Aristotle on Virtues

hello this is dr. Weiss logo this is a presentation on Aristotle's teaching about the virtues focusing especially on book two and book six of the nicotine ethics so what is virtue virtue arattai means excellence it's doing something well and in a wide sense virtue could pertain to just about anything for instance we used the word virtuoso to describe somebody who plays for instance the cello very very well a virtuoso cellist we can also say if somebody possesses certain characteristics they have certain virtues for instance if if someone were detail-oriented and very organized we might say that they possess the virtues of an accountant so virtue just means to do anything well it doesn't mean anything like prudish necessarily sometimes that word virtue might take on a sort of a Victorian kind of quality to it in our the way we use it but it doesn't mean that at all just think think of virtue as as excellence according to Aristotle then there are two main types of virtues that human beings develop or hope to develop the moral virtues sometimes referred to as the virtues of character or excellences of character and the intellectual virtues the virtues of thought or virtues of mind so remember this the structure of the soul according to Aristotle we remember that the soul can be described in terms of its various functions that there are two main groups of functions performed by the human soul the non rational functions which include our vegetative and nutritive functions and our appetites and desires functions of a perfectly healthy human being and on the other hand we have a set of rational functions subdivide again by the object of our thought we can either think about changing things or we can think about unchanging things and if excellence or virtue is about doing something well then the virtues the moral virtues and the intellectual virtues will be about our sole functioning well we remember we said that the sphere of morale consists of the fact that human souls have two things going on first they have their appetites and desires which are non rational in their origin you'll have to think them up to be hungry or fatigued or desire certain things but once these desires occur to you then you also have rational functionality which allows you to think about those desires think about how you're going to satisfy them in what manner and at what time and so forth and that's the sphere of morality in that in satisfying your appetites and desires because we're rational beings we are open to praise or blame for the choices and the actions that we we make so let's talk about moral virtues we want to be praised we don't want to be blamed we want to make our choices with excellence we want to satisfy our appetites and desires in the right way so moreover to a summary is that simple when you're acting and choosing aim and a mean between extremes well it's easy to say but what is that does that mean to aim at the mean between extremes well what is a mean first of all in mathematics it's an average and there's a formula and algorithm that perform to determine the mean of a series of numbers for instance you sum the series of numbers and then you divide by the number of numbers in the series so for instance if I want to get the mean of grades one student got it - and one student got a 10 I performed the algorithm the formula i sum the series of two plus ten equals twelve and then I divide by the number of numbers there's two numbers two grades the grade of two and the grade of ten and I divide 12 by 2 and I get 6 that's the mean between 2 and 10 and that answer is absolute in the sense that it's exactly the same for everyone no exceptions it's 6 is the mean between 2 and 10 a million years ago and it will be a million years in the future and any place on the planet no matter what the person's circumstances are that's the mean it's an absolute the mortal mean is not like that the moral mean is a me is a relative me not an absolute mean it's a mean relative to us as aristotle says and you can find this in book to around 1106 lines 25 to 11 o 6b maybe 7 looking at the text here and if you're using the edition of the book that I suggested it's on page 24 so for instance Aristotle example how much food should I eat for anyone 2 pounds per day is too little and 10 pounds is too much so I'm supposed to aim at a mean does that mean I'm supposed to eat 6 pounds of food and the answer is well it depends on who you are well let's take an example between Michael Phelps the the Olympic gold medalist swimmer and a philosopher like myself Michael Phelps maintains an extremely intense training program if he were to eat 6 pounds of food on his regimen it would not be enough food for him he would need to eat more food than that to generate or to provide him with enough calories so that he could undertake his his training routine on the other hand 10 pounds is still way too much food it would weigh him down he would sink like a stone so 6 pounds well that might be the the mathematical or arithmetic mean between 2 and 10 but six pounds of food let's say for Michael Phelps is too little but on the other hand if I were to eat 6 pounds of food and I sit in a chair or I stand in front of a class I don't do that much 6 pounds of food might still be too much food for me again 2 pounds might be too little I might be undernourished but to eat 6 pounds for me might still be too much maybe maybe the right amount for me is say 4 pounds in the right amount for Michael Phelps as 8 pounds but that the point here is that anyone Michael Phelps or couch potato philosopher anyone can eat either too little or too much food no matter who they are or what their circumstances might be but to find the right amount of food the the amount that's the excellent the just right amount of food to eat it's going to depend on our circumstances but again who you are you still could error in either eating too much food or too little food every mean every just right then is between two extremes an extreme of deficiency too little or extreme of excess too much and that means that every virtue is sandwiched between two vices so to speak and no virtue and vice are about habitual behavior or better it's about dispositions we have to act and choose in a certain kind of way dispositions so for instance if you smoke one cigarette you do not have the vice of smoking you've done something that maybe you should have done maybe it's not an excellent thing to do to smoke a cigarette but we wouldn't say that you have the vice of smoking however you regularly smoke then we'd say yeah well you've developed the vice of smoking and virtues and vices work like that they're not one-off behaviors now a particular behavior any individual behavior could be a good behavior a good choice a good act or it could be a bad choice or a bad act that's true but talking about virtue and vice we're talking about regularities we're talking about dispositions and habits so let's take a look at this chart a little bit and let's look at the graphic that there's a horizontal axis that describes both the the excess of deficiency too little of some some action and on the right-hand side you'll see the excess of extreme of excess of too much of a certain behavior in the middle somewhere not precisely in the middle like in math or arithmetic but somewhere in the middle is just right but note there's also a vertical axis that I've added to this goodness the higher up you go in the vertical axis the better your act is so if you're doing too little of something that you need to do it's not very good if you're doing too much of something it's not very good but somewhere in the middle when you're doing the just right amount of what you're supposed to be doing that's excellent notice it's not a sharp point but sort of a curve somewhere up there in the middle is where excellence is so now let's look at the table below and we can do this and and we should do this to determine what the virtues are that we'd like to develop in life but virtue and vice behavior is all about certain activities that we do okay so we have to learn how to talk properly when we're talking about virtue and vices okay first thing we need to do is develop an understanding of the activities that we engage in and its those activities that we could do too much or too little of according to Aristotle so for instance all of us at one time or another feel fear all of us feel fear the comedian Jerry Seinfeld made an observation says people's number one fear is speaking in public but nobody likes to be called on to speak in public makes it very nervous people's number to fear according to Seinfeld is death so he observes that at a funeral you would rather be the person in the ground than the person standing over giving the eulogy I don't know if that's true but we all know we have our fears and we all need to control them now it's possible obviously to be deficient in the control of our fear we can control our fear too little another way of saying that is our fear could control us instead of us controlling our fear if if we can't control our fear if we have too little control of our fear and and we're habitually dispositional unable to control our fear we would develop the vise of cowardice every time a twig snaps we run for cover right that's that's a person who's a coward now if you think about it you could also control your fear too much if you fear is in us to tell us something fear tells us that the world is a dangerous place if humans did not evolve the sense of fear we would not have evolved at all we didn't died out a long time ago fear lets us know that there's trouble so if you were to clamp down on your fear so much that it didn't tell you anything you didn't let it teach you anything about the world you would end up acting very rashly very recklessly for instance if we were soldiers and we're a small platoon and we're out on patrol and a twig snaps and I dive in the bushes the rest of you are gonna worry about me and say wow he's a very cowardly member of our platoon I don't I don't know if this guy's gonna help us in our mission if he's always hiding every time there's a little noise but on the other hand if we're on this patrol just our little platoon and we come up over a rise and we see 10,000 heavily armed enemy troops in front of us and if I say come on let's go get him and charge up over the hill 20 of us let's say versus 10,000 of them you would say to that guy that guy's crazy it's reckless behavior he can't do that he doesn't is he should be afraid that it's 10,000 against 20 we need to have another plan in order to cope with our situation so it is possible to control your fear too little become a coward if you do that habitually if you developed a disposition to ignore fear all together and don't let it tell you anything well then you're gonna act recklessly and some people engage in risky behavior like parachute jumping but a good parachute jump or one that gets to do it more than one time is somebody who always checks their pack before they go up somebody who says oh I don't need to check my pack it doesn't really matter they're they're not afraid enough again fear is not paralyzing somebody will go up and jump repeatedly out of planes but they have a fear of what happens if you don't do things right and that teaches them make sure you do things like make sure you check your pack before you go up don't act recklessly so the mean between those the person who controls their fear has the disposition developed the disposition to control their fear the proper amount based on the circumstances is somebody that we would say has the virtue of courage or bravery now again as Aristotle said that mean what's the right amount of control of fear that's going to be relative to our sense that you to our circumstances who are we talking about if we're walking down the street and we see a I'm walking down the street and I see three young toughs assaulting a old lady III don't think in my condition that I can go and fight off three young toughs if I try to do that that might be reckless but if I just ignored it or went away that would be a cowardly act I would have to do something like create a disturbance and call 9-1-1 and and and somehow break it up without actually trying to go fight those three however if I'm walking down the street and I am a trained Navy SEAL which is one of the the most highly trained fearsome fighting force in the US Navy and I see three young toughs assaulting an old person well for me it's no trouble to go dispatch those three people they're all hitting the ground before they know I'm come up behind them I'm trained to do that so if I were to just call 911 a trained Navy SEAL well maybe that would be a bit of a cowardly act given the training that I've had and the and the type of person that I was meant to become as a Navy SEAL excuse me so again it depends on who we are and what our circumstances are now let's take the the next example we all all have to give money at a certain point not just to charity but just give money to pay a check or to buy a an item at the store it's something we all engage in all the time if we are if we developed a disposition to not give enough money for the right reasons we are called stingy or cheap on the other hand if we develop the habit or the disposition to be giving money too much trying to give away money that we don't have me even running up our credit cards we would say that that we're spend 40 but a person who gives the right amount of money to the right people for the right reasons at the right time is Aristotle likes to put it that would be somebody who's developed the the virtue of generosity now again how much money do we give is it that everyone gives $1,000 a year that obviously can't be right the amount of money that I and the amount of money that say Bill Gates gives is different there's a terrible as I'm recording this terrible set of series of events going on in Japan now if if I were to send a check to the Red Cross for $300 based on what I make that's a that's a that's a lot of money for me so that that's a that's a lot for my family to give it's it's not too much but it's not too little but but it's a it's a it's a generous donation if I already try to give $500,000 by maxing out my credit cards that that would be a terrible mistake that would be giving too much money if I were to sit and do nothing well maybe I'm cheap the other hand if Bill Gates wanted to do something to help the Japanese people and he gave $300 who would say Wow bill 300 bucks I mean don't you have that in the cushions of your couch somewhere no for the amount of money for Bill Gates to give to be considered generous is a function of how much money we think Bill Gates has to give and the same applies for me so both Bill Gates and I are supposed to be generous both of us but how we're generous how generosity manifests itself or shows itself in our lives that's going to be different depending on our circumstances okay so the so there are ideas to aim at a mean relative to us between extremes of behavior now how do we know what that right amount is Aristotle says we learned that by doing by being trained to do that and we we start through imitation or examples if I want to know generosity I find somebody who's generous and I try to do it their way I don't try to give exactly the same amount of money they give but I try to do it their way if I'm trying to develop the the virtue of courage then I need to put myself in situations where I experience fear and I learned by doing to control my fear and I learn what that control looks like by imitating others finding someone in my community who's thought to be brave and try to do it their way again not do exactly what they do but try to do it the way that they do it by hitting that mean between extremes and the idea in all this this activity that's doing is to develop a habit or better disposition if you read about Aristotle's moral philosophy you you'll see a discussion sometimes about whether the right word is habit or disposition some people say habit is a kind of a bad thing it's something that's mindless that you you know once you have a few cigarettes then all of a sudden you have the habit of smoking whereas a disposition is an inner transformation of the kind of person you are it makes you likely to do the right thing in right circumstances so maybe we should say that the development of moral virtue is the development of a disposition to behave properly an ongoing pattern of the correct behavior and note that as we said virtue this mean between extremes this middle is in no way a mediocrity sometimes we say well it's neither too hot nor too cold it's just sort of mediocre that's not a good way to understand Aristotle the mean the middle is an excellence it's high up on that chart of goodness as we saw it's as good as it gets so that in summary leaves us to consider a couple different kinds of moral positions this isn't from Aristotle I'm just describing some ways we think about morality some moral positions we might call absolutely absolute that means there's one right way for everyone here's an example of an absolutely absolute moral position there's no divorce yeah but he was beating me I don't care but I don't love a minute I don't care she's mean to me I don't care it doesn't matter it doesn't matter who you are it doesn't matter what your circumstances are you cannot get divorced that's a moral position that some people hold there's another kind of moral position that we could call let's say absolutely relative that in in effect that would mean that there's no right way to do anything everyone does what he or he feels like doing at the time and the justification for what they're doing is they feel like doing it that's it that right is completely relative to me and whatever I happen to be thinking at the moment and that's effectively to say there is no right way to do anything it's an anything-goes bit chaotic if you think about it but some people suggest that there are no moral rules or principles whatsoever it's the exact opposite of the absolutely absolute position and that one there's one right way for everyone an absolutely relative position there's no right way for anyone now there's a third that I'll call relatively absolute and I think this is absent there is an absolute in Aristotle because everyone no matter what their circumstances no matter who they are ought to develop the virtues everyone absolutely no matter what ought to be brave and generous and and and witty and kind and whatever virtues that we want to develop those apply to everyone no matter what their circumstances rich and poor you should be generous no matter what your job is you ought to be courageous but on the other hand there's a relative element to this too because Aristotle recognizes that everyone will develop these virtues that all of us ought have developed absolutely we're going to develop them in accordance with our own circumstances so absolutely we should be generous but relative to our circumstances and I think this is a strength of Aristotle's moral philosophy that it's a relatively absolute position you can make judgments about people you can call Bill Gates cheap and you could also call him spendthrift eu Bill Gates could spend too much much money he could conceivably spend too much money you could you can call somebody who's a trained military person who's taught to go into very difficult circumstances you could still call that person rash or reckless so I think this is a strength of Aristotle's position let me just make a note here I've just thought about it to remind you of something about a way to talk try not to say things like too generous or too brave try to avoid talking like that because you you can't be to generous or to brave bravery and generosity are already an extreme they're extremely good it's what you're meant to be it's the best you can be what you can be is too controlling of your fear and that's not being brave at all that's being reckless what you can be is too giving of your money and that's not generous at all anymore that's been thrifty so I know in an ordinary language we sometimes say boy that person's too generous or that person's too brave but if you want to speak precisely there's no way to be too brave or to be too generous bravery and generosity are descriptions of the quality of your behavior your behavior is just right it's not to anything it's not too much or it's not too little it's just right and when it's just right we say you have a virtue all right so those are the moral virtues and now let's talk about the other main group of virtues that Aristotle talks about the intellectual virtues now again go back to our structure of the soul now we're gonna talk strictly about the left-hand side of this the rational functions both are thinking about changing things and are thinking about unchanging things and these are the intellectual virtues and they're discussed in buck book six of the Nicomachean ethics now these are not these are learned not by training so much but what Aristotle says is by teaching now it's a little bit unclear what he's talking about here but he says we learn our intellectual virtues in an intellectual process in other words you could teach a child to be generous with her toys either as we say the carrot or the stick we could punish them if they're not generous or we can give them the cookie every time they share their toys that's a kind of a training and the child could develop the virtue of generosity of being willing to share her toys without really knowing why that's a good idea understand you can you could you could teach a soldier to be brave in other words to have the proper amount of control over her fear without the soldier understanding or knowing why that's the right amount of control over the fear and why that's important so I think that's what Aristotle is talking about in this difference between teaching and training intellectual virtues are not means between extremes but the intellectual virtue aims at an extreme more knowledge and understanding is always better now you may know someone or you may even be someone who other people say thinks too much you ever hear that when people think too much well when when we say that we have to try to understand what we're really saying about a person who thinks too much we're really not complaining about their thinking so much as we're complaining about their doing or more specifically they're not doing certain things you know in other words they think and think but they fail then to act to do something based on their thinking it's not so much that thinking is bad it's that the inaction is bad really you can't think too much or know too much or understand too much in and of itself it's just how that plays out in your life in your action in your doing and I think that's really what we're complaining about so for Aristotle any amount of thinking is good more thinking's better an amount of understanding or knowing is good and more is always better and and and if you could just think of the rational side of our soul is always about thinking so in some ways it's just kind of one thing thinking in the moral virtues we saw lots of different activity giving money is not the same thing as controlling fear and regulating your speech those are three different things but in the rational side we're basically talking about thinking but it is true that we think in various ways about various things and that's where the distinction of the intellectual virtues is going to be drawn from so Aristotle says there's five intellectual virtues the first is techne that's the word we get we get our word technology or technique from and Tecna is defined as any art skill applied science basically I like to think of it as just know-how if you have the know-how to bring about change in the world you have technique so if you know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich you possess technique and what are you doing when you make a peanut butter jelly sandwich well you are changing the world not a huge way but you're changing it it goes from being a world that does not have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in front of you to being a world where there is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in front of you that you can eat so you can see where techne comes into play when we want to satisfy our appetites and desires in this case our appetite our hunger we use techni a technology a technique for satisfying that hunger we take out two slices of bread we smear the peanut butter on which make jelly on put together half that's that's the technique and there's oh it's not just about electronics or or or high-technology those kind of things but no if any simple thing that you're able to do - do you know how to do that's a tech name Aristotle says there's also an intellectual virtue called phronesis which is defined as prudence or practical wisdom and if technique is knowing how to do something phone Asus is knowing in effect whether to do something and why and under what circumstances now one way we can see how these work together is suppose my my little nephew comes to me and he says I go Eric would you help me with my homework assignment my homework assignment is I have to write a report on how to make a nuclear bomb I'm a little surprised by that homework assignment but what can I tell him - how can I help him with his homework assignment he needs to know how to make a nuclear bomb well I think do you think like me the first thing you do is see well let's google it let's go on the internet and see if we can find out how to make a nuclear bomb now I've never done this because I don't want the police to come to my house because they see I'm looking on to make a nuclear bomb so never really try this well my guess is something would come back so kind of instructions would come back about how to make a nuclear fire all right so my little nothing you okay look you need to learn certain mathematics certain physics some engineering you can go to school let's go down to the University and talk to the professors in those areas and then eventually we could learn how to make a nuclear bomb okay many asked me know am it my assignment is different I don't need to know how to make a nuclear bomb I need to write a report on whether to use a nuclear bomb well now can how can I help him what I send them to the Internet oh my goodness what would that be like should I set off a nuclear bomb Google will come back with yes send it off now let God sort them out you know all kinds of craziness is likely to happen so we wouldn't do that what would we do how would we try to learn that might be relatively easy to learn how to make a nuclear bomb my nephew's pretty precocious he probably could but what would it take to have the practical wisdom to decide whether to ever use it well you could study that the history of when it was used and why it was used to be think about all those things but even then at the end of the day even having all the information about why the nuclear bomb was used and when it was used and for what reasons it was used we still wouldn't know with the same kind of certainty whether to use a nuclear bomb as we would have the certainty of how to make one so so techne and furnaces have to play in together in any little circumstance of life we're having a dinner party we're gonna make spaghetti I know how to make spaghetti but I need to try to figure out how much spaghetti to make and and when to put it in so that it's ready for the guests when they arrive and so forth there's technique and phronesis and those always work together and they work together in the world that deals would change with changing things and with our changing the world so these are two intellectual virtues that appear on this rational side of the soul that deals with changing things now there are other virtues there's one called noose or sometimes translated as as mind or intellect or understanding or insight or into knowledge our word gnosis comes from this when somebody says they're an agnostic you can hear the Greek word noose in there that means they don't know in effect noose is the ability to grasp just grasp without a process of reasoning just grasp the first principles behind any anything that we're interested in I'll come back to that in a second let me also then describe Epis tame a we talked about the branches of philosophy we said there was one called epistemology and that was about knowledge and truth and Epis taemi as an intellectual virtue sometimes translated as science but science you know is a reasoning process that we reason from the first principles kind of like a logical reasoning there's a process aspect so noose in some sense is kind of an instantaneous grasp and Epis they may is a process a reasoning process now maybe it's the best way to explain these two is to explain them together with an example so everybody knows the Pythagorean theorem in geometry a squared plus B squared equals C squared that the I the square of the hypotenuse is the sum of the square of the sides of a right triangle that's that's what the the Pythagorean theorem is all about now how did Pythagoras come up with his theorem think about that for a second he has his name on it so how did he come up with that theorem that a squared plus B squared equals C squared in a right triangle how does how did he come up with it did he test every right triangle possible no he didn't because I'm scribbling a right triangle on my piece of paper right here and I know he didn't check that one to find out if a squared plus B squared equals C squared because he's long dead he doesn't know anything about this triangle no what happened was he was thinking about triangles and thinking about them and then all of a sudden I think he had what we call an AHA experience or perfectly good Greek word Eureka found it I get it they see so when you have that feeling of oh yeah yeah yeah I get that that's noose operating within you now suppose I have to take a test right now and I say well a squared plus B squared equals C squared and I have to figure out well what is the length of the hypotenuse when the height is three and the base is 4 well if 3 squared is 10 and 4 squared is 20 then the length of the hypotenuse is the square root of 30 well but what none of that mathematics is correct what I was saying there that's nuts no good if I don't know how to reason from these first principles if I don't even know how to get started if I can't do the calculating part of the mathematics I'm never going to end up with the answer that I need which is what is the length of this hypotenuse it's not enough just to say well I know the the relationship between the hypotenuse and the sides it's possible that I don't know how to reason from that insight that this is how it works I'm stuck in a in in a in the mud here until I know how to reason and in the same light I could have the epistemic I could be a really good calculator look you tell me the formula and and I can come up with the answer but the problem is I don't know the formula I don't get the relationship between the hypotenuse and the sides of a right triangle if I don't have both noose and Epis taymiyah if I don't know that a squared plus B squared equals C squared then I can't figure out that 3 squared is 9 and 4 squared is 16 and you add those together and you get 25 and the square root of 25 is 5 so the hypotenuse is 5 if I can't do all of that then I'm not really good at geometry and if I have those both together you would say that in terms of geometry I am theoretically wise I have the combination of Neuse the ability to grasp and understand the first principles and at best a may the ability to develop a science from that or a process of reasoning so they come to have knowledge of things in this world and these the intellectual virtues deal with the unchanging or immutable things of the world because we're talking about for instance in that case mathematics and mathematics holds for us it held for people a million years ago it will hold for people a million years hence so the three intellectual virtues of noose at post a me and Sophia these are the intellectual virtues that deal with unchanging things and technique furnaces are the intellectual virtues that deal with changing things so here's a summary of how this looks and notice I've I've sort of shifted this around a little bit normally I would have tech name for an asus on the side of deals with changing things and new SEPA stay me and Sophia on the side that deals with unchanging things but notice I put noose kind of on the line between those two categories I put it on the line for this reason suppose you have a problem with wood changing things there's a river and you need to get to the other side of the river but at the moment you don't know how you're gonna get to the other side of the river and you decide you want to build a bridge well that's going to take some technique isn't it that's going to take some know-how you're gonna need to know what materials work for bridge building you'll need to know some of the the ways to put a bridge together to get the bridge put together from one side of the river to the other it's going to take some phronesis too isn't it is this the right place in the river to build the bridge is it worth the amount of money and work that it's going to take to build a bridge maybe there's a better way to do it let's say getting a rowboat instead of building a bridge so you're going to need as you would expect Tecna and phronesis to know how and whether to build this bridge but I think behind that is a certain grasp or understanding it might be inarticulate you might not have the epistemic or the science to go with it but there's a grasp of certain things like physics you don't need physics class to understand that if I put if I put hold something in the air and let go of it it will fall so if I try to just throw a bridge up over top of the river it's just going to all into the river now I never really have to have that as a conscious thought because my noose already grasped that that's the unchanging way the world works scientists and mathematicians can come up with a whole theory of gravity I don't need that whole epistemic I don't need that whole science I don't need to be theoretically wise to get it that things fall when you drop them and it takes a certain amount of force to like leap over a river which I don't possess I already get the way the world is so even in our practical world of dealing with change behind those changing circumstances is an unchanging pattern or structure let's call it of the way the world is and all of us all of us have at least some kind of grasp of that it's because we do have some kind of grasp of the unchanging structure behind things that both we can do things in the practical world and we decide to engage in theoretical pursuits you know and in the sciences to say well how come that is when you drop a rock from a height it falls why does that work like that I know that it will I get that it will but now I want to understand it that leads me on to develop my sciences my epistemic so I think noose is at work both in our theoretical pursuits where we just want to know to know and in our practical pursuits when we want to know in order to get something done to change things to satisfy a need or a desire that we have so that that's the that's the the basic understanding of the five intellectual virtues according to Aristotle so what's next as we say at the end of our previous presentation we need to find the highest virtue of the soul because when we find it we all have found the meaning of true happiness for human beings and that will order that is our final cause that is what we're how we're meant to be according to Aristotle iris thought oh and so that will order all of our actions and choices in life that will help us to develop the virtues that will help us to be morally good in our journey towards ultimate fulfillment Aristotle says happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue and if there's more than in accordance with the highest virtue we've seen a lot of functions of the human soul we've discussed some ways in which those functions can be excellent in other words virtues we only need to figure out now what is the highest virtue and I'll leave it for you to discover

Channel: Eric Weislogel

Views: 26,397

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Keywords: Aristotle, philosophy, ethics, moral philosophy, Nicomachean Ethics (Book), Virtue

Id: jFZ98TndGI0

Length: 40min 17sec (2417 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 03 2014