Margaret Hampson

Aristotle’s catalogue of ethical virtues includes the virtue of magnificence (megaloprepeia), the mean between the vices of vulgarity and shabbiness. This paper asks what exactly the virtue of magnificence is, and more importantly, why it should be regarded as a virtue—that is, a human excellence and constitutive of a flourishing human life. Against the widely accepted view that magnificence is, essentially, a virtue of large-scale generosity or philanthropy, it argues that magnificence is concerned with the place of ‘adornment’ in our lives. Magnificence involves ‘exceeding the necessities’ of everyday living, and is tied, in particular, to our practices of celebration and glorification, or other such expressions of value, speaking to our nature as social and expressive beings and giving colour to our lives.

This chapter offers a re-reading of the tyrannical character through the lens of his failure as a philos. More than identifying a consequence of the tyrant’s unjust behaviour, I will argue that the epithet ‘aphilos’ alerts us to a deeper failure in the way the tyrant relates to other people, as manifested in the account of how he lives. Whilst it is tempting to explain this failure by appeal to the tyrant’s characteristic desires, I shall argue that this initial impulse should be resisted, and we should instead take a diachronic view and consider how the tyrant has developed. Importantly, the tyrant’s developmental history—gleaned from a comparative reading of the education and nurture of the guardians of the ideal city—does not offer mere supplemental information about how the tyrant has become the way he is, but rather offers a new perspective on the source of the tyrant’s aphilia and the relation between this and his characteristic desires. This re-reading, I hope, will offer a richer view of the tyrannical character and the nature of his pathology, and a new appreciation of the role of philia in Plato’s account of moral development and what it is to be well-formed.

In his ‘Memory, Anticipation, Pleasure’, James Warren describes two models for how ancient philosophers understood the memory and anticipation of pleasure and pain. According to the first, memory and anticipation allow us to re-live or pre-live temporally remote affections; according to the second, an experience at t 1 might have a different and opposite affective character to the anticipation of that experience at t -1, or the recollection of it at t 2. This response analyses Warren’s characterization of the two models and the fit between the models and the texts Warren surveys. It shows that the first model in particular struggles to fit many of the texts, with the distinction between the two models threatening to collapse. The chapter ends with a provisional suggestion as to how the distinction between Warren’s two models might be preserved.

Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic schools each display an interest in the psychology of ethical subjects and our psychological engagement with sources of value. They ask, amongst other things, through what psychological capacities we engage with sources of value; how our capacities to so engage might best be developed; and how these capacities can be harnessed in such a way that we lead the best human life. This chapter examines some of the ways in which ancient thinkers understood our engagement with sources of value, from intellectual engagement to appetitive desire, from pleasure and pain as responses to value as well as ways of seeing something as valuable, to temporally remote forms of engagement via our capacities for memory and anticipation. It also highlights the particular contributions made by each of the papers and responses in this volume to our understanding of the psychology of value in ancient Greek ethics.

Ancient Greek thought saw the birth, in so-called Western philosophy, of the study now known as moral psychology. In its broadest sense, moral psychology encompasses the study of those aspects of human psychology relevant to our moral lives—desire, emotion, ethical knowledge, practical moral reasoning, and moral imagination—and their role in apprehending or responding to sources of value. This volume draws together contributions from leading international scholars in ancient philosophy, exploring central issues in the moral psychology of Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic schools. Through a series of papers and responses, these contributions challenge and develop interpretations of ancient views on topics from Socratic intellectualism to the nature of appetitive desires, from the role of pleasure and pain in virtue, to our capacities for memory, anticipation and choice, and their role in a flourishing human life.

That character virtue is produced, according to Aristotle, through a process of moral habituation is a familiar feature of his ethics. And yet our feeling of familiarity with the notions of habit and habituation can engender a like feeling of familiarity with the process Aristotle describes, and encourage us to conceive of this process in an overly narrow way. In this chapter, I examine Aristotle’s notion of ethos and ethismos (habit, habituation) in the Nicomachean Ethics to better understand what Aristotle means to convey when he claims that character virtue ‘arises from habit’. I argue that to characterise habituation as ‘non-rational’ is misleading, particularly when this characterisation forecloses questions about what kinds of activity may be involved in the process of habituation, and what kind of states can be produced as a result. Habituation, I argue, is not characterised as a non-rational process, but a process that involves action and activity. This allows that the process of habituation may be understood in a relatively broad way and as potentially involving a range of activities which engage and develop a variety of psychological capacities. It also raises interesting questions about what a learner’s activity affords and how this contributes to her successful habituation.

Moral virtue is, for Aristotle, a state to which an agent’s motivation is central. For anyone interested in Aristotle’s account of moral development this invites reflection on two questions: how is it that virtuous motivational dispositions are established? And what contribution do the moral learner’s existing motivational states make to the success of her habituation? I argue that views which demand that the learner act with virtuous motives if she is to acquire virtuous dispositions misconstrue the nature and structure of the habituation process, but also obscure Aristotle’s crucial insight that the very practice of virtuous actions affords a certain discovery and can be transformative of an agent’s motivational states. Drawing attention, in Aristotle’s account, to an asymmetry between the agential perspective and the observation of others, I consider what the agential perspective affords the learner, and offer a novel interpretation of the role a learner’s existing motives play in her habituation.

Moral virtue is, for Aristotle, famously acquired through the practice of virtuous actions. But how should we understand the activity of Aristotle’s moral learner, and how does her activity result in the acquisition of virtue? I argue that by understanding Aristotle’s learner as engaged in the emulative imitation of a virtuous agent, we can best account for her development. Such activity crucially involves the adoption of the virtuous agent’s perspective, from which I argue the learner is positioned so as to appreciate the value of virtuous action—its fineness—and what it would be to act finely herself.