All posts filed under: virtue

Aristotle and Light

Friday, March 7, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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activity / Aristotle / contemplation / God / happiness / idealism / materialism / philosophy / reason / virtue

Aristotle and Light Contemplation, Activity and Happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics For while the whole life of the gods is blessed, and that of men too in so far as some likeness of such activity belongs to them, none of the other animals is happy, since they in no way share in contemplation. Happiness extends, then, just so far as contemplation does, and those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are more truly happy, not […]

Outline of Aristotle’s Ethics

Thursday, January 17, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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Aristotle / character / classical philosophy / ethics / eudamonia / happiness / justice / law / Plato / Politics / virtue

“We make war that we may live in peace.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics — 1177b (Book X, Chapter 7) Let’s try to understand this work first through the method by which its project is assembled, the way the text functions. In general Ta Ethika has three phases or stages of development: (a) a general, in-depth study of the “good” and the “good life”; (b) an analysis of moral virtue or excellence; and (c) an investigation into […]

The Will to Virtue and the Morality of Capture

Wednesday, December 5, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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capture / Christianity / domestication / herd morality / individual / Manu / morality / Nietzsche / power / virtue / war / Zarathustra

    “Neither Manu, nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral” (Twilight, 505). Nietzsche despises the improvers of mankind because they have typically been priests, otherwise known as […]

Nietzsche, Pity and Virtue: From the Superfluous to the Exceptional

Thursday, November 29, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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Antichrist / breeding / Christianity / corruption / exception / individual / kant / morality / Nietzsche / overman / pity / power / species / Spinoza / suffering / superfluous / values / virtue

The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance (The Antichrist, 570). In the opening sections of The Antichrist, Nietzsche raises the question of what type of man shall be bred, continuing a line of thought developed in Twilight of the Idols in relation to the Laws of Manu. In former times, Nietzsche argues, the exceptional human was a fortunate accident; […]