Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the revised edition
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Luck and ethics
- Part I Tragedy: fragility and ambition
- Part II Plato: goodness without fragility?
- Part III Aristotle: the fragility of the good human life
- Introduction
- Chapter 8 Saving Aristotle's appearances
- Chapter 9 Rational animals and the explanation of action
- Chapter 10 Non-scientific deliberation
- Chapter 11 The vulnerability of the good human life: activity and disaster
- Chapter 12 The vulnerability of the good human life: relational goods
- Appendix to Part III Human and divine
- Interlude 2 Luck and the tragic emotions
- Epilogue: Tragedy
- Chapter 13 The betrayal of convention: a reading of Euripides' Hecuba
- Notes
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of passages
Chapter 9 - Rational animals and the explanation of action
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the revised edition
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Luck and ethics
- Part I Tragedy: fragility and ambition
- Part II Plato: goodness without fragility?
- Part III Aristotle: the fragility of the good human life
- Introduction
- Chapter 8 Saving Aristotle's appearances
- Chapter 9 Rational animals and the explanation of action
- Chapter 10 Non-scientific deliberation
- Chapter 11 The vulnerability of the good human life: activity and disaster
- Chapter 12 The vulnerability of the good human life: relational goods
- Appendix to Part III Human and divine
- Interlude 2 Luck and the tragic emotions
- Epilogue: Tragedy
- Chapter 13 The betrayal of convention: a reading of Euripides' Hecuba
- Notes
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of passages
Summary
What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of man: not curiosities however, but rather observations on facts which no-one has doubted, and which have only gone unremarked because they are always before our eyes.
Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics 1 141Our central question has been, how far and in what ways does (and should) the world impinge upon us as we attempt to live in a valuable way? How far are we creatures who, like plants, depend passively upon what is outside of us in the world of nature? How far are we purely active intellectual beings like the souls of Plato's middle dialogues? And what is, for a human being, the best (most praiseworthy) way to be? One of the things such questioning demands is, clearly, an account of human action. We need to consider how our various movements in the world are caused, if we are going to be able to say what sorts of causal relationships between world and agent diminish, or remove, the praiseworthiness of a life. Plato's thought about ethical self-sufficiency has relied implicitly on a picture of action. In the middle dialogues we are presented with a double story. On the one hand, there is the self-moving, purely active, self-sufficient intellect, generator of valuable acts; on the other, there are the bodily appetites, which are themselves passive and entirely unselective, simply pushed into existence by the world and pushing, in turn, the passive agent.
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- Information
- The Fragility of GoodnessLuck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, pp. 264 - 289Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001