The speeches called “The Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander the Great” from Plutarch’s Moralia draw a portrait of Alexander as the pedagogical blueprint of the philosopher-king. He clothes him in virtues such as temperance, humanity, generosity, with which Alexander will bring to fruition his ideal: unifying «all the inhabited earth». They are therefore geared towards all who would feel attracted to the depiction of human beings.

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Dominant cultural narratives about later life dismiss the value senior citizens hold for society. In her cultural-philosophical critique, Hanne Laceulle outlines counter narratives that acknowledge both potentials and vulnerabilities of later life. She draws on the rich philosophical tradition of thought about self-realization and explores the significance of ethical concepts essential to the process of growing old such as autonomy, authenticity and virtue. These counter narratives aim to support older individuals in their search for a meaningful age identity, while they make society recognize its senior members as valued participants and moral agents of their own lives.
This book is made open access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched KU Select 2017: Front list Collection

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Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), an Italian Dominican friar and Catholic priest, is one of the most influential theologians in the Christian tradition. Scholarship on Aquinas is flourishing, with studies of natural law theory, action theory, the morality of the passions, feminism, political theory, etc. Yet despite the contemporary renewal of virtue ethics, to date no full-length treatment of Aquinas' theory of virtue exists. Aquinas on Virtues offers a new and comprehensive interpretation of how Aquinas uses the four causes--formal, material, final, and efficient--to understand virtue in general, and how these causes underlie his treatment of specific virtues that make up the bulk of his ethics. In the final part of the book Austin applies the causal approach to four contested issues in contemporary virtue theory: practical wisdom; virtue and the passions; the teleology (or ultimate end) of virtue; and infused moral virtues, exploring the relation between grace and virtue.

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Socrates

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What does human enhancement technology (HET) and artificial intelligence (AI) have to do with religion? This book explores, specifically, the intersection of HET and AI with spiritual health, Christianity, and ethics. The exploration strengthens an emergent, robust body of publications about human enhancement ethics. What does it mean to make us “better” must also address the potential spiritual implications. Concern for spiritual health promises to make the study of religion and human enhancement ethics increasingly pressing in the public sphere. Some of the most significant possible and probable spiritual impacts of HET and AI are probed. Topics include warfare, robots, chatbots, moral bioenhancement, spiritual psychotherapy, superintelligence, ecology, fasting, and psychedelics. Two sections comprise this book: one addresses spirituality in relation to HETs and AI, and one addresses Christianity in relation to HETs and AI.

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Recent decades have brought to light the staggering ubiquity of human activity upon Earth and the startling fragility of our planet and its life systems. This is so momentous that many scientists and scholars now argue that we have left the relative climactic stability of the Holocene and have entered a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. This emerging epoch may prompt us not only to reconsider our understanding of Earth systems, but also to reimagine ourselves and what it means to be human. How does the Earth’s precarious state reveal our own? How does this vulnerable condition prompt new ways of thinking and being? The essays that are part of this collection consider how the transformative thinking demanded by our vulnerability inspires us to reconceive our place in the cosmos, alongside each other and, potentially, before God. Who are we “after” (the concept of) the Anthropocene? What forms of thought and structures of feeling might attend us in this state? How might we determine our values and to what do we orient our hopes? Faith, a conceptual apparatus for engaging the unseen, helps us weigh the implications of this massive, but in some ways, mysterious, force on the lives we lead; faith helps us visualize what it means to exist in this new and still emergent reality.

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This volume gathers papers from the fields of philosophy, theology, and empirical psychology on the topic of gratitude to God. Central themes include the difference between gratitude to God and gratitude to human benefactors and correlations between gratitude to God and important life outcomes.

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This 1961 edition of Plato's Meno was originally edited by R. S. Bluck, Senior Lecturer in Greek at the University of Manchester. Its value lies in the incredibly extensive preliminary chapters provided by Bluck, designed to truly enhance the reader's engagement with this ancient text. In almost 150 pages of introductory chapters, Bluck reviews the argument of the Meno, its relation to wider philosophical and dialogues (written both before and after Plato), and summarises Plato's use of the hypothetical method in the Meno, the Phaedo and the Republic. He also provides a detailed synopsis of Plato's Meno before presenting the full Greek text, accompanied by a wide-ranging and incredibly accessible commentary. Finally, Bluck presents the reader with indices in both English and Greek, ensuring that this volume remains an endlessly rewarding reference and research work.

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This book has two main objectives. The first is to identify and adequately describe the phenomenon of empathy. This essentially means offering a strong, reasoned and accurate description of the phenomenon of empathy in order to capture the essence of the empathic phenomenon and clearly distinguish it from other similar emotional phenomena such as sympathy or compassion The second part focuses on the role that this phenomenon can play on the ethical-moral level. The question is whether empathy is necessary or at least important for morality, and if so, to what extent, in what way and for what reasons. This is an open access book.

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This book has two main objectives. The first is to identify and adequately describe the phenomenon of empathy. This essentially means offering a strong, reasoned and accurate description of the phenomenon of empathy in order to capture the essence of the empathic phenomenon and clearly distinguish it from other similar emotional phenomena such as sympathy or compassion The second part focuses on the role that this phenomenon can play on the ethical-moral level. The question is whether empathy is necessary or at least important for morality, and if so, to what extent, in what way and for what reasons. This is an open access book.

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This reprint deals with the central theme of philosophy of law and legal theory, namely the relationship between truth and justice. This presupposes that we always have true knowledge—that is, verifiable facts—and the intellectual ability to theoretically and historically correctly ascertain and analyse the question of justice. A modern philosopher of law who has formulated this issue excellently in his work is Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013). Therefore, he is the common point of reference for all our contributions to "Justice based on Truth". In addition, great philosophers of the past such as Thomas Aquinas, Baruch de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz or Lon Fuller, to whom our authors devote themselves, have commented on these questions. Finally, time-tested folk wisdom such as the traditional Chinese doctrine of the use of stratagems in life or the modern theory of transitional justice in civil war-like conflicts can also perform these functions.

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In the Gorgias Plato offers a synthesis of what he thinks about the bitter conflict between philosophical and non-philosophical approaches to one’s responsibilities in private and public life. This book contributes to a deeper understanding of this historically and conceptually rich canvas by shedding light on its main topics: speech in its philosophical and non-philosophical forms, psychology in relation to virtuous life, and politics which charges the two former topics with high stakes that call for personal choices.

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What do we mean when we say that something has power? Plato's dialogues are probably the first philosophical corpus to address this question. Powers are causes; they account for how events happen. They are properties that agents have, as well as dispositions in those who suffer the effects of an action. This explanation is the basis of Plato's metaphysics and moral philosophy. He proposed that things are the power they have to act or be acted upon; this is their nature. This book brings together a group of specialists to guide the reader through this fascinating theory.

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This Special Issue focuses on intersections of religious faith and artistic production during the Renaissance. Its temporal scope is 1300-1700, or the Renaissance period, as it is broadly defined. Its geographical scope is Europe and European colonies that participated in Renaissance artistic trends or movements. The Special Issue deepens and broadens our understanding of how images impact faith and in turn faith finds expression in images. It is interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together into one volume some of the most recent work by scholars in iconography, art history and religious studies.

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In October 2018, Samford University hosted Teaching Dante, a conference designed to help non-specialists teach the work of the Florentine poet more effectively in undergraduate core and general education courses. This volume of essays on the Divine Comedy includes a keynote address by Albert Russell Ascoli (UC-Berkeley), as well as a selection of top papers from the conference

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Al-Fārābī and Avicenna are the two most influential authors of the classical period of Arabic philosophy, yet their ethical thought has been largely overlooked by scholars. In this book, Janne Mattila provides the first comprehensive account of the ethics of these important philosophers. The book argues that even if neither of them wrote a major ethical work, their ethical writings form a coherent ethical system, especially when understood in the context of philosophical psychology, cosmology, and metaphysics. The resulting ethical theory is, moreover, not derivative of their classical predecessors in any simple way. The book will appeal to those with interest in Arabic/Islamic philosophy, Islamic intellectual history, classical philosophy, and the history of moral philosophy.

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Published respectively in 1549 and 1560, the epistolary collections of Bernardo Tasso, father of Torquato of the same name and a renowned poet in his time, obey different logics and needs. The first is presented as a model for a wide public, with a clear desire to educate in good letters and morals. It includes a wide variety of epistolary typologies, and focuses on the turbulent history of the early 16th century. Tasso asserts himself as a chronicler and diplomat, while emphasising his stature as a mentor to a prince, anxious to appear as a paragon of professional and personal virtues. The second collection, on the other hand, responds to the desire to publish the exchanges linked to the development of his chivalric novel, Amadis, but is largely dependent on the Neapolitan events of 1547, which transformed this perfect secretary into a penniless courtier. The book thus partly traces the deterioration of Tasso’s relationship with his patron, Ferrante Sanseverino. Together with his denigration of the prince, material contingencies and the intrusion of everyday vocabulary contribute to distancing this collection from the previous one and to drawing a very different self-portrait of its author. The courtier with an exemplary cursus honorum gives way to a pugnacious intellectual aware of the power of his pen. The modus vivendi of 1549 collides with the reality of an ageing servant in adversity, while the modus scribendi of an ideal secretary is succeeded by a lexicon of the ordinary and sometimes of the sour.

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Vulnerability is not often associated with virtue. Yet to be vulnerable is central to human experience. In this book, McCoy examines ways in which Greek epic, tragedy, and philosophy have important insights to offer about the nature of human vulnerability and how human beings might better come to terms with their own vulnerability. While studies of Greek heroism and virtue often focus on strength of character, prowess in war, or the achievement of honor for oneself or one’s society, McCoy examines another side to Greek thought that extols the recognition and proper acceptance of vulnerability. McCoy begins with the literary works of Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Philoctetes before expanding her analysis to philosophical works. There, she analyzes imagery of wounding in Plato’s Gorgias and Symposium as well as Aristotle’s work on the vulnerability inherent in friendship and an innovative interpretation of tragic catharsis in the Poetics. As much a work of philosophy as of classical textual analysis, McCoy’s work aims at a deeper understanding of the virtues of vulnerability for individuals and societies alike.

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