Roopen Majithia

This open access book presents a comparative study of two classics of world literature, offering the first sustained study of what unites and divides the Nicomachean Ethics and the Bhagavad Gita. Asking what the texts think is the nature of moral action and how it relates to the highest good, Roopen Majithia shows how the Gita stresses the objectivity of knowledge and freedom from being a subject, while the Ethics emphasizes the knower, working out Aristotle’s central commitment to the idea of substance as the primary building block of the world. Yet both the Gita and the Ethics explain variety in human behaviour in terms of three driving forces. Both agree moral agency is a construct that is a function of background, education and habit, presupposing a cultural, political and economic infrastructure. What distinguishes the texts is how the content of right action is generated. Reading them together, alert to their individual accounts of how the practical relates to the reflective dimensions of life, Majithaia enriches our understanding of two cornerstone texts in the Greek and Indian philosophical traditions. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollectionsdotcom. Open access was funded by The Marjorie Young Bell Faculty Fund and The Hart Almerrin Massey Endowment.

In the 70s and 80s, scholars were convinced that the Nicomachean Ethics was inconsistent because it seemed to them that while Aristotle emphasized both practical and theoretical virtues in his conception of happiness in much of the NE, in Book X he emphasized only one---contemplation. The problem was that it was hard to imagine how happiness could consist in the satisfaction of a single desire as opposed to the satisfaction of many desiderata. But the gathering consensus in the late 80s and 90s was that there is an implicit assumption that cleared up this difficulty; the activity of happiness was theoria whereas the life of happiness consisted in the satisfaction of several desires both practical and theoretical. ;Yet this has left many scholars dissatisfied for 2 reasons: because the notion of contemplating a completed picture of knowledge seems odd and boring and hardly the sort of thing one would need to express with the ecstatic Augustinian sentiments that Aristotle uses, and because whatever one may say about their consistency, it is clear that in Book I the hero is a less unfortunate Priam or a Pericles and therefore consists of a discussion of the political life, whereas the hero in Book X is an Anaxagoras and therefore is a discussion of the philosophical life. ;What I suggest is that there are indeed 2 different lives being talked about here and that contrary to what has been thought all along, the practical life can also culminate in theoria just as the philosophical one. This is seen with the help of a better understanding of . For theoria is ultimately a religious experience, one that is accomplished when we turn our minds to God, the Active Intellect, and in a sense become him since the mind works by becoming one with the object thought. How this is accomplished is different for the different lives; in the practical life it has to do with acting virtuously and fulfilling our function, as well as with the relation of the practical kalon to the divine one. In the theoretical, it has to do with an explicit ascent to the first principle of knowledge and Being as outlined in the Metaphysics

In this paper I attempt to understand the implications of a kara's claim that liberation is not an action. If liberation is not an action, how is it up to us and therefore our responsibility? What role do actions have in a life concerned with liberation? The key to understanding a kara's view, I suggest, requires broad reflection on his claim in his commentary on Brahma S tra I.1.4 that cessation of action in accordance with Vedic prohibition is not an action. I will conclude by discussing the implications of this interpretation on the nature of m y in a kara

The gathering consensus on the inclusive/exclusive debate regarding happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics seems to be that both sides of the story are partly right. For while the life of happiness (understood as the total life of an individual) is inclusive of ethical and contemplative virtue among other things, the central activity of happiness is exclusively contemplation. The discussions of the Eudemian Ethics, on the other hand, seem to suggest that this text is broadly inclusive. The view I defend here is that the Eudemian text is no more and no less inclusive that the Nicomachean version, although there are significant differences between them in terms of the life of contemplation. That is, I argue that the Eudemian Ethics is concerned with the political life and the actualization of theōria in this context, and suggest that the Nicomachean Ethics is concerned with contemplation in the context of both political and philosophical lives.