The Aristotle Project

Here Aristotle deals with the opinion that the ultimate goal of action is the experience of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This will take us back to the doctrine that the soul has three parts or faculties and to a discussion about how they relate.

In these chapters, Aristotle discusses what sort of thinking goes into a moral decision. Socrates and other thinkers have claimed that science and morality are fundamentally the same sort of reasoning, but Aristotle differs. Even though deliberation does use universal principles, these are of a different sort from those of theoretical science. This is very useful for keeping in mind just what sorts of moral factors go into a decision and how moral praise and blame differ from the intellectual.

We discuss how someone doing something results in moral blame or praise.

A crucial part of complete eudaimonia is being the right kind of person rather than merely following rules. The right kind of person has "vitrue" or in Greek "arete".

In this episode we focus on how eudaimonia is different from many of the assumptions we make about "happiness", for there is no proper way to translate the Greek word into English. I addition, Ada and Adam debate whether habituation rather than nature or theoretical learning a la Socrates is the best source of virtue.