Happiness is perfect and self-sufficient, being the end to which our actions are directed. What does Aristotle mean when he argues that, by nature, human beings are social creatures? The social order enacted by humans is different than that of a plant's ecosystem or a herd of cattle. Ther...
Aristotle observed that human beings, as social animals par excellence, can reach as individuals only some of the perfections possible for humans as such. Cats are more or less all alike in their functions; thus, each can fend for itself. With bees and termites, however, it is different....
From the time of Aristotle it had been said that man is a social animal: that human beings naturally form communities. I couldn’t accept it. The whole of history and pre-history is against it. The two dreadful world wars we have recently been through, and the gearing of our entire ...
The connections between memory and the emotions are typically assumed to be operative only in human beings, associated as they are with collective acts of memorial unavailable to beings without complex language. This chapter challenges this assumption by concentrating on Aristotle’s account of memory ...
Plants and animals, since they are endowed with the power of adaptation, have souls, and the human soul is peculiar only in this, that to the vegetative and sensitive faculties, which characterize plant-life and animal life respectively, it adds the rational faculty—the power of acquiring ...
For McLeod (2016), it is important to emphasise the universality of truth and while different cultures may have a different sense of this basic notion, all human societies are committed to a basic “correspondence intuition”, which allows us to understand how things are and how things should ...
But on Aristotle's view, the lives of individual human beings are invariablylinked together in a social context. In theΠεριΠολις(Politics) he speculated aboutthe origins of the state, described and assessed the relative merits of various types of government, and listed the obligation...
17. “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life—the whole aim and end of human existence.” 18. “Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.” ...
So human good will be good human functioning: namely, Aristotle says, ‘activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are several virtues, in accordance with the best and most perfect’. 所以人类善将是良好的人类功能:也就是说,亚里士多德说,‘按照美德的灵魂活动,如果有多种美德,那就...
and that to profit from ethical inquiry we must resolve this disagreement. He insists that ethics is not a theoretical discipline: we are asking what the good for human beings is not simply because we want to have knowledge, but because we will be better able to achieve our good if we de...