7 ideas
| 468 | Musical performance can reveal a range of virtues [Damon of Ath.] |
| Full Idea: In singing and playing the lyre, a boy will be likely to reveal not only courage and moderation, but also justice. | |
| From: Damon (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B4), quoted by (who?) - where? |
| 4366 | We can't accept Aristotle's naturalism about persons, because it is normative and unscientific [Williams,B, by Hursthouse] |
| Full Idea: Williams has expressed pessimism about the project of Aristotelian naturalism on the grounds that his conception of nature, and thereby of human nature, was normative, and that, in a scientific age, this is not a conception that we can take on board. | |
| From: report of Bernard Williams (works [1971]) by Rosalind Hursthouse - On Virtue Ethics Ch.11 | |
| A reaction: I think there is a compromise here. The existentialist denial of intrinsic human nature seems daft, but Aristotelians must grasp the enormous flexibility that is possible to human behaviour because of the open nature of rationality. |
| 18225 | If we can't reason about value, we can reason about the unconditional source of value [Korsgaard] |
| Full Idea: If you can only know what is intrinsically valuable through intuition (as Moore claims), you can still argue about what is unconditionally valuable. There must be something unconditionally valuable because there must be a source of value. | |
| From: Christine M. Korsgaard (Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value [1986], 8 'Three') | |
| A reaction: If you only grasped the values through intuition, does that give you enough information to infer the dependence relations between values? |
| 18228 | An end can't be an ultimate value just because it is useless! [Korsgaard] |
| Full Idea: If what is final is whatever is an end but never a means, ...why should something be more valuable just because it is useless? | |
| From: Christine M. Korsgaard (Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value [1986], 8 'Finality') | |
| A reaction: Korsgaard is offering this as a bad reading of what Aristotle intends. |
| 18224 | Goodness is given either by a psychological state, or the attribution of a property [Korsgaard] |
| Full Idea: 'Subjectivism' identifies good ends with or by reference to some psychological state. ...'Objectivism' says that something is good as an end if a property, intrinsic goodness, is attributed to it. | |
| From: Christine M. Korsgaard (Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value [1986], 8 'Three') |
| 18233 | Contemplation is final because it is an activity which is not a process [Korsgaard] |
| Full Idea: It is because contemplation is an activity that is not also a process that Aristotle identifies it as the most final good. | |
| From: Christine M. Korsgaard (Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value [1986], 8 'Activity') | |
| A reaction: Quite a helpful way of labelling what Aristotle has in mind. So should we not aspire to be involved in processes, except reluctantly? I take the mind itself to be a process, so that may be difficult! |
| 18226 | For Aristotle, contemplation consists purely of understanding [Korsgaard] |
| Full Idea: Contemplation, as Aristotle understand it, is not research or inquiry, but an activity that ensues on these: an activity that consists in understanding. | |
| From: Christine M. Korsgaard (Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value [1986], 8 'Aristotle') | |
| A reaction: Fairly obvious, when you read the last part of 'Ethics', but helpful in grasping Aristotle, because understanding is the objective of 'Posterior Analytics' and 'Metaphysics', so he tells you how to achieve the ideal moral state. |