Happiness and Theorizing in Aristotle's Ethics

Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh (1986)
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Abstract

Any theory of the human good which presupposes both that the rational is the higher part of the soul, providing the most valuable activity for man , and that the ultimate justification of an action as rational is that it conduces to one's objectively specified, determinate interest implies a peculiar account of the human good. I show how the two assumptions lead Aristotle to the view that happiness consists in maximizing the time one spends theorizing. This demonstration includes an account of the changes in Aristotle's view of the relation of the value of a whole to the values of its parts, and a unified interpretation of the three extant ethical works. ;Value theories which are both eudaimonistic and intellectualist differ in their accounts of the best life only insofar as their views of the higher intellectual activity vary. To support this claim, I preface the discussion of Aristotle by a brief examination of the problem of intellectualism in the Republic. I later consider Aquinas's neo-Aristotelian ethics to investigate the claim that the moral virtues as dispositions are necessary for living the best life and to show that this later treatment of happiness and other-regarding virtue does not succeed in tying the latter to the former. ;Finally, I analyze the consequences for Aristotle of giving up each tenet, eudaimonism and intellectualism. Not surprisingly, it appears that one cannot maintain a recognizably Aristotelian ethics without both of these claims. Investigating Aristotle's ethics and its presuppositions points one to a more general problem, namely, that eudaimonism and intellectualism combine to produce an extremely unusual, intellectualist conception of the best life

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