Plato vs. Aristotle

•      Essences (forms) are immanent not transcendent.

•      Plato as extreme rationalist:

•      Aristotle as combination of rationalist and empiricist

Buddha as strict empiricist: 

•      Aristotle’s rule of all methods of investigation:

Aristotle’s Teleology: Theory of Purpose

•      Greek telos:

•      Everything in the universe has an “entelechy”

•       

•      Rocks and feathers. 

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•      Human entelechy:

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•      Unity of fact, value, and beauty.

Virtue Ethics

•      Aristotelian: “the art of making the soul great and noble” (megalopsychia=pride).

•      Platonic, Confucian, and Buddhist virtue ethics: “the art of making the soul balanced and harmonious.”

•      Roman philosopher Cicero: “Virtue . . . Is nothing else than [rational] nature perfected and developed to its highest point.”

•       General virtue (arete):

•      Knife, race horse, and human beings.

•      Specific virtues: courage, justice, benevolence, loyalty, patience, etc.

Self, World, and Others

•      Organic Model

•      Analogue: a living organism

•      Whole is greater than the sum of its parts

•      Hierarchical social relations

•      Mechanistic Model

•      Analogue: a machine, universe like a clock

•      Whole is a simple sum of parts.

•      Egalitarian social relations. 

Organic vs. Mechanistic

•      Individual is social and relational

•      The individual is dependent upon others

•      The individual is not autonomous

•      autos + nomos

•      Individual is a social atom

•      The individual is

Individual is a substance not a process

•      The individual is autonomous=self-legislating.

Organic vs. Mechanistic-Atomistic

•      Humans are naturally social beings

•      The whole (e.g., the state) is more important than the individual

•      Examples:

•      Mechanistic-Atomistic:

•      Humans are not by nature social beings

•      The individual is more important than society or the state.

•      Examples:

What is the highest good?

•      Two explicit criteria:

–   self-sufficiency:

–    

–   finality:

•      Two implicit criteria:

–   “humanistic” criterion:

–   uniqueness:

Options for the highest good

•      Pleasure

•      Honor

•      Virtue

•      Reason

•      Eudaimonia

•      daimon:

•      Eudaimonia vs. makarios

American happiness

•      “Amusing oneself to death”

•       

•      Declaration of Independence and “pursuit of happiness.”

•       

•      John Locke: “life, liberty, and property.”

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•      Thomas Jefferson: “life, liberty, and . . . happiness.”

Honor: a second look

•      Externally bestowed or internally maintained?

•      William Wallace’s honor in the movie Braveheart.

•      Honor redefined:

Aristotle on the soul (psyche)

•      Nutritive souls

•      Sensitive souls

•      Male fetuses become sensitive souls at 40 days. 

•      The rational soul appears late in pregnancy.

•      Female soul?

 The Christian version

•      Canon law:

•      Rational soul is created by God.

•      Thomas Aquinas

•      Is Aquinas supported by current facts?

Induction and Deduction

n   Deductive arguments

n   Inductive arguments

n   Inductive arguments are “contingent”

n    Example: All swans are white.

n   Empirical generalization vs. necessary truth.

An argument against abortion

n   A person is the only being with a serious moral right to life.

n   A fetus from conception on is a person

n   Therefore, a fetus has a serious moral right to life.

n   What kind of argument?  How do we prove the premises? Are the premises true?

n   Syllogism:

Discovered by Aristotle

Three Types of Goods

•      Goods of the soul:

•      Goods of the body:

•      External Goods:

Two Types of Virtue

•      Intellectual Virtues

•      State of mind

•      More dependent on natural capacities (IQ)

•      Nature

•      Theoretical reason, rational soul only

•      Do not admit of a mean

Objects are invariable and immutable

•      Moral Virtues

•      State of character

•      Learned by experience and emulation

•      Nurture

•      Practical reason and all parts of the soul

•      Do admit of a mean

•      Objects are variable as personal lives are.

•      What about piety?

The Doctrine of the Mean

•      Plato: “But let him know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, . . . For this is the way of happiness.”

•      Plato’s arithmetic vs. Aristotle’s relative mean.

•      The story of Milo.

•      Aristotle’s “relativism

•      Modern moral relativism:

Full definition of virtue

•      “Virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle.”

•      What type of virtue must this be?

•      Some actions do not admit of a mean.