Living Together Essays on Aristotle's Ethics

by Whiting, Jennifer

• ISBN13: 9780199969678
• ISBN10: 0199969671
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780197666029
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-08-29
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

Living Together: Essays on Aristotle's Ethics is one of three volumes collecting previously published essays by Jennifer Whiting. This volume explores Aristotle's conception of eudaimonia, especially the roles played in it by the theoretical and practical activities central to human lives and by the quality of our relationships with one another.

Whiting explores Aristotle's struggle to reconcile the desirability of living in accordance with justice and other distinctively human virtues with the ideal of pursuing the “divine” life of contemplation. She focuses on Aristotle's attempts to reconcile his conception of eudaimonia as the ultimate end of human action with the parallel requirements that virtuous agents choose to engage in virtuous action “for itself” and that friends love their friends “for themselves”. Drawing on her original reading of Aristotle's conception of the ideal friend as an “other self”, Whiting challenges common readings of Aristotle's eudaimonism as a form of rational egoism. She stresses appreciation of the friend's character “for itself”, and apart from any relationships in which it happens to stand to the agent's own needs and/or tastes, but calls attention to the important and often neglected role that Aristotle assigns to pleasure in this relationship. The ideal friend recognizes the value her friend's activity has for her friend and so takes pleasure in the friend's activity as such. This explains why the maximally self-sufficient (and so most godlike) agent, who needs nothing from a friend, will nevertheless choose to have at least one or two: she enjoys their company.

Author Biography

Jennifer Whiting is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. She has taught at Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Toronto (where she was Chancellor Jackman Professor of Philosophy). She has been a fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and Cornell's Society for Humanities and has received fellowships from the ACLS, Howard Foundation, and NEH. In 2006, she received the Royal Society of Canada's Konrad Adenauer Research Award.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1. Aristotle's Function Argument: A Defense
2. Human Nature and Intellectualism in Aristotle
3. Eudaimonia, External Results, and Choosing Virtuous Actions for Themselves
4. Self-Love and Authoritative Virtue: Prolegomenon to a Kantian Reading of Eudemian Ethics VIII.3
5. Strong Dialectic, Neurathian Reflection, and the Ascent of Desire: Irwin and McDowell on Aristotle's Methods of Ethics
6. The Nicomachean Account of Philia
7. The Pleasures of Thinking Together: Prolegomenon to a Complete Reading of Eudemian Ethics VII.12

Reprint Information
Index Locorum
General Index