Darren Hutchinson

Originally published in 1986. Both moral philosophers and philosophical psychologists need to answer the question ‘what is a virtue?’ and the best answer so far give is that of Aristotle. This book is a rigorous exposition of that answer. The elements of Aristotle’s doctrine of virtue are scattered throughout his writings; this book reconstructs his complex and comprehensive doctrine in one place. It also covers Aristotle’s views about choice, character, emotions and the role of pleasure and pain in virtue. The celebrated function (_ergon_) is considered carefully as well as the doctrine of virtue being related to Aristotle’s metaphysics and categories.

We hope to show that the overall protreptic plan of Aristotle's ethical writings is based on the plan he used in his published work Protrepticus (Exhortation to Philosophy), by highlighting those passages that primarily offer hortatory or protreptic motivation rather than dialectical argumentation and analysis, and by illustrating several ways that Aristotle adapts certain arguments and examples from his Protrepticus. In this essay we confine our attention to the books definitely attributable to the Nicomachean Ethics (thus excluding the common books).

Aristotle’s dialogue Protrepticus is not only his earliest work of ethics but also the root of all his subsequent investigations into ethics. Here we explore the various ways Aristotle retained in memory the contents of the Protrepticus and redeployed them in the Eudemian Ethics, including the common books. Since Aristotle himself does not explicitly acknowledge the foundational significance of the Protrepticus to his later works, our exploration must proceed on the basis of our knowledge of the earlier work, which can then related to comparable passages in the treatises. But the Protrepticus is a lost work, unlike the EE and the EN, in the sense that no medieval manuscripts of it have survived. And so it first needs to be reconstructed on the basis of the streams of reception that deposited information in surviving works by later ancient authors. We begin in part 1 by reviewing the surviving evidence of the Protrepticus before presenting our wider reconstruction and conception of the work as a dialogue in part 2. In part 3, we discuss ideas and arguments in the reconstructed dialogue that are retained and redeployed in the Eudemian Ethics, focussing on the account of intellectual virtues in EE v and the introduction and methodological framework in EE i-ii.1.

Isocrates' Antidosis ("Defense against the Exchange") and Aristotle's Protrepticus ("Exhortation to Philosophy") were recovered from oblivion in the late nineteenth century. In this article we demonstrate that the two texts happen to be directly related. Aristotle's Protrepticus was a response, on behalf of the Academy, to Isocrates' criticism of the Academy and its theoretical preoccupations. Contents: I. Introduction: Protrepticus, text and context II. Authentication of the Protrepticus of Aristotle III. Isocrates and philosophy in Athens in the 4th century IV. The Protrepticus of Aristotle as a response to the Antidosis of Isocrates V. Conclusion: dueling conceptions of philosophy, still dueling.

In The Religion of Socrates, Mark McPherran offers an extended discussion of selected evidence about Socrates’s philosophy of religion. Relevant passages from Plato’s Euthyphro and Apology are taken to be authentic reports of Socrates’s own thinking, and are commented on at considerable length. The interpretation that emerges is supplemented by evidence from other works by Plato and from Xenophon’s Memorabilia. The ten-page bibliography is useful, and the index of passages is especially valuable. But McPherran’s evidence is tendentiously selected, and so his depiction cannot be trusted as a portrayal of Socrates himself.

There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t.argument: pluralistic theory opens itself toward different values, languages, histories, modes of reasoning, and forms of experience with a commitment not to reduce or hierarchize the many by means of the one. Such theory has emerged out of various traditions, including those associated with American pragmatism (Emerson, James, Dewey), analytic philosophy (Wittgenstein, Rorty), and continental philosophy (Derrida, Nancy). Not surprisingly, the pluralism issuing from these traditions takes diverse forms and articulates itself through heterogeneous concepts and styles. Many pluralist philosophers in the present, however, have ..

Motivations can often conflict. Suppose it is six o'clock and I want a drink; suppose also that I know that it would be unwise or inappropriate in my present circumstances to drink. In cases like this I feel a struggle inside me. For Plato and for Aristotle, such struggles were an important part of moral experience, and on their description and analysis depends much of Plato's and Aristotle's moral psychology. It is not well enough appreciated that, in this respect, Aristotle was an uncritical follower of Plato. If we understand Plato's theory and how little Aristotle departed from it, we will be able to make better sense of some difficult passages, especiallyDe AnimaIII.11, and we will even be able to solve the conundrum of the ‘sphere’ which has teased scholars for two thousand years.

This essay investigates the way in which dying and dead bodies resist poetic incorporation and the way in which such bodies can be fugitively attested to through fictive prose. It examines Heidegger's treatment of dead and dying bodies from Being and Time to his later work on poetry and language, and it offers as a counterpoint another mode of addressing these bodies found in the fiction of Poe. It also shows how even the poetry of Trakl, heralded by Heidegger as an exemplar of poetic address, can be fruitfully understood in prosaic terms, terms which more faithfully reveal both the content of his poetry itself as well as the true nature of the wounds of dying life

In this article, I perform an aesthetic analysis of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness, redescribing this intuition as the result of a creative activity affirming of the uniqueness and value of human engagements with the world rather than the result of an activity of self-knowing through which phenomenal awareness becomes aware of itself. During this analysis, I analogize the construction of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness to the construction of religious intuitions for sophisticated believers and the construction of aesthetic intuitions for sophisticated aesthetes. I find accounts of the 'mistake' of the intuition of phenomenal consciousness by authors such as Dennett are overly reductive and simplistic, even though I agree that phenomenal consciousness is a created illusion rather than a natural kind. The intuition of phenomenal consciousness is a sophisticated formation which testifies to the commitment of certain naturalistically inclined theorists to the inestimable value of private experience