Abstract

In this elegantly written book, Nicholas White takes on the interesting and timely task of discussing and questioning the myth of “the Greek way” of thinking about ethics fabricated by modern philosophers since the end of the eighteenth century. As the author says in the introduction, this is a preparatory work to a history of Greek ethics, rather than a full-fledged history of Greek ethics or a study of the reception and the uses of Greek ethics in modern philosophy. The “Greek way” of thinking about ethics can be rendered in a single word: harmony. Attracted to or skeptical for what they thought was an unrepeatable experiment, modern philosophers selected the Greek harmonious world as the paradigm of human perfection and happiness. “Admirers of Greek ethics have always been torn between a desire to think of it as advocating a powerful form of eudaimonism and an aversion to regarding it as egoist”.