Aristotelian

• General Greek worldview:

  Cosmocentric
• Kosmios (Gk.)– order, harmony, beauty
• Logos (Gk.) – Reason conveyed by speech
• Ontos (Gk.) – Being
• Telos (Gk.) – End-goal
• The Levels of Beings

  Man – (as nous or mind) capable of laughter and language (henceforth

  rational)

  Animals – capable of sense consciousness

  Plants – capable of nutrition, growth and reproduction.

  Minerals – pertaining to water, fire, air and earth
• The Nature of Man (Anthropos)
• Man is a rational animal (the nous is correlative to logos)
• Telos of Man: Eudaimonia - the flourishing life
• Virtue (Arete Gk. for excellence)

  > Intellectual (through teaching, requires experience and time)

  > Moral or ethical (Gk. ethike) (through habituation, neither by nature nor

  contrary to nature)
• Moral virtue:

  A state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, being determined by a rational principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.
• • Habit is subjective, habitus is grounded in objective necessity
• Vices: There is a permanent possibility of a conflict between man's senses and his reason, which is absolutely normal.
• The Moral Virtues: Prudence, Justice , Fortitude, Temperance, Courage, Generosity, Honesty, and Loyalty
• Practical wisdom – “a reasoned and true state of capacity to act with regard to human goods”
• Prudence: The disposition to do what is supposed to be done, no matter how unprecedented the circumstances, no matter how unique the situation
• • Justice (the moral virtue in relation to “another one”)
• • General justice – an all embracing justice which includes all virtues, and by which the parts of the community give the community its due. 
• Distributive justice – the rule by which the community renders their due to each and every one of its parts. It consists in the distribution not so much of the “social product” as of the “common good,” and it thus includes the distribution of honors as well as material benefits in proportion to individual merits and needs
• Rectificatory or corrective justice – what the community must enforce when the rule of just exchange (strict equality) is not lived up to by individual citizens
• Prudence – “what brings the heart and reason together”
• Justice – virtue of the will in the most excellent sense
• Fortitude is relative to the difficult, the arduous which is hard to get and the evil which is hard to avoid
• • Prudence and justice – virtues residing from rational appetite (will)
• Fortitude and temperance – virtues of the sense appetite
• Fortitude:

  • Disposition to face and fear the right things and from the right motive, in the right way and at the right time, and will feel confidence under the corresponding conditions.
• • Temperance : The control of the drive toward the pleasurable (and away from the unpleasant).
• A virtue is “the mean by reference to two vices: the one of excess and the other of deficiency.”
• • Courage
  • is a mean between the extremes of cowardice and foolhardiness—it is cowardly to run away from all danger, yet it is foolhardy to risk too much. 
• • Generosity 
  • is the willingness to give to others. One can be generous with any of one’s resources—with one’s time, for example, or one’s money or one’s knowledge. 
• • Honesty
  • Is good because it keeps the society intact
• • Loyalty to friends and family
  • Friendship is essential to the good life.