Training Virtue without Losing Autonomy: A Response to Aaron Stalnaker

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Contemporary Virtue Ethics

The Thomist 73 (2009): 621-46 FROM MEDIEVAL VOLUNTARISM TO HURSTHOUSE'S VIRTUE ETHICS KEVIN E. O'REILLY Milltown Institute Dublin, Ireland IN RECENT DECADES there has been an attempt to reinstate virtue ethics in moral theorizing and debate. One contribution in this regard is that of Rosalind Hursthouse, whose book On Virtue Ethics, 1 seeks a rapprochement between an Aristotelianinspired virtue ethics and Kantian deontology. Hursthouse's On Virtue Ethics captures the interest of a Thomist in part because of her discussion of the ends in the light of which we evaluate plants, animals, and human beings as members of their respective species. Her reflections bear a certain resemblance to Thomas Aquinas's observations concerning the natural inclinations (at STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2). While Philippa Foot pioneered contemporary discussion concerning the subject of ethical naturalism,2 Hursthouse, building upon Foot's work, has led the way in discussing the "ends" (which bear a certain similarity to Aquinas's "natural inclinations ") that are characteristic of embodied beings, that is to say, of humans and of other animals. Her project, however, reveals a certain operative anthropological dualism. Put briefly, rationality is not constrained in its deliberations by the parameters suggested by our animal "ends"; it ultimately enjoys an absolute freedom in imposing its own "ends" as though from outside the corporeal conditions of our being. Thus, in transcending the 1 Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 2 P. Foot, "Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?" OxfordJournal ofLegal Studies 15 (1995): 1-14. 621 622 KEVIN O'REILLY bodily dimensions of human being, rationality is free to manipulate them according to its own designs. As I will demonstrate, Hursthouse's account betrays some of the same features as are found in the theorizing of John Duns Scotus concerning the ethical life, albeit in a mutated form.3 Scotus's conception of ethics, however, constitutes a rupture with an Aristotelian-inspired virtue ethics, whose major medieval proponent was Thomas Aquinas, not least because of his treatment of the natural inclinations-which treatment also results, I will argue, in an operative anthropological dualism. If, however, we are hylomorphically constituted as body-soul unities, our bodies and their natural inclinations must necessarily enter into our appraisal of what conduces to human flourishing; if it does not, ethics becomes voluntarist in nature. History shows that Scotus's speculations contributed to the death of the virtue-ethics tradition that arguably culminated in Aquinas. Clearly, it is not possible to predict the future of contemporary virtue ethics; nevertheless, given the historical precedent of Scotus, there are grounds for grave misgivings about a virtue ethics grounded in a dualistic anthropology. Ultimately, 3 My line of argument does not require me to establish a causal link between Scotus and Hursthouse. It simply hinges on the similarity between Scotus's and Hursthouse's attitudes towards the will and human nature. Nevertheless, Hursthouse's speculations do unfold in dialogue with Kant, whose moral philosophy arguably traces its genealogy back to Scotus. In particular, she attempts to effect a rapprochement between Aristotle and Kant when dealing with emotion and motivation (On Virtue Ethics, 91££.), seemingly unaware of the kind of developments indicated in this article, developments which arguably render such a rapprochement impossible. For a treatment of the significance ofScotus's treatment of the will and morality for Kant's ethics, see Hannes Mohle, "Will und Moral: Zur Voraussetzung der Ethik des Johannes Duns Scotus und ihrer Bedeutung fiir die Ethik Immanuel Kants," in Ludger Honnefelder, Rega Wood and Methchild Dreyer, eds.,]ohn Scotus: Metaphysics and Ethics (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 573-94. Ingham and Dreyer summarize Scotus's historical legacy as follows: "Scotus's philosophical legacy ... can be summarized as an attention to personal, subjective awareness, in the light of rational principles. These principles link logic, ontology, and ethics to form a whole whose unifying principle is the person in the act of selfreflection . In his followers, these principles will be developed and enhanced throughout the fourteenth century. The principles will influence the thought of Ockham, as we know, but also thinkers such as Suarez, Molina, Leibniz, Wollf, and Kant" (Mary Beth Ingham...

Reviewed by: Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting by Shannon Vallor Wessel Reijers Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, Oxford University Press, 2016. Some books can be said to represent ‘new beginnings’, opening up new spaces for academic discourse and new methods and perspectives. Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues can rightfully be claimed to be one of those books. There is much about this book that is not only laudable but also urgent. First, it has managed to firmly establish virtue ethics as a tradition worthy of consideration in the field of ethics of technology. Other authors have suggested such a turning (Ess 2009; Coeckelbergh 2012), but none have done it so far in a manner that can live up to the comprehensiveness of Technology and the Virtues. Second, the book has served the virtue ethics tradition well in convincingly arguing for its continuing relevance in a time of serious sociotechnical challenges. As our moral critiques of technologies are increasingly entangled in discussions of existential threats that are claimed to be too complex to be handled by common human beings and call for an enhancement of our species, Vallor’s urgent call back to earth, back to our own human capabilities, will be welcomed by many. Third, it establishes a way of approaching matters in moral philosophy that is quite uncommon today, namely drawing from not only the ‘Western’ perspective but also systematic moral philosophies from other cultures: Buddhist and Confucian ethics. This echoes the increasing need in a multipolar world to build bridges between moral traditions, to construct a global dialogue (insofar possible) concerning the good life and the kind of societies we want to live in. Vallor’s book is structured in a convincing way and guides the reader from foundational questions to a framework of the ‘technomoral’ virtues, and to a series of in-depth case studies of contemporary technologies: social media, surveillance technologies, robots, and human enhancement technologies. In the introduction and Part I of the book, Vallor has three main objectives. The first is to argue for the existence of a so-called state [End Page E-17] of “acute sociotechnical opacity” (6) in the 21st century, which means that the practical circumstances of our everyday lives are changing so rapidly due to technological innovations that we cannot reasonably anticipate the impact of future states of affairs on our morality. This notion provides Vallor with the resources to argue against the use of utilitarian ethics, due to its false reliance on transparent choices based on the rational calculation of their outcomes, and against Kantian ethics, due to the impossibility of any categorical rule to respond to highly contingent future states of affairs. Virtue ethics is presented as a modest but viable alternative, in that enables us to acknowledge the existence of sociotechnical opacity and at the same time offers us a strategy for self-cultivation that empowers us to manage it prudently. The second objective is to introduce the revival of the virtue ethics tradition, to connect it to contemporary philosophy of technology, and to make the claim that both should be wary of their Western provincialism and engage in a global dialogue because the problems they address (e.g. climate change) are of a global character. The third objective is to lay down the fundamentals of the three virtue ethics traditions used in the book (Aristotelian, Buddhist, and Confucian) and to argue for their convergence on four major issues: a conception of the highest human good, of virtues as cultivated states of character, of a practical path for moral self-cultivation, and of a the existence of an essence of human beings (44). In Part II of the book, Vallor presents seven “core elements” (64) or perhaps rather conditions of the practices that mediate the cultivation of technomoral virtues. These conditions pertain to the ‘how’ of the cultivation of technomoral virtue, indicating according to what kinds of standards we could for instance evaluate our educational, mentoring, and training practices. Vallor painstakingly discusses the details of the accounts of cultivation of virtue in the three virtue ethics traditions she...

Joel J. Kupperman, 1936–2020 Diana Tietjens Meyers (bio) It is with deep sadness that I report the death of Joel Kupperman, University of Connecticut Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He died in Brooklyn, New York on April 8, 2020. Joel received both his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Chicago and his PhD from Cambridge University. He joined the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut in 1960. Except for visiting Trinity College, Oxford as a lecturer in 1970, two years supported by NEH fellowships, and fellowships at Clare Hall, Cambridge and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he remained at UConn until his retirement from teaching in 2013. In addition to these major national and international awards, Joel received the Faculty Excellence in Research award from the UConn Foundation in 2004. A widely recognized and influential scholar, Joel specialized in ethics, aesthetics, and Asian philosophy. He published numerous journal articles and chapters in all three fields. Two early books resist subjectivism in ethics: Ethical Knowledge (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970; reprint Routledge, 2002) and The Foundations of Morality (London and Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1983; reissue from Routledge, forthcoming in 2022). In his monographs, Joel’s long-standing interest in Chinese philosophy first became prominent in Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Value . . . And What Follows (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Joel’s scholarship in Asian philosophy long predated the recent professional awakening to non-Western philosophical traditions. Initially, he studied Chinese philosophy with H. G. Creel at the University of Chicago, and in 1967 he traveled to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan to continue his studies. In the 1980s he created Asian philosophy courses at all levels of the UConn undergraduate and graduate curriculum. His scholarship and pedagogical initiatives were visionary. Regarded as a classic by many in the field, his Learning from Asian Philosophy nimbly integrates insights from classical Chinese and Indian philosophy as well as Western philosophy into nuanced accounts of the self, choice, moral psychology, moral requirements, and interpersonal communication (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; Chinese translation, Beijing: Renmin Press, 2009). That Joel delivered the keynote lecture at the [End Page 1] conference honoring the ninetieth anniversary of the Peking University Philosophy Department as well as the keynote lecture at the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy’s 2011 meeting in Hawai‘i are two measures of the importance of this book. Click for larger view View full resolution Joel Kupperman (1936–2020) during his keynote speech at the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy 43rd annual conference, May 25–28, 2011 in Honolulu. In addition, Joel published books that would be valuable to professional philosophers and that would also reach college students and the larger educated public. Notable among these are Theories of Human Nature (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010), Ethics and Qualities of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Six Myths about the Good Life: Thinking about What Has Value (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), and Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; second edition, 2006). When it became possible for Chinese students to come to the United States to study, Joel attracted some of them to the UConn philosophy department. Like all the graduate students, they studied Western philosophy. But thanks to Joel, they were able to study Chinese philosophy as well. Joel received the Faculty Excellence in Teaching award from the UConn Foundation in 1973. Upon his retirement, two of his Ph.D. students, Chenyang Li and Peimin Ni, celebrated his career by publishing a festschrift containing chapters by leading scholars: Moral Cultivation and Confucian [End Page 2] Character: Engaging Joel J. Kupperman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014). Joel is survived by his wife, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, his two children, Michael Kupperman and Charlie Kupperman, and a grandchild, Ulysses Kupperman Dougherty. His colleagues and many students join me in sympathy over their loss. His singular voice and distinctive presence are irreplaceable. In honor of Joel and his philosophical legacy, the department and Joel’s family have set up a graduate fellowship fund in his name to provide some financial support for Ph.D. students in the UConn Philosophy...

Reviewed by: From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle by Mariska Leunissen Paula Gottlieb Mariska Leunissen. From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xxxii + 216. Cloth, $74.00. In her new book, Leunissen, author of Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle's Science of Nature (2010), turns her expertise in Aristotle's biology to the issue of virtue of character. The book contains some fascinating material from Aristotle's biological works and also material from relatively neglected parts of the Politics, including discussions of ethnography, climate, physiognomy, and "eugenics." Leunissen's thesis is that an examination of this material will provide insight into how people become morally virtuous, and especially why Aristotle excludes women from this group. Leunissen suggests that it is Aristotle's biology that leads to his views about women, but that does not exclude the possibility of the social prejudices of ancient Athens from infecting both. For example, when Aristotle thinks that women have cold blood and are oversensitive to pain, it is not clear whether the biological grounds for his so thinking are immune to various social prejudices about women. Sometimes, indeed, Aristotle's biology seems to be at odds with his views about women. For example, since hot-blooded male babies need to be acclimatized to the cold in preparation for later military service (117, 180), according to Aristotle, would females, who have cold blood by nature, not be more suitable for warfare and developing courage, according to Aristotle's own assumptions? Aristotle's ideas about pain in women, if correctly attributed, are even more startling. The ancient Greeks knew what kinds of pain women could endure, and had a special word for the pangs of childbirth. Be that as it may, I shall instead focus on what I take to be the crux of Leunissen's view that a biological approach is essential to understanding how virtues of character are developed. This argument comes in her chapter 5. Leunissen writes, "In Physics VII 3, Aristotle provides one of the lengthiest discussions of the physical process of virtue acquisition in the corpus" (110). At the beginning of this chapter of the Physics, Aristotle distinguishes alteration, where an existing object persists while taking on a new property, from what Aristotle elsewhere treats as substantial change, where a new object, for example, a bronze statue, comes into being. If bronze becomes fluid, that is an alteration, but if a statue comes into being, we have a new object, the statue, which is made out of the bronze and which we say is "brazen." Nor are dispositions of body and soul alterations along this line of thinking. Now one might think that Aristotle's point is that bronze spheres cannot be reduced to their matter; and dispositions cannot [End Page 552] be reduced to their material basis. Aristotle also here treats dispositions as relational and he goes on to say that acquiring or losing a disposition involves alterations of other things. In the case of virtues and vices of character, they are related to bodily pleasures and pains that are alterations of the sensory part of the soul. (Physics VII 3 is four pages long in the Oxford Classical Text, but Leunissen omits the discussion of virtues of thought at the end of the chapter.) Leunissen suggests that virtues of character may be related to elements of the soul, as health is related to bodily elements. It is not clear what the elements of the soul are, but if they include desires, feelings, and thinking, none of which Aristotle describes in purely physiological terms, the Physics is silent on their relationship to virtue of character. Nor do we have a discussion in the Physics about how particular feelings (that are types of pleasure or pain) so arise that they are appropriate in particular contexts, or how practical reasoning so develops that virtue of character involves deliberative desire and practical wisdom. In short, there is no account of virtue acquisition in the Physics. True, we are told that virtues and vices relate to pleasures and pains, but that point is already noted and refined in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Furthermore, according...

Virtue Ethics and Literary Imagination Jay R. Elliott Did Plato see something that Aristotle missed? According to a familiar narrative, Plato regarded literature as dangerous to the aims of philosophy, and he accordingly exiled the poets from his ideal republic (in fact, he proposed to censor them, allowing only those who would "imitate the speech of a decent person,"1 which from a modern point of view is perhaps even worse). By contrast, Aristotle is supposed to have reconciled literature and philosophy, not only through his appreciative account of epic and tragedy in the Poetics but also through his invocations of literary examples at crucial junctures elsewhere in his corpus, for example his use of the Trojan legend of Priam in the Nicomachean Ethics. In this contest between two of the founding figures of virtue ethics, recent virtue theorists have been emphatically on the side of Aristotle: sympathetic accounts of literary works have now become part of the standard equipment of arguments in virtue ethics, and virtue ethicists widely assume that attention to literature yields important forms of support for their philosophical agenda. Yet in all their enthusiasm for literature, recent virtue theorists may have missed something that Plato saw clearly: for philosophers, literature often spells trouble. Unlike Plato, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. But contemporary virtue ethicists [End Page 244] perhaps should be more aware of the kinds of trouble literature tends to get them into, and thus more receptive to the challenges that literary reading can pose for their philosophical projects. Philosophers are often tempted to invoke literature in places where something eludes the grasp of their arguments. As a result, philosophers' trouble with literature can be intellectually productive, provided that we hold ourselves fully open to the gaps and challenges it brings to light. In modern times, the expectation of a deep natural connection between virtue ethics and literature derives above all from the writings of Iris Murdoch. Murdoch proposed a fundamental analogy between the work of reading (or writing) literature and the work of cultivating virtuous character: just as, according to Murdoch, literature is "an education in how to picture and understand human situations,"2 so also virtue is essentially a matter of "really apprehending that other people exist."3 In her view, the essential task of literature is to combine "clear realistic vision with compassion,"4 and in so doing it provides a model for ethical cultivation as well. Many philosophers of the subsequent generation—perhaps most notably Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, and Bernard Williams—in various ways inherited Murdoch's ideas and sought to show that attention to the ethical work of great literary texts could lend support to some of the central ideas of virtue ethics. More recently, however, doubts about the presumed natural harmony between virtue ethics and literature have been sown effectively by many astute critics who have powerfully deployed literary examples in order to challenge some of virtue theorists' most basic assumptions. In Unprincipled Virtue, for example, Nomy Arpaly provides an extended reading of a central episode in Huckleberry Finn as a crucial piece of evidence in favor of her argument that virtuous actions need not involve acting on the agent's considered judgment about what he ought to do. In a little-noticed aspect of John Doris's much discussed book Lack of Character, he uses a rich and nuanced reading of Lord Jim as a key part of his argument against virtue theory. Similarly, Kwame Anthony Appiah deploys a reading of certain aspects of Martin Chuzzlewit to cast doubt on some of the claims of virtue ethics in his Experiments in Ethics. It may be time for virtue ethicists to recall something else Murdoch said—that "literature is various and very large whereas philosophy is very small"5—and to recognize that sensitive readings of literary works may give as much trouble as support to their favored arguments and conclusions. In what follows I offer three case studies, illustrating kinds of trouble that literature gives to current work in virtue ethics, drawn from three [End Page 245] of the most ambitious and creative thinkers in the field: Neera Badhwar, Daniel Russell...

Reviewed by: Before Virtue: Assessing Contemporary Virtue Ethics by Jonathan J. Sanford Anthony T. Flood Before Virtue: Assessing Contemporary Virtue Ethics by Jonathan J. Sanford (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), x + 280 pp. For Thomists and other Aristotelians working within the analytic tradition, the rise of contemporary virtue ethics (CVE) in current philosophical discussion seems like occasion for rejoicing. A rejection of deontology and consequentialism in the name of virtue by top members of the field leaves one thinking: "What is not to like?" But then, when we read the literature, something seems amiss, even to the point where we wonder if CVE is a coherent approach and if it has anything in common with what Aristotle and Aquinas mean by "ethics." Jonathan Sanford has clearly pondered these same questions and given Before Virtue to us as a result. [End Page 953] Sanford has performed a great service in offering a painstaking analysis of CVE and a sober assessment of its status as a viable normative ethical theory. This is no small task. To what CVE even refers is the source of much discussion. Seeking to include the wide array of thinkers and cover their viewpoints that make up the movement, Sanford offers the following characterization: "A contemporary virtue ethicist is an academic philosopher who subscribes to some of the principles shared by some virtue ethicists and who self-identifies with this movement" (89). Due to the wide extension of this description, he treats the multitude of thinkers self-identifying according to this characterization. In terms of Sanford's analysis of CVE, at no point does he reject the movement out of hand or fail to see the positive contributions many of its authors have made to contemporary discussion. Nonetheless, he makes a compelling case that it is a movement in disarray, in large part due to its rejection of key Aristotelian principles. Aristotle performs the central role in Sanford's case for three reasons: (1) the function G. E. M. Anscombe assigns to him in her analyses; (2) Aristotle serving as a common denominator in subsequent CVE literature; and (3) Sanford's contending that the framework of Aristotle's ethics is superior to the alternatives. Sanford's assessment of the CVE movement begins with Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy." In this article, Anscombe diagnoses the shortcomings of modern moral philosophy and suggests that it ought to be scrapped in favor of an ethics revolving around the Aristotelian virtue of phronesis and its place in the good life. Since subsequent virtue ethicists credit this article as the origin of CVE, Sanford thinks it legitimate to use Anscombe's principles as the standard of evaluation of the CVE movement. Against this measure, he thinks CVE ultimately fails to distinguish itself from the common framework of contemporary moral philosophy. The movement "has in many respects betrayed the recommendations of its mother" (183). Key to the fabric of what Anscombe thinks a suitable moral theory are both an affirmation of ethical absolutes and an adequate philosophical psychology. She points to Aristotle for addressing both considerations. Sanford posits three questions, the answers to which would constitute an adequate psychology: (1) What is human nature? (2) What is the purpose of human life? (3) And by what means can we judge progress made toward achieving the goal of human life? The raising of and providing answers to these questions constitutes the heart of the book. Attempting to employ the notion of virtue as the basis of an ethical theory without addressing these questions is likely either to fail or to be rife with confusion. As I read Sanford, CVE is plagued by attempt after attempt to treat virtue as [End Page 954] removed from the broader context in which it is intelligible. Before virtue, we must address foundational questions of moral philosophy and understand virtue as nested within this context. The book could stand on its own as a worthwhile critique of an important contemporary ethical movement; however, Sanford goes further by offering a second part, which I found to be the most compelling aspect of the work. He offers an overview of Aristotle and Aquinas that, while providing...

Aristotelian Necessities

BOOK REVIEW: edited by Ronald Sandler and Philip Cafaro.<i>ENVIRONMENTAL VIRTUE ETHICS</i>. New York and Oxford: Rowman &amp; Littlefield, 2005.

Reviewed by: Thomas Aquinas: Faith, Reason, and Following Christ by Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt Olivier-Thomas Venard O.P. Thomas Aquinas: Faith, Reason, and Following Christ. By Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xii + 342. $110.00 (cloth), $31.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-19-921314-6 (cloth), 978-0-19-921315-3 (paper). After so many "companions" or "readers," is it still possible to compose a novel introduction to Aquinas? In this insightful book, presented "as a general introduction to the life and thought of Thomas Aquinas" (x), Frederick Bauerschmidt meets the challenge. His work consists of seven chapters. The first chapter, "Time, Place, and Person," is a historical-cultural introduction focusing on Aquinas's life and [End Page 297] activity in the context of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (1-37). Two parts follow. The first has a historical-theoretical flavor. It explains "how Thomas related reason to faith" (x), including the following chapters: "Thomas's Intellectual Project" (chap. 2, pp. 41-81), "Praeambula fidei: God and the World" (chap. 3, pp. 83-142), and "Fides quaerens intellectum" (chap. 4, pp. 143-75). The second part, "Following Christ," deals more with morals, starting in a quite Thomasian way by examining "the way of God incarnate" (chap. 5, pp. 179-227) before examining "the way of God's people" (chap. 6, pp. 229-89). Chapter 7, "Thomas in History" (291-316), presents a nuanced overview of the history of the reception of Aquinas. According to Bauerschmidt himself, "those who wish to have an easy descriptor for this book can describe it as an essay in Hillbilly Thomism" (xi, alluding to Flannery O'Connor). However, this opus is much more refined than the humble claim suggests. Indeed, the last chapter, "Thomas in History," shows great hermeneutic sophistication and mastery. Although Bauerschmidt obviously favors la nouvelle théologie rather than archeo-Thomism in his review of the history of twentieth-century Thomism, he stresses both the naïveté of Marie-Dominique Chenu's dichotomy between religious affirmations or intuitions and particular languages and concepts throughout history, and the "point" of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange "that it is hard to identify continuity of intuition or affirmation without some sort of conceptual continuity" (313). We would go further and speak of a necessary continuity of wording, of language. When he compares "historical theology" à la Rorty with the "history of theology" (308-10), Bauerschmidt obviously presents the reader with his own method. Indeed, his book does not only offer (1) historical reconstructions (accounts of Aquinas in terms that Aquinas himself would approve, trying to avoid anachronism) and (2) "rational reconstructions" (redescriptions of Aquinas in our terms, deliberately anachronistic). It also gives some insights pertaining to (3) Geistesgeschichte and (4) intellectual history (the broader cultural context). Indeed, this book epitomizes "historical theology" at its best, by presenting Aquinas's intellectual project as "a form of discipleship" (x) still imitable today. Bauerschmidt presents theology, sacra doctrina, as a "way of life." Throughout the book, he demonstrates how sacra doctrina as understood by Aquinas compares with ancient philosophy as rediscovered by Pierre Hadot: it is a way of life, more than a theoretical discipline. Bauerschmidt stresses the reciprocal integration of Aquinas's way of life (as a Dominican) and his thought. For instance, he writes, "Thomas recognizes, as did the schools of philosophy in antiquity, that virtues are acquired or deepened through practices, which always occur at particular times and places under the guidance of particular rules, teachers, and examples" (260). Even the reception of infused virtues may be prepared by such exercises (ibid.). Hence the prevalence of virtue over law in Aquinas's moral teaching. This feature [End Page 298] mirrors the statements of the Order of Preachers about the legal—not moral—status of its regulations (258-59). In order to stress the Dominican-oriented dimension of Aquinas's theology, Bauerschmidt makes a judicious use of Michèle Mulchahey's work on medieval Dominican institutions (chap. 2 and pp. 258-64). Dominican formation started even with learning "a new way to walk" (261)! Since Aquinas was a "disciple," his way of life and oeuvre are fundamentally Christocentric: "his single goal...

Reviewed by: Memoir Ethics: Good Lives and the Virtues by Mike W. Martin Raymond Angelo Belliotti (bio) Mike W. Martin. Memoir Ethics: Good Lives and the Virtues. Lexington Books, 2016, 196 pp. ISBN 978-1498533652, $80.00. A memoir is an autobiographical narrative of a life. As Mike W. Martin informs us, memoirs "are non-fiction in that they are presented as truthful and as true … Memoir Ethics is the study of moral aspects of memoirs" (5). Why might we select memoirs as a fruitful springboard for moral theorizing? A colony of [End Page 442] possibilities bursts forth. By examining memoirs, we can learn about moral values within the context of actual human experiences, understand the motivations and socializing influences that drew prominent historical figures to embody particular normative visions, analyze situations in which such figures exercised and exerted virtues they extolled elsewhere in their literary work, dissect the philosophical and moral self-awareness of influential thinkers, underscore how authors exemplify within the writing of their memoirs the virtues they celebrate in the labors that earned them renown, and highlight the manner in which authors apply philosophical and normative concepts to their lives. Another crucial dimension must be noted: enchanting stories have a power to convey moral lessons that far exceed the persuasiveness of an ethicist holding court within a traditional classroom. Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, and Gandhi shunned conceptual precision but mastered the art of teaching the trajectory of morality through fables, parables, folklore, aphorisms, and proverbs. Perhaps careful scrutiny of the memoirs of historical icons is worth more than hundreds of presentations by learned professors on the is-ought conundrum and the intricacies of categorical imperatives. Martin explains and interrogates moral themes illustrated by an impressive array of human exemplars. Sonia Sotomayor pays tribute to "love and generosity instilled by her family; ambition and rigor fostered by her teachers; and fairness and empathy cultivated throughout her career in law" (1). Frederick Douglas provides an autobiographical protest argument against slavery. Albert Schweitzer's memoir is a paradigm argument for a rendering of a good life—the story of his life is his argument. Benjamin Franklin emphasizes the development of good character and the importance of social impact. In Martin's view, canonical thinkers such as Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre self-consciously promote authenticity as the highest value distinguishing worthy human living. Jill Ker Conway's contemporary account describes authenticity as a "hybrid virtue governing personal identity—the discovery, creation, and expression of who we are" (45). Martin's favored notion of authenticity includes "individual autonomy, self-honesty and self-respect" (46). He prudently distances his understanding of authenticity from the seductive but fatuous platitudes uttered by the character Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Martin then demonstrates how subjective and objective meaning motivate, explain, and underwrite vigorous human action by analyzing Leo Tolstoy's description of his psychological crisis, Ernest Hemingway's chronicle of his years in Paris, and Ted Honderich's summaries of the intricate causal sequences molding his life. Beryl Markham's, Roland Barthes's, and Galen Strawson's contributions focus on whether lives unify and achieve coherence [End Page 443] within the domain of values. Alternate prescriptions for searching for happiness within moral realms arise from John Stuart Mill, Gretchen Rubin, and Henry David Thoreau. The connection between the good human life and health emerges from the work of Havi Carel and Arthur Frank, who stress the challenges of illness and disability. Martin advises that "self-fulfillment is the process and outcome of unfolding deep aspirations and valuable capacities over a normal lifetime … it is the most inclusive aspect of good lives" (4). He consults the lives of Charles Darwin, Hazel Barnes, and P. D. James to piece together the major themes of the book through the art of self-fulfillment. Martin continues his labors by asking and answering: are the memoirs of philosophers, taken collectively, different in tone, topic, and aspiration from the memoirs of other writers? Do they exude unique insights into leading good human lives? Does their writing of memoirs promote different, more personal ways of expressing philosophy generally? Martin concludes his work by connecting personal meaning, as "the sense persons make of their...

Reviewed by: Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson by Benedetta Zavatta Marta Faustino ZAVATTA, Benedetta. Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson. Translated by Alexander Reynolds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. xxv + 265 pp. Cloth, $90.00 Even though Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche’s work has long been acknowledged within Nietzsche scholarship, Zavatta’s book is the first thorough and finely detailed examination of Nietzsche’s fruitful and enthusiastic reading of Emerson throughout the various stages of his life. Its solid and, up to now, neglected philological basis is the book’s greatest strength. Zavatta carefully goes through Nietzsche’s notebooks, letters, and personal library, perspicuously tracing the underlinings, comments, and annotations in his copies of Emerson’s works. Since Emerson appears only three times in Nietzsche’s published writings, this is an important and much needed work, which Zavatta carries off with exemplary care and mastery of the sources. The book is divided into five main chapters that reveal the affinity of Emerson and Nietzsche by tracing two of their fundamental philosophical [End Page 422] concerns: the development of individuality, on the one hand, and the overcoming of this individuality once it has been achieved, on the other. After surveying the development of scholarly work about Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche and exploring why the study on the Emerson–Nietzsche relation could emerge only almost a century after Nietzsche’s death, in chapter 1 (“The Reception of the Emerson-Nietzsche Relation”) Zavatta insightfully discusses four major themes in Nietzsche’s writings where this affinity, and more specifically Emerson’s influence, can most evidently be ascertained. Chapter 2, “The Struggle against Fate,” deals with the problem of fate, determinism, and free will in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Zavatta ascribes a compatibilist account of freedom to Nietzsche and shows that fundamental insights in his construction of freedom as agency were influenced by Emerson. Despite important differences between the two authors on this topic, Emerson played a decisive role in shaping Nietzsche’s combination of determinism with the sense of being free as an agent of one’s own actions. The problem of freedom interested both authors, Zavatta argues, more from a psychological point of view than from a theoretical one, converging on the idea that “the feeling of freedom coincides with a feeling of personal attainment and achievement.” In chapter 3, entitled “Self-Reliance as Moral Autonomy and Original Self-Expression,” Zavatta focuses on Nietzsche’s criticism of Christian morality and the interrelated transvaluation of values, highlighting Emerson’s contribution to his alternative model of morality. Describing both authors’ models as forms of pluralistic “virtue ethics,” Zavatta uses Emerson’s notion of “self-reliance” to clarify Nietzsche’s ideas of individuality and respective “journey of individualization,” chronologically personified in the figures of “Schopenhauer as educator,” the free spirit, and Zarathustra, all of which Emerson helped to shape. For both authors, becoming an individual equates to conquering moral autonomy, even if they disagree on how precisely true individuality is attained and moral autonomy achieved. Chapter 4, “Society or Solitude?”, discusses Nietzsche’s critique of compassion and what Zavatta calls the “transvaluation of egoism.” Zavatta shows that Emerson decisively influenced Nietzsche’s positive appraisal of egoism as “individualism,” which also involves a higher and healthier form of concern for and commitment to the well-being of the collectivity. Special attention is given to the topic of friendship, which Zavatta defines as a form of “love for the distinctive individuality of the other person.” According to the author, Emerson led Nietzsche to extend his “ethics of friendship” to society as a whole, whereby the latter “becomes the model for all social relations.” In the fifth and final chapter, entitled “Making History and Writing History,” Zavatta addresses Nietzsche’s views on history and historiography throughout the various stages of his work, highlighting the influence Emerson exerted on the evolution of Nietzsche’s position from the second Untimely Meditation to the works of the middle and late [End Page 423] periods. Zavatta argues that Nietzsche’s reading of Emerson was crucial to the former’s abandonment of the virtue of “active forgetting” from Human, All Too Human onward and the discovery of a healthy and virtuous...

Reviewed by: Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life Svetla Slaveva-Griffin Daniel Russell . Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp.ix, 272. $74.00. ISBN 0-19-928284-6. This book is important for two reasons. First, it offers a comprehensive analysis of the concept of pleasure and its relation to "the good life" (according to the philosophers) and happiness in the Euthydemus, Gorgias, Phaedo, Republic, Philebus, Laws, Timaeus, and Protagoras. This breadth makes the book one of the most complete presentations of Plato's ethics. Second, Russell proposes and defends with marked persistence the thesis that we can talk about conditional and unconditional good in Plato. That is, happiness is based on a lifestyle directed by wisdom (as an unconditional good), while pleasure is only a conditional good in need of a rational direction. This view presents an instructive perspective on the traditional debates on whether Plato is a hedonist and whether his dialogues present an integral ethical theory. Chapters 1–3 expose the evidence that Plato does not view happiness as an accumulation of pleasures ("additive happiness") but as a result of the rationality with which all elements of one's life are brought together as a whole ("directive happiness"). The answer of the latter question constructs the overarching argument of the study that one cannot talk about a developed value theory in Plato. Chapter 1 establishes that in the Euthydemus Plato distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic goods. Wisdom and intelligent agency are among the former, while everything else which has value in one's life, including pleasure, is among the latter. Russell argues that wisdom is the only unconditional good that has the power to direct one's life as a whole, and that it constitutes what he calls "directive happiness." Chapter 2 reveals that this, indeed, is the case in the Gorgias, in which Plato allows that happiness depends only on that which is unconditionally good, and that all pleasant experiences, if they are not guided by rationality, amount only to "additive happiness." Chapter 3, then, examines pleasure as a conditional good in the Phaedo. The analysis crystallizes the distinction between the healthy and unhealthy ways of experiencing pleasure. Russell observes that this distinction is further carried by the duality of human nature and the dichotomy between "soul" and "body." Unsurprisingly, he addresses Plato's discussion of pleasure in the Republic as chapter 4 demonstrates how wisdom directs pleasure towards happiness and makes it an essential part of "the good life." Even more, the rational incorporation of pleasure, chapter 5 concludes based on the Philebus, provides the means by which we live our lives not in an otherworldly contemplation but in a rational tailoring of the nature we have. Chapter 6 goes even further to explain the seemingly paradoxical position in the Philebus that pleasure is necessary for the virtuous life and even for happiness. For Russell, Plato is no stranger to the mysterious depth of human psychology. In the last chapter, he demonstrates that Plato is aware that the reality of human nature is not straightforward and that we try either to rationalize or fight off our wayward desires. The book concludes with an epilogue exposing that even in the Protagoras Plato does not endorse hedonism [End Page 453] because it is inconsistent with the anti-hedonistic views presented elsewhere in his works. Russell has lucidly exposed the fundamental relation between pleasure and the good life in Plato. The first six chapters contain the meat of his argument and stand in a somewhat tangible structural and conceptual opposition to chapter 7 and the epilogue. It is surprising that the section on the Protagoras has not found a place among the main chapters of the study. For example, it would be a good first chapter, providing the background of the opinions against which the rest of the book stands. It is also interesting to note that the book contributes, without an explicit mention, to the controversial view, promoted by Pierre Hadot, that ancient philosophy is simply about the way of life one should lead. The book is written in a refreshing and clever style which combines elegantly the...

Keynes’s ethics is an ethics of virtues in the way ancient Greeks understood it. It emphasises the importance of friendship, moral emotions and pays precise attention to the contextual relativity of right action and conduct. A good life is a life worth being lived, that is a moral life: to be good is more important than to do good. Keynes accepts the Aristotelian notion of the good and happy life. Keynes’s notion of happiness also recalls Aristotle’s happiness (eudaimonia). In line with Aristotle, Keynes believes that a good life has necessary material and institutional conditions. A good life requires material prerequisites for human flourishing. For Keynes, the tasks of political economy as a moral science and of economic policy, are precisely to supply these material conditions for good and happy life: they are its necessary material preconditions. Employment is one of those.

The traditional argument of Muslim theologians that aims to verify the claims of a true prophet and distinguish him from an impostor is based on the acceptance of miracles performed in history and testified through an uninterrupted chain of tradition (tawātur). A second argument that equally involves transmission through tawātur is based on the prophet’s virtuous and impeccable character establishing the trustworthiness (sidq) of the prophet. These are, for instance, the types of proofs (singl. huˇgˇga) mentioned by the Baghdadian Mu‘tazilī al-Gˇāhiz (d. 255/869) in his monograph Huˇgaˇg al-nubuwwa. For theologians of the Aš‘arite school this approach to the verification of prophecy posed a problem. According to classical Aš‘arite theology, good is what God commands and bad is what he forbids. If God chooses prophets to reveal knowledge about what is right and what is wrong, and thus also reveal knowledge about how to live a virtuous life, how can those whom the prophets call upon know that the prophets have a virtuous character before they even know the criteria for virtue? Early Aš‘arite theologians indeed accepted that all prophets had a most virtuous character. This fact, however, became apparent only after their message gained acceptance within their community and it cannot be regarded as a viable verification of the claim of a prophet to those he calls upon. Al-Aš‘arī (d. 324/935), for instance, is said to have accepted a number of indications that allow humans to distinguish a prophet from ordinary people. He does not mention the claim based on the impeccable moral conduct of prophets. In fact, he stresses that in order to distinguish a true prophet from other people who are close to God (awliyā'), but who have no message to reveal, one should put oneÕs trust only in the occurrence of true prophetic miracles.