Aristotle as Teacher of Ethical Discourse

Academy of Athens, 2018

There is an enormous scholarly discussion on how virtue of character or ethical virtue and phronesis, which is a dianoetic virtue, are related. In the present paper, I am interested in how, according to Aristotle, we develop ourselves into virtuous agents, that is, how we should train ourselves, or how we should be trained, so that we become virtuous, that is, acquire virtue of character and thus act virtuously. By taking this starting point, I will appoach the question of the relation between phronesis and virtue of character in determining virtuous action from a different angle, namely that of ethical upbringing.

S. Tenenbaum (ed.), Moral Psychology: Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities, 2007

2021

The title of this work does not refer to any lost work of the Stagirite, but to a compendium of ethical content that is well known but perhaps, in my opinion, has not been given due attention. On the other hand, the title is a verbal play on a well-known treatise pompously called, it is not clear why, the "great Ethics", Magna Moralia, admittedly late and belonging not to Aristotle himself but to members of his school from the Hellenistic period.

This is the Introduction to my book, Aristotle's Method in Ethics: Philosophy in Practice.

This thesis develops an account of ethical discourse through a unified approach to ethical evaluation, practical reasoning, and action explanation. It pursues a comparative analysis with respect to modern moral theories, theories of practical reasoning, and action theories so as to explain how a unified approach can resolve the chronic problems in each area.

2006

ἄνευ γὰρ φίλων οὐδεὶς ἕλοιτ᾽ ἂν ζῆν, ἔχων τὰ λοιπὰ ἀγαθὰ πάντα Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VIII 1 (1155a) In Homage to José García López φιλίας χάριν Summary: The paper aims to raise certain questions of Aristotelian Ethics focusing mainly on the Nicomachean Ethics, it being the author's purpose to "contextualize" Aristotle's ethical thought and his writings on it. In the first place the structure and the links between the different books, which prove a late conflation of NE, are analyzed. Secondly, regards content, the sources of Aristotle after his rejection of Platonic Ethics are taken into consideration: these reveal a partial return to the aristocratic morals in the concepts both of eudaimonia and areté, and through the catalogue of virtues in Book IV. Finally, problems both lexical and semantic of Aristotle's ethic vocabulary are raised.

Phronesis-a Journal for Ancient Philosophy, 1997

We may distinguish two very different ways in which Aristotle figures in contemporary Anglo-American moral philosophizing. Some philosophers find in Aristotle an ethical theory that conceptualizes the subject matter of ethics, and the very questions an ethical theory should aim to answer, in ways that are crucially different from those characteristic of modem moral theories. Other philosophers view Aristotle as essentially toiling in the same philosophical fields as the modems, deploying essentially the same concepts and giving analyses of those concepts that can be compared with, and perhaps preferred to, modem analyses, without undue risk of comparing apples and oranges or of changing the subject. The title of Susan Sauve Meyer's Aristotle on Moral Responsibility' already suggests that she belongs to the second camp, and she makes it clear from the beginning of her work that she sees herself as opposing those who hold (Bernard Williams is foremost in her mind) that there is nothing in Aristotle's ethical theory corresponding to the modern notion of moral responsibility. She aims to show, on the contrary, that "Aristotle's concerns and aims in his various discussions of voluntariness are precisely those of a theorist of moral responsibility" (3). Nevertheless in the course of her masterly execution of this project M. takes care to point out that, on her reconstruction, Aristotle's theory of moral responsibility lacks at least one feature that is widely, if not universally, thought to belong to moral responsibility: what M. refers to as "responsibility for character." There is little to be gained by debating whether this feature, if it is indeed a central feature of most modem accounts of moral responsibility, is essential to the very concept of moral responsibility, or simply a feature of many modem conceptions of it (to use Rawls's distinction); we may be grateful to M. for undertaking to show that Aristotle has a notion bearing a strong family resemblance to that of moral responsibility in the modern sense. M. defends her thesis with a cogently-reasoned argument that draws not only on the three ethical treatises in the Aristotelian corpus (she rightly treats the Magna Moralia as a fairly reliable source of Aristotelian thought, th ough probably not by Aristotle's own hand) but also, and importantly, on discussions of efficient causation in Aristotle's theoretical works. On the basis of these texts M.

Review of the contents of the Proceedings of the Symposium Aristotelicum on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics VII in Venice 2007. Published in Rhizai VIII, 1, pp. 99-109. (2011)