The Reception Of Aristotle S Ethics

A new collection of thirteen essays, covering the reception of Aristotle's ethics from the ancient world to the twentieth century. Provides both a history of reception and conceptual analysis for each figure or school. For students of philosophy and of the history of ethics and ideas.

This volume provides the first authoritative study of the creative appropriation of Greek ethics by late antique and Byzantine authors.

Authored by an interdisciplinary team of experts, including historians, classicists, philosophers and theologians, this original collection of essays offers the first authoritative analysis of the multifaceted reception of Greek ethics in late antiquity and Byzantium (ca. 3rd-14th c.), opening up a hitherto under-explored topic in the history of Greek philosophy. The essays discuss the sophisticated ways in which moral themes and controversies from antiquity were reinvigorated and transformed by later authors to align with their philosophical and religious outlook in each period. Topics examined range from ethics and politics in Neoplatonism and ethos in the context of rhetorical theory and performance to textual exegesis on Aristotelian ethics. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy, classics, patristic theology, and those working on the history of education and the development of Greek ethics.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle suggests that a moral principle 'does not immediately appear to the man who has been corrupted by pleasure or pain'. Phantasia in Aristotle's Ethics investigates his claim and its reception in ancient and medieval Aristotelian traditions, including Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. While contemporary commentators on the Ethics have overlooked Aristotle's remark, his ancient and medieval interpreters made substantial contributions towards a clarification of the claim's meaning and relevance. Even when the hazards of transmission have left no explicit comments on this particular passage, as is the case in the Arabic tradition, medieval responders still offer valuable interpretations of phantasia (appearance) and its role in ethical deliberation and action. This volume casts light on these readings, showing how the distant voices from the medieval Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin Aristotelian traditions still contribute to contemporary debate concerning phantasia, motivation and deliberation in Aristotle's Ethics.

Explores the extent to which Aristotle's ethical treatises employ the concepts, methods, and practices developed in his 'scientific' works.

Perception in Aristotle's Ethics seeks to demonstrate that living an ethical life requires a mode of perception that is best called ethical perception. Specifically, drawing primarily on Aristotle’s accounts of perception and ethics in De anima and Nicomachean Ethics, Eve Rabinoff argues that the faculty of perception (aisthesis), which is often thought to be an entirely physical phenomenon, is informed by intellect and has an ethical dimension insofar as it involves the perception of particulars in their ethical significance, as things that are good or bad in themselves and as occasions to act. Further, she contends, virtuous action requires this ethical perception, according to Aristotle, and ethical development consists in the achievement of the harmony of the intellectual and perceptual, rational and nonrational, parts of the soul. Rabinoff's project is philosophically motivated both by the details of Aristotle’s thought and more generally by an increasing philosophical awareness that the ethical agent is an embodied, situated individual, rather than primarily a disembodied, abstract rational will.

Aristotle's ethics are the most important in the history of Western philosophy, but little has been said about the reception of his ethics by his many successors. The present volume offers thirteen newly commissioned essays covering figures and periods from the ancient world, starting with the impact of the ethics on Hellenistic philosophy, taking in medieval, Jewish and Islamic reception and extending as far as Kant and the twentieth century. Each essay focuses on a single philosopher, school of philosophers, or philosophical era. The accounts examine and compare Aristotle's views and those of his heirs and also offer a reception history of the ethics, dealing with matters such as the availability and circulation of Aristotle's texts during the periods in question. The resulting volume will be a valuable source of information and arguments for anyone working in the history of ethics.

From the earliest times, philosophers and others have thought deeply about ethical questions. But it was Aristotle who founded ethics as a discipline with clear principles and well-defined boundaries. Ethics After Aristotle focuses on the reception of Aristotelian ethical thought in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, underscoring the thinker’s enduring influence on the philosophers who followed in his footsteps from 300 BCE to 200 CE. Beginning with Aristotle’s student and collaborator Theophrastus, Brad Inwood traces the development of Aristotelian ethics up to the third-century Athenian philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias. He shows that there was no monolithic tradition in the school, but a rich variety of moral theory. The philosophers of the Peripatetic school produced surprisingly varied theories in dialogue with other philosophical traditions, generating rich insight into human virtue and happiness. What unifies the different strands of thought—what makes them distinctively Aristotelian—is a form of ethical naturalism: that our knowledge of the good and virtuous life depends first on understanding our place in the natural world, and second on the exercise of our natural dispositions in distinctively human activities. What is now referred to as “virtue ethics,” Inwood argues, is a less important part of Aristotle’s legacy than the naturalistic approach Aristotle articulated and his philosophical descendants developed further. Offering a wide range of ways of thinking about ethics from an ancient perspective, Ethics After Aristotle is a penetrating study of how philosophy evolves in the wake of an unusually powerful and original thinker.