Aristotelian Perspective Research Articles

The Anthropocene, Self-Cultivation, and Courage: The Jesuit François Noël as a Witness of Inter-Religious Dialogue between Aristotelian and Confucian Ethics

This article explores the specific role of courage in the context of the Anthropocene’s moment; it first examines Aristotle’s conception of virtues, focusing on courage, before comparing it to Confucian thought and analyzing the historical dialogue between Western and Chinese traditions on ethics through the works of François Noël (1651–1729). Aristotle views moral cultivation as a social process wherein habits shape inner dispositions; in his view, courage is linked to other virtues, such as temperance and justice. For Aristotle, courage implies the appropriate balance between extremes and must be directed toward a worthy end, such as promoting positive change within a community. This Aristotelian perspective was later incorporated into a biblical framework by Aquinas and Suarez, emphasizing dichotomies between body and soul, as well as between humans and other living beings. These dichotomies must be challenged in the face of the Anthropocene’s emergencies. The second part of this contribution proceeds to a detour examining Confucian ethics, which rests on a different anthropology, emphasizing continuities rather than discontinuities. Like Aristotelian thought, Confucian thought also underscores moral education within a community; it prioritizes humanity, embodied through empathy and loyalty. In the Analects, courage is balanced by a sense of rituals and righteousness. Mencius further distinguishes several types of courage, stressing self-cultivation and the ruler’s responsibility to make empathetic, appropriate decisions for the community’s sake. From this perspective, courage is understood as the continuous perseverance in self-cultivation, coupled with a firm intention oriented toward the good of the community. Zhu Xi’s comments on Zilu’s courage in the Analects extend this Confucian tradition. Finally, this article highlights how a dialogue between Aristotelian and Confucian ethics began four centuries ago, particularly through Noël’s Philosophia Sinica, which combined these traditions. This inter-religious approach to ethics, enriched by figures such as Aquinas, Suarez, Zhu Xi, and neo-Confucian thinkers, requires re-evaluation because the understanding of personal ethics and nature has evolved. The modern naturalistic approach, with its emphasis on dichotomies, has contributed to a mechanistic view of nature, fostering its exploitation, and a devaluation of the body. This contrast highlights the urgent need for renewed dialogue between Western and Chinese ethical traditions to address contemporary challenges, with François Noël serving as a historical witness of these exchanges.

Structuring ethics education in undergraduate business programs: a proposal

This paper examines the role that business schools can play in reducing the occurrence of unethical business practices. Recent experience has highlighted the persistence of unethical conduct, especially in the finance industry, and the limitations of legislation in curtailing this type of conduct. In response, alternative approaches, including self-regulation through industry codes of conduct and firm-based ethics training programs, have increased in importance. But these approaches have also been ineffective. Recognising this, the potential for ethics education at the university level is highlighted. This would reflect an Aristotelian perspective based on virtue ethics where participants in the financial system would possess ‘virtues’ or ‘character traits’ that would cause them to refrain from unethical behaviour because of the education they had received in their business degrees. This raises questions about how to ensure that universities realise this potential on the one hand, and the best way to realise it on the other. The paper argues for a mandatory ethics subject in the core of all business degrees as a condition of accreditation by bodies such as AACSB and EQUIS.

Wanwuyiti and Finding God in All Things: A Comparative Study between Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation and Ignatian Spirituality

It seems that the early Jesuits misinterpreted the key Neo-Confucian terms taiji/li from an Aristotelian perspective in the seventeenth century, thereby leading to a dialogical failure in their initial encounter with Neo-Confucian tradition. What necessitates interreligious dialogue today is a pluralistic stance that deems all religious quests worthy in their own context. Therefore, this paper renews the dialogue between two spiritual traditions, long overdue, by reading two representative texts, side by side, from each tradition on self-cultivation: Reflections on Things at Hand (twelfth century) and The Spiritual Exercises (sixteenth century). The comparison showcases that the notion of “wanwuyiti”, a concomitant of the Confucian ren, is tantamount to a religious imperative for human ethical engagements, and the Ignatian axiom “Finding God in All Things” energizes a spiritual self-transformation to forge an intimate bond with God and the world. While Neo-Confucian cultivation focuses on the removal of desires, seeking to maintain “equilibrium” and “centrality”, the Ignatian exercises foreground commitment to “discernment” and “indifference”. The Neo-Confucians address human and worldly affairs in a procedural manner, with ever-broadening horizons, to establish an orderly society. In contrast, the Ignatian self is directed toward an orderly life to serve, love, and bring ever more to God’s Divine Majesty.

The Crisis of Logic and the (In)stability of Science

Abstract The purpose of this paper is 1) to focus on the last section of the In Parmenidem, analyzing Proclus’ reflection on the relationship between the First God and what he calls the “axioms of contradiction”, accompanied by an attempt to harmonize in a subordinate sense the Aristotelian perspective with the Platonic one; 2) to analyze the reception of this idea in Nicholas of Cusa, the first Latin author to be systematically influenced by the In Parmenidem. It will be possible to show how Cusanus develops a perspective that, on the one hand, finds its explicit antecedent in Proclus and, on the other, how he radicalizes Proclus’ perspective, developing theoretical tensions that we can find unsystematically in Proclus’ own thought. Proclus is aware that the Principle of all reality—and of science itself—must be conceived as in itself unknowable. At the same time, he seeks to save the ability of human knowledge to describe reality. Starting from an idea of the relationship between God and the laws of contradiction close to that of Proclus, Cusanus develops an epistemology that, on the one hand, recognizes the principle of contradiction as the ultimate principle of reason and, on the other hand, comes to the conclusion of a separation between thought and reality outside thought.

Drama and organisational culture: an exploration of Aristotle’s “Poetics” as a conceptual dramatic framework in the design of organisational culture

PurposeThe paper draws extensively from Aristotle’s Poetics, a classical work on the aesthetics of drama. Drawing from symbolic and thematic elements from folklore and mythology, this paper aims to illustrate how the Poetics can be referenced as an allegorical device in the design of culture-building strategies and interventions.Design/methodology/approachThis exploratory paper examines Aristotle’s “Poetics” and the range of creative expression this literature provides as a conceptual design framework for the development of a culture map in creating a distinctive organisational mythology. The Poetics articulates an Aristotelian perspective on theatre which infuses itself as a new language in offering structural and archetypical plot devices in the development of an organisational narrative.FindingsFindings from this explorative study can provide a creative roadmap to culture practitioners and leaders, to be used as a determining reference point in developing culture maps and change management interventions.Practical implicationsPoetics has its detractors, notably Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal. Boal examines how Poetics promotes a narrative that suppresses free thinking and encourages a cult of feudal personality, therefore encouraging industrial and cultural oppression, which he rebelled against through the development of his “Theatre of the Oppressed”. This new kind of theatre discarded the Aristotelian model of thinking. Ideas proposed in the Poetics may also lend verisimilitude to the propagation of obsessive consumerism through the definitive symbolism it offers in the development of institutionalised personality cults.Originality/valueThe Poetics as a creatively driven reflexive study provides a forward movement in the study of culture design templates. Its definitive allegorical devices and metaphors act as action principles through which an enterprise culture and its value system can be examined and developed.

Grounding and Limiting Political Corporate Social Responsibility (PCSR) Using a Neo-Aristotelian Approach

This paper offers a neo-Aristotelian approach to PCSR aimed at enabling us to more systematically ascertain which sorts of corporate political activities, if any, might be politically acceptable. Part 1 sketches Aristotle’s account of the “political.” Aristotelian politics have at least four key dimensions. When we speak of PCSR, we should, from this Aristotelian perspective, evaluate how specific behaviors accord with or undermine these four aspects of political life. Part 2 of the paper explores which forms of activity by corporations qualify as genuinely (and thus acceptably) political within a neo-Aristotelian framework. Part 3 highlights strengths and limitations of this approach to PCSR.

Some Modest Proposals for Improving Business Ethics from Primarily an Aristotelian Perspective

The long-term health of business ethics is suspect. In particular, there are some troubling trends within the discipline’s methodology that should be closely monitored and, in some cases, countered. Furthermore, business ethicists and management theorists should take some steps to make business ethics more robust and more relevant to actual business practice. Part 1 of this article argues that, while the dominance of the social science approach should be curtailed, relations between normative and empirical scholars need not be hostile; on the contrary, there are some modest ways in which the two approaches could complement each other more than they have to date. Part 2 examines why business ethics needs more systems thinking. Part 3 explores why business ethicists in general should follow the lead of some of our colleagues who are engaging in powerful and influential research with direct and immediate practical applications. The article closes with a few modest suggestions for enhancing business ethics theorizing and provides some concrete ways for scholars to become more involved with business practitioners and business practice and to learn from the latter in ways that can productively feed research streams.

Moderating the effects of “surveillance capitalism”: an Aristotelian perspective

Moderating the effects of “surveillance capitalism”: an Aristotelian perspective

Conditions for mission‐led companies to humanize the economy: An Aristotelian perspective

AbstractWith the creation of the legal status of “benefit corporations,” mission‐led companies have been developing since 2010 in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Italy, and recently France. Shareholders of mission‐led companies define a social, scientific, or environmental mission for their companies in addition to the pursuit of profits. Given this specific characteristic, these companies seem more likely than traditional firms to serve human flourishing in an authentic way. But are these legal forms and strategic objectives sufficient? This article builds on Aristotelian virtue ethics and the concept of the “good life” to identify necessary conditions to build a mission‐led approach to firms that can truly humanize the economy. We explain mechanisms through which the mission‐led approach may provide an essential lever for humanization for the individual person, the company, its industry, and the broader economy. We also identify several factors that may limit or prevent the mission company's ability to contribute to the good life. This conceptual article is inspired by the context of the emergence of mission companies in France since 2019, which has led many companies to question their purpose and their mission towards society and their mission's implementation.

Ethico-Political aspects of clinical judgment in opportunistic screening for cognitive impairment: Arendtian and aristotelian perspectives

This article examines a population-based opportunistic screening practice for cognitive impairment that takes place at a hospital in Sweden. At the hospital, there is a routine in place that stipulates that all patients over the age of 65 who are admitted to the ward will be offered testing for cognitive impairment, unless they have been tested within the last six months or have been diagnosed with any form of cognitive impairment. However, our analysis shows that this routine is not universally and mechanically applied. Rather, the health care professionals have developed and use an ethico-political judgment, concerning, for example, whom to test, when to offer the tests, and how to explain and perform them. This article explores the role and practice of this form of judgment, emphasising its political and ethical nature. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with professionals and patients, and draws on the theories of Aristotle and Hannah Arendt.

Античний жанр трагедії як суспільна «школа».

Review of a new monograph by contemporary Greek philosophers Panos Eliopoulos and Christopher Vasilopoulos (Eliopoulos, P., & Vasillopulos C. (2021) Interpreting Euripides's Medea from Aristotelian and Nietzschean Perspectives. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. 530 p.). The relevance of scientific research is highlighted and the key concepts and ideas on which scientists focus in the reviewed book are highlighted.

Professional skepticism through audit praxis: An Aristotelian perspective

While professional skepticism (PS) is a critical element of audit practice, academic and professional discourse offers unclear and sometimes competing narratives of how to maintain or improve it. This study provides a holistic account of how PS develops by interpreting interviews of 21 highly experienced auditors. Using a theoretical framework from Aristotle and Alasdair MacIntyre, PS is interpreted as a character virtue of skepticism guided by the intellectual virtue of phrónēsis. PS is developed through two distinct stages of auditors' careers: (i) the pre‐professional phase, in which an auditor acquires characteristics amenable to developing PS; and (ii) the professional praxis phase, in which PS is inculcated through a combination of formal and on‐the‐job instruction and audit experience. This approach to how PS is developed suggests that audit firms could focus more explicitly on recruiting novice auditors whose pre‐professional characteristics make them receptive to acquiring PS, and on blended learning, with formal and on‐the job instruction and habituation through audit experience.

Learning virtue ethics for developing psychological sustainability

Virtue ethics has been considered to be of utmost relevance in every aspect of education in terms of cultivating virtuous character in individuals. Moral education aims at the development of worthy moral character through the cultivation of virtues, values, attitudes, ethical conduct and habits. Eudemonic well-being suggests engaging in behaviours that people perceive to be morally right and derive a sense of personal meaning from righteous actions. Modern education has neglected concern for human virtues, which has led to the erosion of moral virtues in society at large. With this backdrop, a study which could investigate what virtues could be inculcated that are most essential to students and those that would improve their psychological sustainability seems relevant. This study aimed to practice virtue ethics as a means to learn virtues based on an Aristotelian perspective. Virtue-based lessons were prepared and taught to students based on set objectives. A Situational Judgment Test was administered as pre and post tests to analyze the effectiveness of these lessons in the treatment group. The results reveal that virtue-ethics based lessons are effective for developing the psychological sustainability of students.

Retrieving Aristotle’s Phronesis

Most executives recognize that the long-term financial health, prosperity and survival of their firm depend upon leaders who have good moral character. The article argues that a retrieval of Aristotle’s work on character and virtue can bring new clarity on how to identify and select leaders of our business institutions. The study presents a discussion of Aristotle’s phronesis or practical wisdom and how this focus might aid and abet the selection of appropriate leaders. The original contribution offered here centers on how virtue only makes sense for Aristotle in the context of a teleological worldview whereby human beings are seeking what is intrinsically worthwhile—purpose, meaning, health, and community life. For Aristotle, virtues are much more than what makes a person attractive to the job market. Catholic social teaching reflects this Aristotelian perspective on the role of business in society. The article concludes showing how Aristotle’s insight on phronesis offers a way to enhance standard processes employed in the selection of business leaders.

Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages by Rita Copeland

Reviewed by: Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages by Rita Copeland Shea McCollough Rita Copeland, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), xv + 432 pp. More than three decades have passed since Rita Copeland first published Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (1991), a study that has become an indispensable resource for scholars thinking about the development of vernacular texts and interpretative models from late antiquity to the Middle Ages. That first book laid the foundation for a body of scholarly work from Copeland that, while dealing with the variously related topics of classical reception, pedagogy, and representation, is nonetheless bound together by the through-line of rhetoric, her most persistent and pervasive research interest. Her newest book, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, is a delightful expression of that rhetorical preoccupation, demonstrating a sustained interest in the intertwined relationships between rhetoric, emotion, and ethics that developed and redeveloped from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages and offering a compelling and comprehensive narrative of the transformations of rhetorical thought and practice over nearly two millennia. Like the good rhetorician that she is, Copeland offers a map of the book's overarching scope in apophatic terms, outlining the contours of the study by simultaneously delineating what it is not: it does not endeavor to offer a comprehensive history of medieval emotions—à la Barbara Rosenwein's Generations of Feeling (2015), or any number of similar studies that Copeland mentions throughout her footnotes—nor is it an attempt to uncover and represent the emotional experiences of medieval readers per se, although readerly experience becomes a secondary interest in the book, particularly in chapter 2. Rather, what Copeland does embark upon is a twofold history of both rhetoric through emotion and emotion through rhetoric in the Middle Ages, a history predicated upon [End Page 240] a belief that rhetoric "represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions" and that is ultimately "concerned more with production than with consumption of emotive content" (1). Copeland builds from these initial claims, describing the "double plot" of her book "as a reception history that commences with the Ciceronian rhetorics of antiquity, that develops on a long course, and that, at a later juncture, incorporates the Aristotelian perspective" (14). Following this robust outline, the rest of the text splits into two halves, emblematized by the figures of Cicero and Aristotle, respectively. Chapter 1 analyzes Cicero's theory of affectio as presented in De inventione, establishing emotion as a valid form of invention (the process of developing an argument), as opposed to an exclusive element of style, even though the stylistic understanding would eventually come to dominate the discourse of medieval rhetoric. Chapter 2 picks up on this thread and demonstrates how early Christian thinkers, primarily Augustine and Cassiodorus, expanded their understanding of style to accommodate an ethical dimension of rhetorical appeal invested in the cultivation of "textual affection" (59), whether for the scriptures or for Virgil. As this instilled love for texts grew commonplace, it became less imperative to explicitly outline the ethical valence of style in rhetorical texts, resulting in the paradoxical effacement of this notion from Christianized rhetorical treatises by the twelfth century. Chapter 3 narrates the rise of style to a place of preeminence in the "pragmatic rhetoric" of the eleventh through fourteenth centuries by close reading pedagogical treatises (112), love letters, Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, Petrarch's Seniles, and Chaucer's (again) Clerk's Prologue. Chapter 4 (re)turns to Aristotle's Rhetoric, the second piece of the book's "double plot," in order to "chart the routes through which Aristotelian rhetoric found its place in later medieval thought" (158). Copeland sketches the transmission history of the Rhetoric, arguing that the text effectively disappeared until resuscitated by a group of Arabic scholars—Al-Farabi (ca. 870–950), Avicenna (980–1037), and Averroes (1126–98)—whose commentaries treated the emotions "as both cognitive and moral forces in persuasion" (175). Chapter 5 extends the discussion of the Rhetoric's medieval afterlife by focusing on a shift in thinking about the emotions evident in Giles of Rome...

Learning to teach as a two-sided endeavor: mentors’ perceptions of paired practicum in initial teacher education

ABSTRACT In this article, mentors’ perceptions of paired practicum in initial teacher education in Sweden are studied. Taking the mentors’ perspective, we describe the potentials and the pitfalls of paired practicum. The pros and cons of the model are analyzed from a perspective of learning the vocation of teaching as a two-sided endeavor. Inspired by a modified Aristotelian perspective, we use the terms participant knowledge and spectator knowledge to conceptualize the learning of two different forms of knowledge. Qualitative data were gathered through interviews with five mentors and analyzed using an abductive process. The analysis reveals that paired practicum facilitates a potential for learning mainly a distanced and propositional spectator knowledge while the learning of a contextual and practical participant knowledge seems to be obstructed. For instance, paired practicum seems to prolong the peripheral position of the students and their opportunities to gain participatory knowledge. Results also show that there is a discrepancy between the pedagogical intentions of paired practicum and the concrete possibilities for realizing these in practice. The limitations of the paired practicum model, and how these can be overcome, both at individual and organizational level, are highlighted.

Collective Phronesis in Business Ethics Education and Managerial Practice: A Neo-Aristotelian Analysis

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of various discourses relevant to developing a construct of collective phronesis, from a (neo)-Aristotelian perspective, with implications for professional practice in general and business practice and business ethics education in particular. Despite the proliferation of interest in practical wisdom within business ethics and more general areas of both psychology and philosophy, the focus has remained mostly on the construct at the level of individual decision-making, as in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. However, he also made intriguing remarks about phronesis at the collective level in his Politics: remarks that have mostly eluded elaboration. The aim of this article is practical and revisionary, rather than exegetical and deferential, with respect to Aristotle. Nevertheless, just as most of the literature on individual phronesis draws on Aristotle’s exposition in the Nicomachean Ethics, the obvious first port of call for an analysis of collective phronesis is to explore the resources handed down to us by Aristotle himself. The lion’s share of this article is, therefore, devoted to making sense of Aristotle’s somewhat unsystematic remarks and the lessons we can draw from them about collective managerial phronesis and business ethics education.

Aristotelian and/or Nietzschean narratology

AbstractOver the years, narratologists have established a unitary view of narrative structure based on the principles of Aristotle’sPoetics. I propose in this essay to describe the general features of an alternative epistemological framework based on a renewed interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’sThe Birth of Tragedy. Through this analysis, I wish to show how the adoption of the Aristotelian model as a framework for narratological research could have led to neglecting certain fundamental aspects of narrativity that the adoption of a Nietzschean perspective, conversely, would highlight. In particular, I want to emphasize that the abandonment of the Aristotelian perspective in favor of a Nietzschean approach can be extremely useful in order to highlight the über-natural character of so-called “unnatural narratives”. I will test my hypotheses through the analysis of David Foster Wallace’s short story “Mister Squishy” (2004), which represents an emblematic case of “Nietzschean narrative”.

Recontextualising Aristotelian Perspectives on the Purpose of the Business Corporation

Business ethicists draw extensively on Aristotle’s work in defining the purpose of the business corporation. Insights from ancient authors can be valuable in illuminating contemporary issues, but we should be wary of enlisting their authority for our views without paying careful attention to what they might have intended by what they said in their own social and economic context. Business ethicists have argued that the business corporation should be a community within which its members can live a good life; that its purpose should not be to maximise profits; and that it should integrate itself into a range of wider communities beyond its own boundaries and serve their interests. Aristotle would have agreed that the business corporation should not seek to make as much profit as possible, although he might have accepted that – in the light of modern developments in economic management - it should make enough profit to fund projects that would be beneficial to society. Aristotle’s view that the polis provided the setting in which people could best live a good life does not justify the claim that the business corporation can or should serve a similar purpose. Aristotle believed that people should strive for enough and not too much in several contexts, not only in acquiring wealth, but also in defining the size and scope of the community of which they should be members. Some expansive, contemporary views on the communities into which the business corporation should integrate itself are alien to Aristotle’s thinking.

Understanding Independence: Board of Directors and CSR.

On August Business Roundtable (2019), the Business Roundtable redefined the purpose and social responsibility of the corporation. Yet, this statement must be followed by substantial changes in the business models of corporations for it to avoid becoming empty rhetoric. We believe that the figure of the independent director may be one of the catalysts needed for this change of paradigm for corporations. In spite of the positive correlation between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and board independence, the development of the independence of boards during the last decade has not lead to the expected CSR results. Academics and regulators point to a weak definition and the non-standardized measurement of both independence and board independence (BI) as one possible explanation, and agree that a broader definition is needed. This paper aims to contribute to this debate. We develop a second-generation definition of independence based on a positive approximation to the concept by integrating an Aristotelian perspective of virtue ethics with the best practices of corporate governance. Thus, we define independence as a virtue guided by practical wisdom, that implies autonomy and autarky and which enables a person to act with integrity, fairness and truthfulness. In the context of corporate governance, independence is associated with an honest disposition to serve. Our proposal has political implications for supervisors that make decisions relating to the suitability of board members.