Richard Kraut

In Liberty and Nature, Rasmussen and Den Uyl use an Aristotelian conception of the human good to provide a foundation for libertarianism. Their principal argument is that intelligence and virtue are necessary ingredients in every flourishing human life, but since these are not goods that the state can distribute to individuals, governments can play only a modest role in promoting the common good. The state best promotes the well‐being of its citizens by allowing them to, pursue happiness in a manner of their own choosing, and defending them against those who would invade their moral boundaries.

The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance: the fear of death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression. Like medicine, philosophy to them was a rigorous science aimed both at understanding and at producing the flourishing of human life. In this engagingly written book, Martha Nussbaum maintains that these Hellenistic schools have been unjustly neglected in recent philosophic accounts of what the classical "tradition" has to offer. By examining texts of philosophers committed to a therapeutic paradigm - including Epicurus, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Chrysippus, and Seneca - she recovers a valuable source for current moral and political thought and encourages us to reconsider philosophical argument as a technique through which to improve lives. In describing the contributions of Hellenistic ethics, Nussbaum focuses on each thinker's treatment of the question of emotion. All argued that many harmful emotions are based on false beliefs that are socially taught, and that good philosophical argument can transform emotions, and, with them, both private and public life. Written for general readers and specialists, this book addresses compelling issues ranging from the psychology of human passion through rhetoric to the role of philosophy in public and private life.

The passage I will discuss in this paper, one of the best known in the Aristotelian corpus, occurs in Book I chapter 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics, and concerns the ergon, i.e. the function, of human beings. Aristotle argues that we have a function, that our happiness consists in fulfilling it, and that this function must be idion, i.e. it must be peculiar to us. On this basis, he asserts that our function cannot consist in being alive, nourishment, growth, or perception, for these activities are common to other species. Aristotle then arrives at his familiar conclusion that our function consists in the excellent use of reason.

My aim is to show how Aristotle's theory of friendship supports his thesis that happiness requires virtuous activity. Ethical behavior is valuable, according to the Nicomachean Ethics, not solely because it uses reason (the immoral can use reason too), but also because it is the expression of a loving attitude towards other persons. By emphasizing this aspect of virtuous activity, I defend Aristotle against the charge that his high estimation for pure intellectual activity commits him to an unethical doctrine. I also argue that his theory of love helps explain why he considers the political life second only to the philosophical life.

The Morality of Happiness is a marvelous book, one that I read with excitement and admiration for the author’s command over her subject and the philosophical richness of her ideas. It is an examination of some of the leading themes of ancient ethics: happiness, virtue, nature, and the proper relation between self and others. Annas does not try to present a comprehensive treatment of the whole of classical moral philosophy, since Socrates, Plato, and Plotinus are left aside. It is Aristotle and the Stoics who receive most emphasis, although the Epicureans and the Skeptics also play an important role in her discussion. In spite of these self-imposed limitations, this is a work of extremely wide scope; I don’t know of any other from which a reader can learn so much about ancient moral theory. And it is also an important contribution in its own right to moral philosophy, because it always discusses ancient material with a view to its implications for the ways in which ethics has been transformed in the modern period and is practiced today. Annas is at pains to deny that ancient ethics suffers in comparison with modern moral philosophy; on the contrary, she finds contemporary ethical thought to be barren and out of touch with what people care about. The ancient ethical theories—particularly those of Aristotle and the Stoics—are ones she thinks we can profitably use to remedy this situation.

Plato stands as the fount of our philosophical tradition, being the first Western thinker to produce a body of writing that touches upon a wide range of topics still discussed by philosophers today. In a sense he invented philosophy as a distinct subject, for although many of these topics were discussed by his intellectual predecessors and contemporaries, he was the first to bring them together by giving them a unitary treatment. This volume contains fourteen essays discussing Plato's views about knowledge, reality, mathematics, politics, ethics, love, poetry, and religion. There are also analyses of the intellectual and social background of his thought, the development of his philosophy throughout his career, the range of alternative approaches to his work, and the stylometry of his writing.

I argue that the many similarities between what aristotle says about "eudaimonia" and what we say about happiness justify the traditional translation of "eudaimonia" as "happiness." it is not widely realized that "eudaimonia" involves a psychological state much like the one we call "happiness." nor is it generally recognized that both "eudaimonia" and "happiness" involve a standard for evaluating lives. For aristotle, The standard is objective and inflexible; for us, It is subjective and flexible. Thus, When we call someone happy and aristotle says he is not "eudaimon", We are not using two different concepts, But rather two different ways of evaluating lives