Julia Annas

Some years ago I started to write a book on virtue ethics, in which I tried to meet early criticisms of what was then a new way of doing ethics. The book continued to be unsatisfactory, and I finally abandoned it, realizing that I needed to get clear about virtue before producing a defence of virtue ethics. This need should have been obvious, especially since I frequently teach Platonic dialogues where Socrates gets people to see that they are doing what I was doing, namely developing ideas about something without first examining what it is. The need became even more obvious as the field rapidly expanded with the production of Humean, Nietschean, Kantian and consequentialist kinds of virtue ethics. Within the field of neo-Aristotelian ethics itself it became clear that different aspects can be stressed: the importance of practical wisdom can be developed, for example, without defending a naturalistic account of the relation of virtue to happiness.I finally wrote a book to explore and d ..

Sextus’s arguments against ethical theories are shorter and more general than those he brings against the other two parts of ancient philosophy, logic and physics. Until recently this part of his work, in Outlines of Pyrrhonism III and Adversus Mathematicos XI has been comparatively neglected. Now, as well as the splendidly scholarly book by Emidio Spinelli, Sesto Empirico: Contro Gli Etici we have Richard Bett’s translation with commentary in the Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers series. Both books make Sextus’s sometimes elusive work far more available and usable to the modern reader.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Julia Annas ACTION AND CHARACTER IN DOSTOYEVSKY'S NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND Notes from Underground was written with a specific purpose in mind: to answer Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?1 And many features of Dostoyevsky's work can only be understood when we bear in mind its specifically Russian setting. The narrator is a romantic idealist of the forties transformed into something rather different by 1864, and no doubt we lose much if we do not bear in mind that Dostoyevsky is looking back across the gulf of imprisonment and suffering at his own idealistic youth.2 But the intense and radically peculiar nature of Dostoyevsky's writing takes us to a level of the work which is accessible to those without knowledge of the local conditions of the work's production. As Mochulsky says, "the author steadily emerges beyond the confines of the Russian intellectual... the underground man's paradoxes are not the whims of some half-mad eccentric, but a new revelation of man about man." The book is "the philosophical preface to the cycle of the great novels" (p. 245). Even though Dostoyevsky's passionate and extreme temperament made him quite incapable of constructing a piece of precise philosophical argument, there is much of genuine philosophical interest in part I. It is not just a particular moral and political theory, like Chernyshevsky's, which is to be discredited, but something deeper, the presuppositions of a whole type of moral theory. In this article I shall examine the implications of what Dostoyevsky says for the philosophy of action and thence for ethics. I shall argue that he challenges a very basic model of human action, which is both intuitively plausible and basic to many moral theories. I shall also argue that as the work stands, there is a lack of continuity between parts I and II on the philosophical as well as on the literary level. In concentrating on the consequences for moral theory, I shall be ignoring the social and political aspects of the work. It may well be urged that such a division of the moral from the political is unrealistic in treating 257 258Philosophy and Literature a Russian writer. In defense I can only say that this narrowing of focus brings out in a sharper and more tractable way the philosophical issue which is my main concern. I Tell me, who was it who first declared, proclaiming it to the whole world, that a man does evil only because he does not know his real interests, and if he is enlightened and has his eyes opened to his own best and normal interests, man will cease to do evil and at once become virtuous and noble, because when he is enlightened and understands what will really benefit him he will see his own best interest in virtue, and since it is well known that no man can knowingly act against his best interests, consequently he will inevitably, so to speak, begin to do good. Oh, what a baby! Oh, what a pure innocent child! (part I section 7; all quotations are from the translation by Jessie Coulson [London: Penguin, 1972]). What exactly is the target here of the Underground Man?3 Every moral theory presupposes some theory of human action, although this may not be explicit; since moral philosophy is concerned with human actions, it must presuppose some account of what it is for a human action to be performed. One very influential tradition thinks of the paradigm of action as essentially aimed at some good: "Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good" is the opening sentence of Aristotle's Ethics.4 What is it for every action to aim at some good? We have the assumption here that every action is purposive and rational; purposive in that there is some goal which the agent sees as a good and rational in that performing the action is believed by the agent to be an appropriate means or way of bringing about the desired goal. This model of action is developed very fully in Aristotle, but it is not conceptually linked to...

In this book I look at the tradition of eudaimonistic ethics which stems from Aristotle's treatment of ethics, and which takes distinct, though related forms in Epicurus, the Stoics and the Sceptics. I look at this tradition from different points of view: how is it related to human nature, how does it account for other-related virtue and action, and how much does it require in terms of revising previously held priorities. I discuss the methodology of discussing ancient texts in ways that relate them to contemporary concerns, particularly the importance of respecting the texts and avoiding anachronism.

Julia Annas here offers a fundamental reexamination of Plato's ethical thought by investigating the Middle Platonist perspective, which emerged at the end of Plato's own school, the Academy. She highlights the differences between ancient and modern assumptions about Plato's ethics--and stresses the need to be more critical about our own. One of these modern assumptions is the notion that the dialogues record the development of Plato's thought. Annas shows how the Middle Platonists, by contrast, viewed the dialogues as multiple presentations of a single Platonic ethical philosophy, differing in form and purpose but ultimately coherent. They also read Plato's ethics as consistently defending the view that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and see it as converging in its main points with the ethics of the Stoics. Annas goes on to explore the Platonic idea that humankind's final end is "becoming like God"--an idea that is well known among the ancients but virtually ignored in modern interpretations. She also maintains that modern interpretations, beginning in the nineteenth century, have placed undue emphasis on the Republic, and have treated it too much as a political work, whereas the ancients rightly saw it as a continuation of Plato's ethical writings.

This volume brings together a selection of Rosalind Hursthouse’s essays on Aristotle, virtue ethics, and social philosophy. These articles—many of which are published in more obscure venues—provide valuable context and clarification for much of her more famous work on virtue ethics while drawing attention to new avenues of philosophical investigation Hursthouse pursued. Important contributions include articles on the development of virtue in children, what the Aristotelian practically wise person knows, how virtue ethicists can inform discussions about environmental and animal ethics, what the starting point for virtue politics should be in a contemporary political context, and how human nature and ethical naturalism could provide the foundation for a virtue ethical system.

Response to Nancy Snow In Nancy’s impressive book she shows, through a thorough study of the philosophical debate about the position called ‘situationism’ and the psychological literature that supposedly based it, that there was a serious misconception right from the start among philosophers about the kind of disposition or trait which psychologists were concerned with. The kind of disposition the philosophers were rejecting was one taken to be expressed over a number of situations characterized from the outside, independently of the person’s take on the situation. What ‘situationist’ psychologists were defending was an account of traits which took into consideration the person’s own construal of the situation. They weren’t defending the view that situations in themselves get us to act regardless of what we bring to them . When properly understood, situationist psychology is a friend, not a ..

In his later depiction of an ideal city, the Laws, Plato does not move from rule by experts to the rule of law, as often claimed, since law is also basic to the Republic. Rather, he now sees educated law-abidance as part of civic virtue: the laws are to be obeyed strictly, but also to be understood so that they are obeyed in the right spirit. Plato introduces original means to encourage this, and is led to make some moves in the direction of what will later be developed by the Stoics as natural law.