Aristotle on Anger, Virtue and Vice.

I was recently invited up to Green Mountain College, just across the border in Vermont, to provide a faculty development workshop and also to give a talk about Aristotle, anger, and virtue ethics.  The latter talk was intended primarily for undergraduate students taking an Ethics course in the Environmental Liberal Arts core program at Green Mountain, and it provided me with a useful occasion to do a bit more thinking about some of the topics corralled together in a book I'm writing, focused specifically on Aristotle and his theory of anger.

As I remarked early on in the talk -- which you can hear here, or watch here -- one of the most distinctive features of Aristotle's approach to anger is that, unlike so many other ancient, medieval, and modern thinkers, he doesn't consider anger uniformly or even generally bad.  In fact, he comes right out in saying that there are times when we ought to get angry -- to feel the emotion and to act upon it.  It's not just a question of whether it's psychologically good for us to express our anger sometimes, nor is it simply an issue of prudently maintaining boundaries or responding to bullying -- for Aristotle, anger is at its very core a moral issue, a matter of character.

Rational Limits on Pursuit of Pleasure

I've been researching and writing the follow-up post to my Thanksgiving-time reflections on gratitude -- digging into corners and crannies of texts I've run through previously but hadn't reread recently -- portions of writings of Cicero, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, David Hume, Thomas Aquinas, and Adrian Peperzak.  Rather than attempt to draw all those varied threads into one knot, or at least braid at this time, I've decided today to write instead about one of the several topics I'll be discussing tonight at the first in a new series of philosophy-centered events:  Philosophy Eats.  Tonight, it's Hedonism on the menu, both figuratively -- I'll be giving a talk and then leading a discussion -- and quite literally -- the chef and owner of Global Palate, Jessica Winchell, has assembled an amazingly aphrodisiac set of courses.

One of the matters I mean to bring up -- but not to go into full detail about -- has to do with setting rational limitations on the pursuit of pleasure, as well as one the avoidance of pleasure's contrary or opposite, pain.  There are hedonists, of course, for whom there are no restraints upon pleasure-seeking -- the popular conception associating hedonism with the adage "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die" -- but in point of fact, most hedonists (and certainly those who thought enough about it to leave behind some coherent moral doctrine) don't act according to such an extreme, and likely short-lived, interpretation of that basic idea. 

Motive, Moral Discourse, and Conflict in the Song of Ice and Fire

I've been rather lax in posting on Virtue Ethics Digest of late, a factor principally of slogging through the end of semester and the holiday break, continuing to produce online and handout content for my classes this semester, and following up on contacts made after a set of three conference presentations all within a month of each other.  I've yet to follow-up my post on Madoff and Happiness, and there's plenty other posts on the docket, some of them half-written or  partly developed, others only so far in nuce.

So, for faithful or even occasional Virtue Ethics Digest readers, I proffer a tidbit from the last of those conferences, a short presentation available both as Powerpoint slides (well, actually as a pdf of them) and in video format, a prefiguration of what I intend eventually to turn into a a short volume -- one has to devote to topics the lengths of prose they demand, as as I've discovered, in order to say anything both meaningful and in adequate depth about George R.R. Martin's epic (and still unfinished) fantasy series, much more than a conference presentation would be required.

All I'll say about this here at present is that the gritty, morally complex world Martin develops -- as a "gardener", in his own word, as opposed to the sort of "architect" he credits Tolkien with being -- is one which to me seems almost uniquely well-suited to be understood in terms of Aristotelian moral theory -- read not only through his two Ethics, but also across the Politics, the Rhetoric, and the Poetics.

Virtues and Supplemental Instruction

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to carry out what I sometimes jokingly refer to as "Virtue Ethics evangelism."  I'd been invited to submit a workshop proposal for a one-day conference held down at City University of New York (CUNY)-Lehman, focused specifically on Supplemental Instruction, bringing together educators from many different disciplines and schools, mainly from across the CUNY system schools but including a scattering of others from upstate schools -- and me, a philosopher, virtue ethicist, representing my fledgling consulting company, ReasonIO.

At my last academic position, at Fayetteville State University, where I'd focused heavily on teaching and improving the core Critical Thinking classes, I recruited -- or at least attempted to, since the better candidates were nearly always courted by other programs -- and worked with, student Supplemental Instruction leaders.  I'd given some thought to the successes and failures we'd encountered in semester after semester of classes assisted by SI, and now provided with an opportunity to reflect on those matters in the somewhat more sustained, systematic, and rigorous ways that producing a conference presentation requires, I proposed a session linking Virtue Ethics with Supplemental Instruction, arguing the need or at least usefulness of the former in thinking about and doing the latter well.