Episode 28, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Part II)

The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast

Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane

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4.8 • 604 Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

Everything you could need is on www.thepanpsycast.com! Please tweet us your thoughts at www.twitter.com/thepanpsycast. The Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle’s (384 – 322 BC) best-known work on ethics. The work consists of ten books and is understood to be based on Aristotle’s lecture notes. These notes were never intended for publication. Sometimes his notes are merely cues to talk more generally about a subject, other times they are more representative of what Aristotle would have actually said to his students. The Nicomachean Ethics is amongst the most discussed texts in history and philosophers continue to debate its contents and intended purposes today. One cannot deny, however, that Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is concerned with key political and ethical questions – Questions like, How can we do what is best for citizens? and What is the good life and how do we achieve it? Part I. Aristotle’s Approach and Fundamental Arguments (start of Part I), Part II. Virtue as Excellence (start of Part II), Part III. Book X and Application (start of Part III), Part IV. Further Analysis and Discussion (start of Part IV).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Part 2. Virtue as Excellence.
0:17.0	Our inquiry question, what do we mean by virtue ethics?
0:21.6	So Andy, can you start us off? Can you tell us what is a virtue?
0:24.6	What is a virtue?
0:26.6	Well, it's interesting. Before I actually say what a virtue is,
0:30.6	I think it's probably worth saying what it's not, at least for the Greeks,
0:33.6	which is that people these days, if you hear virtue,
0:36.6	you're thinking like, kind of
0:38.4	this morally sound person that's really charitable and that it...
0:44.2	Morally good traits of character.
0:46.0	Yeah, but the, but I reckon because of the Christian virtues, that you have this
0:51.9	skew that people think that it's not just about excellence of characters,
0:56.7	it's about like being a nice person towards other people.
0:59.8	And while the Greeks wouldn't say that's a bad thing,
1:03.0	they would say like the most virtuous people
1:05.4	might be like great warriors and stuff like that,
1:08.1	that you wouldn't normally attribute to like,
1:10.6	what is moral or when
1:12.2	we're talking ethics. So there is a difference there to be said. What's the Greek term then?
1:18.0	Because it's obviously not virtue. What's the Greek word? So, yeah. So there's a Greek term
1:21.9	Arate, which is, well, basically just excellence. And that's what we're looking at here. We're
1:27.4	looking at excellence of character.
	...

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