Pain and Pleasure -- Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
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December 7 - Having finished the major part of Book VII on "Troubleshooting the Virtues," we are now in the part on the mechanism for discerning the bad and the good--reading chapter 12 of NE VII. Everyone knows what pain is, what pleasure is, right? So what can we learn from Aristotle?
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Let's follow his train of thought starting at 1152b25.
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Our main translation from here on will be by Adam Beresford (Penguin Classics, 2020), but we will occasionally dip into other older English translations to get more insights and interpretations.
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Bring your own questions about the text if you are interested in joining this Sunday's meeting.
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We are live-reading and discussing Aristotle's ~Nicomachean Ethics~, book VII, which is about troubleshooting the virtues.
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The prerequisite to this book is our answering for ourselves these questions from the prior books, to which we will briefly review:
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1. What is a virtue of character {ēthikē aretē}?
2. How does one come to acquire it? (E.g. [Aristotle’s], ambition, bravery, gentlemanliness, generosity, candor, …)
3. From a first-person perspective in being virtuous, how does one feel and what does one see (differently, discursively) in a given situation of everyday living?
4. From a third-person perspective, how is the virtuous person (of a specific virtue) to be characterized?
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The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.