The chapter examines Kant’s complex assessment of Stoic ethics in Religion part two. It focuses first on how Kant contests the modern legacy of Stoicism in Rousseau and others who suppose that we may develop to virtue if we simply stop getting in the way of provident nature. Kant replies that the Stoics themselves rightly saw that there is an enemy we must actively fight – adducing the ‘battle’ metaphor for moral life that he draws from Seneca, and which commentators have largely misunderstood owing to underestimation of Kant’s engagement with Stoicism. The chapter then examines Kant’s striking claim that Stoic ethics provides a necessary ‘preparatory exercise’ (Vorübung, 6:58) for moral development, demonstrating that this propaedeutic is the cultivation of self-respecting character that figures distinctively in Epictetus’ Discourses, and which forms the basis of Kant’s own account of character in the Anthropology. The chapter concludes by considering Kant’s recognition of kindred conceptions of the progressor’s humility in Stoicism and Christianity, and in that light tracks Kant’s evolving critical appraisal of Stoic ethics in the 1790s.

The Conclusions summarise the book’s themes, highlighting the importance of language in creating character. Male characters (Hector and Achilles) use language to express individuality and display their ability to ‘read’ interlocutors, explaining their actions to the community while withholding full disclosure to prevent counterproductive results. They also expose fissures and tensions in their community’s values. However, their attempts to master language clash with human and divine unpredictability and communication failures. Ancient commentators policed the text to deny women escape from linguistic and behavioural limits. Yet, Homer’s text subtly suggests alternative readings of women’s minds and actions. Helen offers strong meta-narrative comments, linking the poem’s existence to her violation of gender norms. The chapter argues that interpretive communities, ancient and modern, rely on strict gender definitions when reading character minds, even though Homer’s text occasionally questions these boundaries.

Voting reform was as much concerned with creating the right kind of voter as with extending representative opportunities. It was debated at length before competing party interests conspired to defeat the possibility of reform, and a general election was called. Despite winning additional seats, the Tories were defeated in a vote of confidence by united Liberal interests who formed a new party. Other forms of collective action were seen in strikes that spread through the country in the summer. They were condemned by Samuel Smiles as they ran counter to the ethos of his book, Self-Help, which came out in November. These topics indicate disturbances in traditional class demarcations, also seen in fictional depictions of young professionals. At an unsettled time, the country was further distressed by the passing of the great engineers Brunel and Robert Stephenson, though the widespread success and popularity of Adam Bede offered a more positive collective experience.

Chapter 3 discusses how audiences interpret character motivations. The Iliad frequently draws attention to what drives characters, prompting ancient and modern audiences to reflect on motivations even when they are not explicitly mentioned. Many influential Homeric interpreters denied that characters had free will, and claim that a supposedly ‘complete and unambiguous’ heroic code dictated all their choices. The chapter argues that this view contradicts both the text’s mechanisms and ancient interpretive practices. It also briefly surveys modern literary theories on ‘mind-reading’ and their implications for interpreting literary texts, in order to establish a framework for analysing character psychology

Doubtless law does have distinctive resources to offer the tempering of power, and Chapter 8 considers some of them. It discusses the significance of the letter of the law but notes that it can conceal arbitrary abuse by acting as camouflage for what is really happening. It is also susceptible to the phenomenon of dual statehood, where the law follows the letter in some domains and for some people and is ignored in others and for others. It can also be manipulated by contemporary populists who often ‘rule by cheating’. Philosophers have commended law of a certain character, so that it be predictable, but that too is subject to manipulation. A lot depends on the kind of legal traditions that the legal order embodies. Law is a crucial frame for interactions, solving a lot of problems ahead of time and engendering possibilities of deliberative adjudication. However, it needs a lot of support from sources outside the law itself.

In Chapter 2, vehicle it-narrators in the form of carriages, carts, coaches, and sedan chairs provide a unique perspective from which to explore the spectrum of inadvertent movement. In eighteenth-century legal cases involving wanton driving, British judges took for granted that awareness was a broad spectrum across which many forms of causality and blame could be plotted. This chapter analyzes vehicle-narratives from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – including Peacham’s Coach and Sedan (1636) and the anonymous works Travels of Monsieur Le Post-Chaise (1753) and Adventures of a Hackney-Coach (1781) – alongside a rare example from the 1990s: Latour’s Aramis (1992), about a sentient Parisian transport system. Vehicle-narrators challenge the supposed dominance of reading for deep inner character or central plot because their wanton redoundings of agency tend to externalize morality and disperse it across assemblages of actants or even entire cities. Vehicle-narratives thereby create a model of culpability without a static moral core.

Akin to Aristotle’s attempt in the Poetics to lay out the various conditions of artistically rendered human action that make for the most gripping treatments, Hegel develops a poetics of action that attempts to articulate what makes for the most beautiful artistic presentations of action. This chapter focuses on this “poetics of action,” and it is argued that the key to understanding Hegel’s aesthetic privileging of heroic action in his poetics lies in the peculiar ontology of the artwork itself: that is, it is argued that the decisive, transformative events that are the focus of scenes of heroic action in effect provide art with that express content that most readily fits with the artwork’s own deeper nature as such a transformative event in its own right. The chapter explores various of Hegel’s specific aesthetic judgments about dramatic settings, characters, narrative structure, and the role of ethics in art, in each case arguing that the basis of these judgments is oriented both in terms of the heroic and in terms of what enables the character of a transformative event to become most manifest.

An overview of what is known about the life and times of Hipparchus. Ancient testimony shows that he was born in Nicaea in Asia Minor, and worked latterly in Rhodes, but other details of his life can only be inferred from considerations of the intellectual milieu of his time, together with an examination of his astronomical observations, as detailed by Ptolemy. From these a possible timeline of his life is sketched out.

This chapter introduces the Aristotelian conception of moral character that is predominant in philosophical virtue ethics as well as in adjacent disciplines such as social psychology. According to the Aristotelian conception, moral character traits – virtues and vices – are hexeis, or dispositions to experience emotions, feelings, and desires, as well as to make choices. Following this, the chapter points to the growing number of studies in recent decades that have engaged with Kant’s concept of moral character and virtue. It concludes by sketching a philosophical problem that serves as the starting point for the subsequent study: central aspects of Kant’s practical philosophy, particularly his emphasis on transcendental freedom as the freedom of choice, seem to make it difficult to assign a significant role to the concept of character within his moral philosophy, at least as long as it is interpreted along Aristotelian lines. This suggests that the best way forward is to examine the aspects in which Kant’s conception of moral character fundamentally diverges from Aristotle’s.

This chapter serves as a reference point for the subsequent discussion of Kant in two ways. First, it systematically examines a reciprocal relationship between the idea of committing oneself to a normative principle of action and the concept of moral character. On one hand, by committing to a normative principle, a person not only decides how to act in the present moment but also views this decision as a precedent for future actions, thus projecting themselves as a consistent character into future situations of choice. On the other hand, to genuinely commit to a principle, a person must act in accordance with it consistently and non-accidentally. As will be explored in later chapters, Kant can be interpreted as defending similar claims, thereby aligning with our common-sense understanding of character. Second, the chapter offers a more detailed outline of the Aristotelian conception of moral character and its underlying motivation, also linking character to commitment to a normative principle. This outline serves as a contrast for the discussion of Kant in the chapters that follow.

Drawing from both the medieval Scholastic philosophical-theological tradition and Aristotelian virtue ethics, Thomas Aquinas offers a comprehensive and nuanced account of the virtuous life – one that suggests fruitful relationships not only with contemporary philosophical and theological discussions but also with recent empirical work. In this short chapter, I sketch the big picture using an Aristotelian, four-causes approach. Section 1 mainly addresses the final cause or telos of virtue: ultimately, perfect happiness in eternal life – although a good earthly life affords “a certain participation” in happiness. Section 2 considers virtue’s quasi-material causes: reason and the appetites, including the intellectual appetite or will. Section 3 focuses on the formal causes (modes) of virtue in general and of the cardinal and theological virtues in particular, as well as the relationships between various virtues in the larger structure of Thomistic virtue ethics – including the possibility of a unity of the virtues. And Section 4 discusses proposed efficient causes of such virtues, drawing on the various ways in which virtues are developed and related to each other in the Thomistic picture. Throughout, I consider connections between Aquinas’s account of the virtuous life and contemporary work in ethics, psychology, and education.

Beginning in the 1930s, Elizabeth Bowen wrote literary criticism, book reviews, essays, and other non-fiction works for various media at a remarkably steady pace. Much of this writing centered on the novel – whether on contemporary novels that she reviewed, on classic works of English fiction for which she wrote introductions, or on the novel as a genre with an important history and an uncertain, yet vital, future. This essay traces the development of Bowen’s thinking about the novel and her gradual honing of an idiosyncratic descriptive vocabulary for the genre. It concentrates on a key set of writings that Bowen produced towards the end of, and just after, the Second World War, when she was at the height of her own fame as a novelist and when the history of what she regarded as the ‘free form’ of the novel, especially the recent history of the modernist novel, was a matter of urgent cultural discussion.

Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf became friends in the 1930s, when the two were widely considered the pre-eminent women modernist novelists in the British Isles. Younger writers at the time, like literary critics later, compared the two women; yet in their private writings, both of them dwelt on their divergent personal characteristics. This underlines the importance of the notion of character to both Woolf’s and Bowen’s fictional projects. In her pivotal experimental essays and fictions of the early 1920s, Woolf returned to the idea of two people sitting opposite in a railway carriage to explore the ways in which the variety and intricacy of subjectivity could never be fully plumbed by another. Bowen, who admitted to being influenced by Woolf, used the same railway-carriage thought experiment in her own essays on the writer’s craft. Although Bowen understood character largely in terms of Woolfian notions of the vast complexity of subjectivity, she demonstrates in her own novels, particularly The House in Paris and To the North, that character needed to be delimited by more notions from previous eras that depend on the broader strokes of caricature to ascertain another’s personality.

This chapter addresses three questions that arise from Hume’s observations about character in the Treatise: whether Hume can talk about enduring traits that constitute character, given his depiction of the mind as in flux; whether character is “objective” or a creation of spectators; and whether Hume’s treatment of virtue and vice is only descriptive of how we derive our moral categories. I argue, first, that since Hume distinguishes between the feeling of a motive and its causal efficacy, he can observe that, while feelings may be fluid, character is determined by which has the force to produce action consistently. Second, the contingency of moral categories on human nature is not the same as creation of the features that fall under those categories. Third, Hume both describes our process of moral discrimination and offers guidance about making judgments of virtue and vice. However, he is not defending his view of moral character but employing the norms that arise from human practices.

This chapter discusses the provisions of the Act that address character evidence. The term ‘character evidence’ is not defined in the legislation, so some recourse to the common law is required. However, pt 3.8 of the Act provides a simple mechanism allowing evidence of character to be adduced in criminal proceedings, as follows. (1) Exclusionary rules that would prevent a defendant from adducing evidence of good character (the hearsay, opinion, tendency and credibility rules) do not apply. (2) If the defendant adduces evidence of good character (whether by giving evidence or through the testimony of another witness) then the prosecution, or another defendant, can respond with evidence of bad character (because the same exclusionary rules also do not apply).

This chapter also deals with the interaction of character and credibility evidence, and concludes with a discussion of evidentiary and procedural rules relating to character evidence about complainants and victims, addressed mainly in legislation outside the Act.

Metropolitan liberal thinkers idealized settler colonialism as the positive face of nineteenth-century imperialism. The developmental logic of stadial thought played an enduring role in asserting settlement’s racially demarcated conception of civilization and sociability. A variety of forms of settler narrative from Australia and New Zealand circulated widely in Britain and their portrayals of character engaged directly with those civilizing claims. The chapter first considers two contrasting accounts of cultural contact: Arthur Phillip’s The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay (1789), and Frederick Maning’s Old New Zealand, a Tale of the Good Old Times (1863). It then addresses the thematizing of settler criminality in Australian novels: Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1870–72), Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery under Arms (1882–83), and Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886). It lastly assesses the delineation of gender roles in short story collections set in frontier environments: Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (1902), and G. B. Lancaster’s Sons o’ Men (1905). While representations of settler character interrogated liberalism’s justification of colonization as a means of civilizational progress and improvement, settlement’s racialized foundations of possessive individualism also remained visible but were largely unchallenged.