upon seeing his power made actual in some other person. Aristotle’s philosophical teachers seem to be simultaneously more generous and less interested in their students