The phenomenology of virtue

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (1):21-34 (2008)
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Abstract

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

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Julia Annas
University of Arizona

Citations of this work

The Value of Consciousness.Uriah Kriegel - 2019 - Analysis 79 (3):503-520.
What's Aristotelian about neo‐Aristotelian Virtue Ethics?Sukaina Hirji - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (3):671-696.
Is moral phenomenology unified?Walter Sinnott-Armstrong - 2008 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (1):85-97.

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References found in this work

The methods of ethics.Henry Sidgwick - 1877 - Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press. Edited by Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones.
The Methods of Ethics.Henry Sidgwick - 1874 - Bristol, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones.
Virtue, Vice, and Value.Thomas Hurka - 2001 - New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
The Methods of Ethics.Henry Sidgwick - 1907 - Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 30 (4):401-401.
The Methods of Ethics.Henry Sidgwick - 1874 - International Journal of Ethics 4 (4):512-514.

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