Aristotle on Virtue and Friendship

Aristotle on Virtue and Friendship

AKC 2009

Aristotle on virtue and friendship

  1. When assessing moral value, where do we locate it?
  2. In acts or persons?
  3. In rights and duties?
  4. In the outcome of actions?
  5. In virtue?
  1. When assessing moral value, why do we think it is compelling?
  2. Why do we need a reason for it to be compelling?
  3. The question of self-interest and other-regarding actions
  4. Often morality looks as though it is against our interests.
  5. So why do we do it?
  6. It is a duty?
  7. It is a divine requirement?
  8. It is a social requirement?
  9. It is in our best interests anyway?
  1. Socrates’ question: ‘How best to live?’
  2. Focuses on a life
  3. On a life lived best
  4. And on the person who lives the life
  5.  a general interest in how to achieve the best in one’s life
  6. Eudaimonia
  7. Happiness, a feeling?
  8. Happiness a state of the person?
  9. Where this is accessible by knowledge.
  1. Aristotle on the ends of life:
  2. The good?
  3. Here he responds to Plato’s conception of goodness
  4. Goodness as a real value, and knowable.
  5. But what is it from something to be good?
  6. Is goodness a property of things?
  7. Or a way of being something or other/somehow or other?
  8. An end, where that keeps on going…. Good function.
  9. Suppose we knew what was the best way of being (a person)
  10. Would that be happiness?
  11. This is how best to live…
  12. This is virtue?
  13. How do we achieve eudaimonia?
  14. The argument from function (Nicomachean Ethics 1.7)
  15.  an account of how best to live determined by natural function
  16.  it privileges the highest functions
  17.  intellect and practical reason.
  18.  functioning virtue.
  1. Two competing lives (NE 1, 2, 10)
  2. The theoretical life (what is that like?)
  3. The practical life (what is that like?)
  4. They are the ends of life in that they are
  5. Complete
  6. Self-sufficient
  7. Worth choosing.
  8. What is missing?
  9. Individual preferences?
  10. Moral demands
  11. Love and concern for others – friendship
  12. Why would the self-sufficient person need friends?
  13. What would be missing if he did not??
  1. A different view: (Politics 1, NE 9).
  2. The complexity of human function
  3. Joint faculties
  4. Conversation and philosophy
  5. Man as a political animal
  6. A revision of the concept of function
  7. Does this account for moral duties?

Select Bibliography

Socrates and Plato

Plato, Apology of Socrates

Plato, Meno

[both in J.M. Cooper, ed. Plato, Collected Works]

S. Ahbel-Rappe, R. Kamtekar, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Socrates

G. Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher

Aristotle

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle, Politics

J. Barnes, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle

G. Hughes, Aristotle on Ethics

A. Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics

Stoics

A.A.Long and D. Sedley, eds., The Hellenistic Philosophers

B. Inwood, The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics

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