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Nussbaum on Transcendence in Plato and Aristotle*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Kenneth Dorter
Affiliation:
University of Guelph

Extract

Martha Nussbaum's The Fragility of Goodness is an ambitious, imaginative and wide-ranging study (from classical antiquity to contemporary moral theory), one which has understandably received considerable attention. It comprises studies of the five authors that are arguably the greatest interpretive thinkers of classical antiquity whose works have come down to us: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato and Aristotle. Nussbaum's project is to contrast what might be called the rational and pluralistic (the anachronism ‘existential’ would be appropriate) approaches to life and happiness.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1993

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References

Notes

1 The apparent allusion to Dion's name at 252e has long been noted.

2 VII.15 1249b16-23. The Revised Oxford translation is used in this and subsequent passages unless otherwise noted.

3 At least since Jaeger, this book too is sometimes relegated by empirical Aristotelians to an immature period of Aristotle's thought, in order to make his “mature” thought correspond to their own unteleological ontology. But the sheer number of such editorial “corrections” that ultimately become necessary, in order to make Aristotle a consistent empiricist, tell against the naturalness of this way of reading him. Almost all his major works are eventually affected: De Anima, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Politics.

4 Ackrill, J. L. provides a judicious discussion of this in “Aristotle on Eudaimonia,” in Proceedings of the British Academy (1974), Vol. 60, pp. 339–59Google Scholar; reprinted in A. Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Nussbaum mentions the essay in a footnote but does not comment on it.