Sections offered SPRING 2020:
#12524 |
REGA WOOD |
MW 4:00pm-5:15pm |
HU 217 |
CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; meets with PHIL-P 371 and PHIL-P 541
An introduction to “Virtue Ethics.” Virtue Ethics emerged in the second half of the 20th century as an alternative to deontology and consequentialism, beginning with Elizabeth Anscombe’s seminal paper “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958). But advocates of virtue ethics claim it has ancient roots: it is the ethics of Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and the Scholastics. This course begins with an attempt to summarize virtue ethics as it is described by such modern proponents as Rosalind Hursthouse and Julia Annas. Thereafter we will look at selections from Plato’s Republic and Philebus, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Aquinas’ Summa theologica and On Virtue, and Ockham’s On the Connection of the Virtues. We close by considering modern proponents of virtue ethics, comparing and contrasting them with ancient and medieval philosophers.