The Soul, the Virtues, and the Human Good: Comments on Aristotle's Moral Psychology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25180/lj.v18i2.51Keywords:
Elisabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, virtue, soul, modern virtue ethics, moral psychologyAbstract
In modern moral philosophy, virtue ethics has developed into one of the major approaches to ethical inquiry. As it seems, however, it is faced with a kind of perplexity similar to the one that Elisabeth Anscombe has described in Modern moral philosophy with regard to ethics in general. For if we assume that Anscombe is right in claiming that virtue ethics ought to be grounded in a sound philosophy of psychology, modern virtue ethics seems to be baseless since it lacks or even avoids reflections on the human soul. To overcome this difficulty, the paper explores the conceptual connections between virtue and soul in Aristotle's ethics. It claims that the human soul is the principle of virtue since reflections on the soul help us to define the nature of virtue, to understand the different kinds of virtues, and to answer the question why human beings need the virtues at all.
Downloads
References
Anscombe, G.E.M. "Modern Moral Philosophy," in Goger Crisp, and Michael Slote (eds.). Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 26-44.
Aristotle. Categories. Transl. by J.L. Ackrill. In Jonathan Barnes (ed.). The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. 1. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984. 3-24.
Aristotle. De Anima. Transl. by J.A. Smith. In Jonathan Barnes (ed.). The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. 1. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984. 641-692.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated with Introduction, Notes, and Glossary by Terence Irwin. 2nd Edition. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company, Inc. 1999.
Aristotle. Politics. Transl. by B. Jowett. In Jonathan Barnes (ed.). The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. 2. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984. 1986-2129.
Besser-Jones, Lorraine. "The Situationist Critique," in Lorraine Besser-Jones, and Michael Slote (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics. New York: Routledge, 2015. 375-384.
De Young, Rebecca Konyndyke, Colleen McClusky, and Christina Van Dyke. Aquinas's Ethics: Metaphysical foundations, moral theory, and theological context. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.
Flannery, Kevin L. The Aristotelian Logical Structure of Thomas Aquinas's Moral Theory. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001.
Doris, John. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Foot, Philippa. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.
Goméz-Lobo, Alfonso. "The Ergon-Inference," in John P. Anton, and Anthony Preus (eds.). Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy IV: Aristotle's Ethics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. 42-57.
Harman, Gilbert. "The Nonexistence of Character Traits." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (1), 2000. 223-226.
Kamtekar, Rachana. "Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character." Ethics 114 (3), 2004. 458-491.
Lutz, Christopher Stephen. Reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. London: Continuum, 2012.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. London: Duckworth, 1999.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd Edition. Notre Dame, Indi-ana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
McDowell, John. "Some Issues in Aristotle's Moral Psychology," in Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. 23-49.
Snow, Nancy. Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Snow, Nancy. "Notes Toward an Empirical Psychology of Virtue: Exploring the Personality Scaffolding of Virtue," in Julia Peters (ed.). Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspec-tive. New York/Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. 130-144.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa theologiae. Transl. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Benziger Bros. Edition, 1947. (http://www.dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/index.html)
Thompson, Michael. "The Representation of Life," in Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn (eds.). Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. 247-296.
Stump, Eleonore. "The Non-Aristotelian Character of Aquinas's Ethics. Aquinas on the Pas-sions." Faith and Philosophy 28.1, 2011. 29-43.
Stump, Eleonore. "True Virtue and the Role of Love in the Ethics of Aquinas," in Harm Goris, Lambert Hendriks, and Henk Schoot (eds.). Faith, Hope, and Love: Thomas Aqui-nas on Living by the Theological Virtues. Leuven: Peeters, 2015. 7-24.
Te Velde, Rudi. "The Hybrid Character of the Infused Moral Virtue according to Thomas Aquinas," in Harm Goris, Lambert Hendriks, and Henk Schoot (eds.). Faith, Hope, and Love: Thomas Aquinas on Living by the Theological Virtues. Leuven: Peeters, 2015. 25-43.
Whiting, Jennifer. "Aristotle's Function Argument: A Defense." Ancient Philosophy 8 (1), 1988. 33-48.
Whiting, Jennifer. "Hylomorphic Virtue: Cosmology, Embryology, and Moral Development in Aristotle." Unpublished Manuscript (to appear in Jennifer Whiting, Body and Soul, Ox-ford: Oxford University Press 2018).
Wilkes, Kathleen V. "The God Man and the Good for Man in Aristotle's Ethics," in Oksenberg Rorty, Amélie (ed.). Essays on Aristotle's Ethics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. 341-357.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2016 Kathie Beier
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
After acceptation of the paper, the author has to sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement granting to Labyrinth and Axia Academic Publishers the exclusive copyrights for the online and printed editions, and to deal with reprint requests from third parties. On special occasions, articles and studies published in Labyrinth may be republished in textbooks or collective works of Axia Academic Publishers as well as translated and published in other languages. By submitting a paper to Labyrinth, you implicitely agree with these conditions.