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Note: Café Philo is a way of meeting interesting, inquiring people who enjoy talking about life's big issues and conundrums in a convivial atmosphere, rather than a heavy-duty philosophy seminar. Read more about our approach here.

Courage, Plato said, was one of the four great virtues, but what is it? Philosophers have argued for millennia, yet almost all agree on one thing: courage is not fearlessness. To feel nothing in the face of danger is not bravery but blindness. The real question is what courage actually is.

Plato's dialogue Laches explores the problem. Two generals try to define courage — first as standing one's ground, then as endurance — but Socrates shows each fails. Endurance without wisdom is just stubbornness. The dialogue ends unresolved, suggesting courage is harder to pin down than it looks.

Aristotle offered the most influential answer: courage is a mean between cowardice and recklessness. The courageous person fears the right things, for the right reasons, at the right time; they endure danger because doing so is noble. The coward flees and the reckless charge in without judgement; both get it wrong in different ways.

The Stoics argued courage is really a kind of knowledge: understanding what is genuinely bad (vice) and what is not (death, pain, loss). Christian thinkers later made courage a cardinal virtue, embodied in patient endurance. Kant moved courage inward, defining it as moral strength — the will to do one's duty against one's own desires. Nietzsche recast it as self-overcoming: the nerve to create new values and affirm life despite suffering. Tillich made courage existential: affirming one's being in the face of anxiety, guilt, and meaninglessness.

  • Plato's generals cannot define courage. Can you?
  • The Greek emblem of courage was the lion – but can an animal show courage?
  • Is a reckless person brave? Aristotle says most reckless people are secretly cowards. Do you agree?
  • Must courage serve a good cause to count as courage? Can a villain be courageous?
  • Is courage primarily about physical danger — or is moral or social courage (risking ridicule, loss, isolation) the more demanding form?
  • If a Stoic feels no fear because they judge nothing external to be truly bad, is that courage — or something else?
  • Kant says courage means the strength to resist your own inclinations for the sake of duty – but what defines your duty?
  • Nietzsche says every advance in knowledge comes from "hardness against oneself." Is self-overcoming courage, or a different virtue entirely?
  • Existentialists claim anxiety about death and meaninglessness cannot be eliminated, only faced. Is facing the void the ultimate courage?
  • What gives you courage and sustains it? Can we be more courageous?

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