Paula Gottlieb

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Department of Philosophy

The article is about whether Aristotle is committed to a Protagorean view in his accounts of relatives and perception.

This Element is an examination of the philosophical themes presented in Aristotle's Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics. Topics include happiness, the voluntary and choice, the doctrine of the mean, particular virtues of character and temperamental means, virtues of thought, akrasia, pleasure, friendship, and luck. Special attention has been paid to Ar...

This is a review of Dominic Scott's book *Listening to Reason in Plato and Aristotle*. I raise some questions about the role of Thrasymachus in Plato's *Republic*, and wonder how one can persuade people to do something if they won't listen.

Aristotle's discussion of the motivation of the good person is both complicated and cryptic. Depending on which passages are emphasized, he may seem to be presenting a Kantian style view according to which the good person is and ought to be motivated primarily by reason, or a Humean style view according to which desires and feelings are or ought to...

This chapter argues that Aristotelian virtue of character involves knowledge of one’s own abilities and qualities, forms of self-knowledge that are implicit in Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean and in his account of practical reasoning. Support is found in the description of truthful people in EN IV 7, who, in contrast to boasters, give true, unexag...

One might think that inequality of income and wealth are a special cause for concern only nowadays. But, perhaps surprisingly, equality and inequality of resources are issues addressed by Aristotle in his Politics. I first discuss Aristotle’s suggestion that equality of resources is a way of avoiding faction (e.g., Pol. V.3 1304a38-b5). I then disc...

Feelings play an important role in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, but the discussion of them is scanty. A longer discussion is to be found in Aristotle's Rhetoric, but as Irwin points out, there are important differences between the context and content of the two works. I consider how far the discussion of the feelings in Aristotle's Rhetoric can...

Aristotle’s principle that “nature does nothing in vain” (NDNIV) is central to his teleological approach to understanding organisms. First, we argue that James G. Lennox’s influential account of NDNIV is unsuccessful. Second, we propose an alternative account that includes a natural state model. According to a natural state model of development, an...

From the editor: On behalf of the editors of FPQ, I thank our colleagues for providing us their public addresses at the Celebration of Life of Professor Claudia Falconer Card of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who died on Saturday, September 12, 2015. Claudia Card was the author of over one hundred articles and books, key works of moral and fe...

Moral Psychology - Pakaluk(M.), Pearson(G.) (edd.) Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle. Pp. x + 342. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Cased, £45, US$85. ISBN: 978-0-19-954654-1. - Volume 62 Issue 2 - Paula Gottlieb

While Aristotle's account of the happy life continues to receive attention, many of his claims about virtue of character seem so puzzling that modern philosophers have often discarded them, or have reworked them to fit more familiar theories that do not make virtue of character central. In this book, Paula Gottlieb takes a fresh look at Aristotle's...

The Practical Side of DeliberationThe Analogy between the Theoretical and Practical Syllogism and the Importance of the Middle TermFormulating the Practical Syllogism and the Analogous Middle TermThe Middle Term and the Ethical AgentThe Middle Term and Ethical Virtue: Deliberation Re-visitedA Note on the Enkratic, the Akratic, and the LearnerConclu...

The philosopher, as Aristotle is called by St Thomas Aquinas, was born in Stagira, northeast Greece, in 384 BCE, and was the most eminent of Plato's students. His father was doctor to King Amyntas of Macedon, and tradition has it that Aristotle later became the tutor of King Philip's son, the future Alexander the Great. Early on in the Nicomachean...

This is an analysis and commentary on books I and II of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. The hypertext version can be found online at Project Archelogos. This was a pioneering text using what was new computer technology at the time.

What would stoic ethics be like today if stoicism had survived as a systematic approach to ethical theory, if it had coped successfully with the challenges of modern philosophy and experimental science? This book proposes an answer to that question, offered from within the stoic tradition but without the metaphysical and psychological assumptions t...

Accepting the controversial thesis that Aristotle is an ethical egoist, I argue that Aristotle's brand of ethical egoism is immune to four important objections to such a position. I analyse the causes of the four objections showing (a) that Aristotle does not have a conception of happiness which would give rise to the first three, and (b) that his...

BOOK REVIEWS 333 pure pleasures (that are therefore neither good nor beautiful) reappears in a new form as the first principle of the good, the measure of the mean (211). The true message of the Philebus, according to Benardete, is then a Nietzschean one: not abstract principles but life wins, the mixed life, which for Benardete is symbolized by mu...

L'A. defend la coherence de la pensee d'Aristote lorsque celui-ci affirme, comme le faisait Socrate, que l'on ne peut avoir une vertu sans les avoir toutes, mais il divise l'âme en parties (rationnelle et irrationnelle) auxquelles correspondent une vertu particuliere. L'A. montre que cette division permet de fonder l'ethique veritable de l'homme qu...

Professor Vlastos argues that Socratic irony was responsible for a momentous change in the way in which irony was understood in ancient times. Before Socrates, he argues, irony is connected with lying and deceit, but after Socrates it is associated with wit and urbanity. Vlastos claims that Socratic irony is distinctive and complex. According to Vl...