The tradition of ancient philosophy is a long, rich and varied one, in which a constant note is that of discussion and argument. This book introduces readers to some ancient debates to get them to engage with the ancient developments of some themes. Getting away from the presentation of ancient philosophy as a succession of Great Thinkers, the book gives a sense of the freshness and liveliness of ancient philosophy, and of its wide variety of themes and styles.

This volume brings together a selection of Rosalind Hursthouse’s essays on Aristotle, virtue ethics, and social philosophy. These articles—many of which are published in more obscure venues—provide valuable context and clarification for much of her more famous work on virtue ethics while drawing attention to new avenues of philosophical investigation Hursthouse pursued. Important contributions include articles on the development of virtue in children, what the Aristotelian practically wise person knows, how virtue ethicists can inform discussions about environmental and animal ethics, (...) what the starting point for virtue politics should be in a contemporary political context, and how human nature and ethical naturalism could provide the foundation for a virtue ethical system. (shrink)

Julia Annas offers a new account of virtue and happiness as central ethical ideas. She argues that exercising a virtue involves practical reasoning of the kind we find in someone exercising an everyday practical skill, such as farming, building, or playing the piano. This helps us to see virtue as part of an agent's happiness or flourishing.

The book provides a commentary on Plato's Republic which encourages the reader to be stimulated to philosophical thinking by Plato's wide-ranging discussions.

Ancient ethical theories, based on the notions of virtue and happiness, have struck many as an attractive alternative to modern theories. But we cannot find out whether this is true until we understand ancient ethics--and to do this we need to examine the basic structure of ancient ethical theory, not just the details of one or two theories. In this book, Annas brings together the results of a wide-ranging study of ancient ethical philosophy and presents it in a way (...) that is easily accessible to anyone with an interest in ancient or modern ethics. She examines the fundamental notions of happiness and virtue, the role of nature in ethical justification and the relation between concern for self and concern for others. Her careful examination of the ancient debates and arguments shows that many widespread assumptions about ancient ethics are quite mistaken. Ancient ethical theories are not egoistic, and do not depend for their acceptance on metaphysical theories of a teleological kind. Most centrally, they are recognizably theories of morality, and the ancient disputes about the place of virtue in happiness can be seen as akin to modern disputes about the demands of morality. (shrink)

This interpretive introduction provides unique insight into Plato's Republic. Stressing Plato's desire to stimulate philosophical thinking in his readers, Julia Annas here demonstrates the coherence of his main moral argument on the nature of justice, and expounds related concepts of education, human motivation, knowledge and understanding. In a clear systematic fashion, this book shows that modern moral philosophy still has much to learn from Plato's attempt to move the focus from questions of what acts the just person ought (...) to perform to the more profound questions of what sort of person the just person ought to be. (shrink)

In this book I look at the tradition of eudaimonistic ethics which stems from Aristotle's treatment of ethics, and which takes distinct, though related forms in Epicurus, the Stoics and the Sceptics. I look at this tradition from different points of view: how is it related to human nature, how does it account for other-related virtue and action, and how much does it require in terms of revising previously held priorities. I discuss the methodology of discussing ancient texts in ways (...) that relate them to contemporary concerns, particularly the importance of respecting the texts and avoiding anachronism. (shrink)

Not many philosophers have dealt seriously with the problems of women's rights and status, and those that have, have unfortunately often been on the wrong side. In fact Plato and Mill are the only great philosophers who can plausibly be called feminists. But there has been surprisingly little serious effort made to analyse their arguments; perhaps because it has seemed like going over ground already won.

How could ectogestative technology disrupt gender roles, parenting practices, and concepts such as ‘birth’, ‘body’, or ‘parent’? In this chapter, we situate this emerging technology in the context of the history of reproductive technologies and analyse the potential social and conceptual disruptions to which it could contribute. An ectogestative device, better known as ‘artificial womb’, enables the extra-uterine gestation of a human being, or mammal more generally. It is currently developed with the main goal of improving the survival chances of (...) extremely premature neonates. We argue that the intended use of the technology in neonatal intensive care units, as an alternative to current incubators (’partial-ectogestation’), challenges concepts such as ‘birth’, ‘fetus’, and ‘neonate’, and has several ethico-legal implications. We moreover address a more futuristic scenario where the entire embryological and fetal development could happen within an artificial womb (’full-ectogestation’). Such a scenario reveals the disruption of gender roles, parenting practices, and concepts such as ‘mother’, ‘father’, and ‘parent’. Both full- and partial-ectogestation would have implications for engineering and design, law-making, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Outlines of Scepticism, by the Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus, is a work of major importance for the history of Greek philosophy. It is the fullest extant account of ancient scepticism, and it is also one of our most copious sources of information about the other Hellenistic philosophies. Its first part contains an elaborate exposition of the Pyrrhonian variety of scepticism; its second and third parts are critical and destructive, arguing against 'dogmatism' in logic, epistemology, science and ethics - an approach (...) that revolutionized the study of philosophy when Sextus' works were rediscovered and published in the sixteenth century. This volume presents the accurate and readable translation which was first published in 1994, together with a substantial new historical and philosophical introduction by Jonathan Barnes. (shrink)

Julia Annas here offers a fundamental reexamination of Plato's ethical thought by investigating the Middle Platonist perspective, which emerged at the end of Plato's own school, the Academy. She highlights the differences between ancient and modern assumptions about Plato's ethics--and stresses the need to be more critical about our own. One of these modern assumptions is the notion that the dialogues record the development of Plato's thought. Annas shows how the Middle Platonists, by contrast, viewed the dialogues (...) as multiple presentations of a single Platonic ethical philosophy, differing in form and purpose but ultimately coherent. They also read Plato's ethics as consistently defending the view that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and see it as converging in its main points with the ethics of the Stoics. Annas goes on to explore the Platonic idea that humankind's final end is "becoming like God"--an idea that is well known among the ancients but virtually ignored in modern interpretations. She also maintains that modern interpretations, beginning in the nineteenth century, have placed undue emphasis on the Republic, and have treated it too much as a political work, whereas the ancients rightly saw it as a continuation of Plato's ethical writings. (shrink)

Julia Annas explores how Plato's account of the relation of virtue to law developed, and how his ideas were taken up by Cicero and by Philo of Alexandria. She shows that, rather than rejecting the account given in his Republic, Plato develops in the Laws a more careful and sophisticated version of that account.

When Mill's The Subjection of Women was published in 1869 it was ahead of its time in boldly championing feminism. It failed to inaugurate a respectable intellectual debate. Feminist writers have tended to refer to it with respect but without any serious attempt to come to grips with Mill's actual arguments. Kate Millett's chapter in Sexual Politics is the only sustained discussion of Mill in the feminist literature that I am aware of, but it is not from a philosophical viewpoint, (...) and deals with Mill only in the service of an extended comparison with Ruskin. Philosophical books on Mill give the essay short measure. Alan Ryan in J. S. Mill heads one chapter ‘Liberty and The Subjection of Women’, but the former work gets twenty-six pages and the latter only four. Ryan says that ‘it is almost entirely concerned with the legal disabilities of women in Victorian England’. H. J. McCloskey, injfohn Stuart Mill: A Critical Study, gives the essay one and a half pages, commenting that it reads ‘like a series of truisms’ and seems so unimportant today because equality of the sexes has been achieved! (shrink)

"Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind" is an elegant survey of Stoic and Epicurean ideas about the soul an introduction to two ancient schools whose belief in the soul's physicality offer compelling parallels to modern approaches in the ...

In the tradition of Western philosophy since the fifth century BC, the default form of ethical theory has been some version of what is nowadays called virtue ethics. Virtue ethics is best approached by looking at the central features of the classical version of the tradition. Modern virtue ethical theories have not yet achieved such a critical mass of argument and theory, and most are as yet partial or fragmentary. This article builds up, cumulatively, a picture of the entire structure (...) of classical virtue ethics, and then sees how different versions of it result from ignoring or rejecting parts of that structure. The result, while unavoidably schematic, helps to clarify the various debates that are growing up in virtue ethics, and helps to orient those who are less familiar with the terrain and are sometimes puzzled by the recent proliferation of theories with the name virtue ethics. (shrink)

Abstract The article argues that a consideration of the idea, common in ancient ethical theory, that virtue is a skill or craft, reveals that some common construals of it are mistaken. The analogy between virtue and skill is not meant to suggest that virtue is an unreflective habit of practised action. Rather what interests ancient ethical theorists is the intellectual structure of a skill, one demanding grasp of the principles defining the field and an ability to reflect on the justification (...) of particular actions. This is brought out with reference particularly to the discussion of virtue as analogous with skill in Plato's early Socratic dialogues. The demands made of the virtuous agent by philosophers who regard virtue as analogous to skill are akin to the demands made by more recent theories of morality which demand that the moral agent be able to reflect on her practices, extract the principles that these depend on, and produce justification when needed. This point about ancient ethical theories enables us to appreciate their distance from modern versions of ?virtue ethics? ? which stress the importance of the traditions and contexts within which the content of the virtues is learned, and place less importance on the need for intellectual justification. The type of virtue ethics defended by Alasdair Maclntyre provides an instructive example of this contrasting kind of theory. (shrink)

The Modes of Scepticism is one of the most important and influential of all ancient philosophical texts. The texts made an enormous impact on Western thought when they were rediscovered in the 16th century and they have shaped the whole future course of Western philosophy. Despite their importance, the Modes have been little discussed in recent times. This book translates the texts and supplies them with a discursive commentary, concentrating on philosophical issues but also including historical material. The book will (...) be of interest to professional scholars and philosophers but its clear and non-technical style makes it intelligible to beginners and the interested layman. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that virtue ethics is incapable of 'telling us what to do'. I explore what this could mean, and come to the conclusion that virtue ethics does enable this, in the only sense in which it is something which we would reasonably want in an ethical theory.

What is it like to be a good person? I examine and reject suggestions that this will involve having thoughts which have virtue or being a good person as part of their content, as well as suggestions that it might be the presence of feelings distinct from the virtuous person’s thoughts. Is there, then, anything after all to the phenomenology of virtue? I suggest that an answer is to be found in looking to Aristotle’s suggestion that virtuous activity is pleasant (...) to the virtuous person. I try to do this, using the work of the contemporary social psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and his work on the ‘flow experience’. Crucial here is the point that I consider accounts of virtue which take it to have the structure of a practical expertise or skill. It is when we are most engaged in skilful complex activity that the activity is experienced as ‘unimpeded’, in Aristotle’s terms, or as ‘flow’. This experience does not, as might at first appear, preclude thoughtful involvement and reflection. Although we can say what in general the phenomenology of virtue is like, each of us only has some more or less dim idea of it from the extent to which we are virtuous—that is, for most of us, not very much. (shrink)

There are problems with egoism as a theory, but what matters here is the point that intuitively ethics is thought to be about the good of others, so that focusing on your own good seems wrong from the start. Virtues are not just character traits, however, since forgetfulness or stubbornness are not virtues. Virtues are character traits which are in some way desirable. Criticism is generally renewed at this point on the grounds that claims about flourishing are now including claims (...) about virtue, and are thus no longer common ground to the defender and the critic of virtue ethics. But virtue ethics has never held that they are, so this is not a problem. It is only to be expected that the virtuous will differ from the nonvirtuous in their assessments of flourishing, because we are dealing here with virtue in the context of a formally characterized conception of flourishing. (shrink)

Offers a fundamental reexamination of Plato's ethical thought, highlighting the differences between ancient & modern assumptions & stressing the need to be ...

Virtue ethics is sometimes taken to be incapable of providing guidance for an individual's actions, as some other ethical theories do. I show how virtue ethics does provide guidance for action, and also meet the objection that, while it may account for what we ought to do, it cannot account for the force of duty and obligation.

Some years ago I started to write a book on virtue ethics, in which I tried to meet early criticisms of what was then a new way of doing ethics. The book continued to be unsatisfactory, and I finally abandoned it, realizing that I needed to get clear about virtue before producing a defence of virtue ethics. This need should have been obvious, especially since I frequently teach Platonic dialogues where Socrates gets people to see that they are doing what (...) I was doing, namely developing ideas about something without first examining what it is. The need became even more obvious as the field rapidly expanded with the production of Humean, Nietschean, Kantian and consequentialist kinds of virtue ethics. Within the field of neo-Aristotelian ethics itself it became clear that different aspects can be stressed: the importance of practical wisdom can be developed, for example, without defending a naturalistic account of the relation of virtue to happiness.I finally wrote a book to explore and d .. (shrink)

In the area of moral epistemology, there is an interesting problem facing the person in my area, ancient philosophy, who hopes to write a historical paper which will engage with our current philosophical concerns. Not only are ancient ethical theories very different in structure and concerns from modern ones, but the concerns and emphases of ancient epistemology are very different from those of modern theories of knowledge. Some may think that they are so different that they are useful to our (...) own discussions only by way of contrast. I am more sanguine, but I am quite aware that this essay's contribution to modern debates does not fall within the established modern traditions of discussing moral epistemology. (shrink)

BackgroundThe UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the reformed guardianship law in Germany, require that persons with a disability, including people with dementia in Alzheimer’s disease (PwAD), are supported in making self-determined decisions. This support is achieved through communication. While content-related communication is a deficit of PwAD, relational aspects of communication are a resource. Research in supported decision-making (SDM) has investigated the effectiveness of different content-related support strategies for PwAD but has only succeeded in improving understanding, (...) which, although one criterion of capacity to consent, is not sufficient to ensure overall capacity to consent. The aim of the ‘spatial intervention study’ of the DECIDE project is to examine an innovative resource-oriented SDM approach that focuses on relational aspects. We hypothesise that talking to PwAD in their familiar home setting (as opposed to a clinical setting) will reduce the complexity of the decision-making process and enhance overall capacity to consent. MethodsPeople with a suspected or confirmed diagnosis of dementia in Alzheimer’s disease will be recruited from two memory clinics (N = 80). We will use a randomised crossover design to investigate the intervention effect of the decision-making place on capacity to consent. Besides reasoning capacity, which is part of overall capacity to consent and will be the primary outcome, various secondary outcomes (e.g., other aspects of capacity to consent, subjective task complexity, decisional conflict) and suspected moderating or mediating variables (e.g., meaning of home, demographic characteristics) will be assessed.DiscussionThe results of the study will be used to develop a new SDM strategy that is based on relational resources for PwAD. If a change in location achieves the anticipated improvement in capacity to consent, future research should focus on implementing this SDM strategy in a cost-effective manner in clinical practice.Trial registration: DRKS00030799. (shrink)

Author Julia Annas Aristotle made ​​the German Asia-mile out and fortunately Fuk The arguments related point, and the role of external good fortune Fook in the problems caused. And text analysis and dialectical Happy Stoic school and school for good moral behavior and external point of view. Author argues, Aristotle on the German sub-km behavior regardless of the state with the fortunate Fook, reflecting the hope臘human ethics ideological consensus, and he left to posterity to resolve the discovery. Aristotle (...) on the German sub-km conduct the test volume and fortunately Fook to take the views of ordinary people, and thus for long-term development. We take this to understand the Stoic school and get away with school, behavior and fortunately for Germany Fuk related views and noted against the intentions are. Julia Annas presents Aristotle's view of the relation of virtue and happiness, and the resulting problem of the role of the external goods in happiness. The Stoics and Peripatetic views on virtue and external goods have been analyzed and argued. The writer suggests what Aristotle says about virtue and happiness reflects common sense of Greek ethical thought and leaves the issue. Aristotle's account of virtue and happiness takes ordinary thought on the matter and develops it far. We can see what the Stoics and Peripatetics are going to say on this matter and the opposing tendencies in this article. (shrink)

This book features new essays by philosophers, psychologists, and a theologian on the important topic of virtue development. The essays engage with work from multiple disciplines and thereby seek to bridge disciplinary divides. The volume is a significant contribution to the emerging interdisciplinary field of virtue development studies.

The two most important and central concepts in ancient ethical theory are those of virtue and happiness. This is well-known by now, as is the way that many scholars and philosophers have in recent years investigated the structure of ancient ethical theories, at least partly in the hope that this would help us in our modern ethical thinking by introducing us to developed theories which escape the problems that have led to so much frustration with deontological and consequentialist approaches. And (...) there has indeed been considerable interest in developing modern forms of ethics which draw inspiration, to a greater or lesser extent, from the ancient theories. However, there is an asymmetry here. Modern theories which take their inspiration from Aristotle and other ancient theorists are standardly called virtue ethics, not happiness ethics. We have rediscovered the appeal of aretē, but eudaimonia is still, it appears, problematic for us. This has an important consequence for us, for in ancient theories virtue is not discussed in isolation; it is seen as part of a larger structure in which the overarching concept is happiness. If we focus on virtue alone and ignore its relation to happiness, we are missing a large part of the interest that study of the ancient theories can offer. (shrink)

Plato (c. 427-347 BC) was born into a wealthy and aristocratic Athenian family. He cherished the ambition of entering politics when he came of age, but was disillusioned first by the injustices of the oligarchic government in which his relatives Charmides and Critias were involved, and later by the action of the democracy which succeeded it, particularly the trial and execution of Socrates in 399 BC. In his best-known dialogue, The Republic, he sought to provide a theoretical foundation for a (...) government which would embody the justice he had found to be lacking in the actual governments of his day. His only active intervention in politics, in the intended role of adviser, was an unsuccessful one in Syracuse, Sicily. Details of it are given in his Seventh Letter. Some time before his second visit to Sicily, in 367 BC, he founded the school known as ‘the Academy’. His career as a writer of dialogues may have begun before this. In his early dialogues, he memorialized Socrates and his method of philosophizing by making him chief participant and questioner. His teaching in the Academy was interrupted for a third visit to Sicily in 361-360 BC, when he was nearly seventy. He survived an illness caused by the hardships of the journey, and died aged about eighty-one. (shrink)