Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Notes on Translations
- Chapter 1 A New Dialogue
- Chapter 2 The Emotional Structure of Aristotelian Virtue
- Chapter 3 A Brief Stoic Interlude
- Chapter 4 The Passional Underpinnings of Kantian Virtue
- Chapter 5 The Shared Voyage
- Chapter 6 Aristotelian Particularism
- Chapter 7 Making Room for Practical Wisdom in Kantian Ethics
- Chapter 8 Perfecting Kantian Virtue: Discretionary Latitude and Superlative Virtue
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 1 - A New Dialogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Notes on Translations
- Chapter 1 A New Dialogue
- Chapter 2 The Emotional Structure of Aristotelian Virtue
- Chapter 3 A Brief Stoic Interlude
- Chapter 4 The Passional Underpinnings of Kantian Virtue
- Chapter 5 The Shared Voyage
- Chapter 6 Aristotelian Particularism
- Chapter 7 Making Room for Practical Wisdom in Kantian Ethics
- Chapter 8 Perfecting Kantian Virtue: Discretionary Latitude and Superlative Virtue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Recent moral philosophy has seen a revival of interest in virtue, and with it a striking, if often implicit, dialogue between Aristotle and Kant. To think of Kant as an exponent of virtue may seem to some readers itself novel and not easily associated with the Kant familiar to discussions of justice and rights. Certainly Kant's conception of virtue is in important ways distinct from Aristotle's, and Kantian texts are correctly thought of as a locus for modern discussions of autonomy and respect in a way that Aristotle's texts simply are not. But all the same, Kant, great admirer of the Stoics that he was, preserves the notion of virtue in his moral theory in a manner that bears recognizable traces to the Aristotelian tradition to which the Stoics themselves react. It is important to appreciate from the start, however, that Kant's reaction to the Stoics is complex and different in different periods of his writing. To cast Kant as the harsh “duty philosopher,” unsympathetic to human emotions, and to see this as a Stoic inheritance would be misguided. For it has not been adequately appreciated that Kant develops a complex anthropology of morals – a tailoring of morality to the contingent features of the human case – which at times brings him into surprising alliance with Aristotle and his project of limning an account of human excellence. Still, there remains the crucial distinction between Aristotle and Kant – that for Kant, moral anthropology rests always on a foundation of pure morality, on a conception of the autonomy of reason that can be stripped, for the most part, from the constraints of the human case.
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- Making a Necessity of VirtueAristotle and Kant on Virtue, pp. 1 - 23Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997