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1 results

  • Chapter 3 - Virtue Theory and the Nature of the Aesthetic

  • Matthew Sussman, University of Sydney
  • Book:
    Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction
    Published online:
    11 June 2021
    Print publication:
    01 July 2021, pp 72-95

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 further establishes the significance of Aristotelian virtue theory within the landscape of British moral philosophy, where it has been almost entirely neglected. It begins with the 1874 publication of Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics, which was a significant literary event because it identified virtue ethics with “aesthetic” modes of reasoning. An Aristotelian conception of stylistic character subsequently flourished in the philosophical writings of J.S. Mill, John Grote, T.H. Green, and Bernard Bosanquet, all of whom rejected the dissociation of ethics from aesthetics and imagined character as an aesthetic realization of the self. In this way, philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition provided an ethical justification for aesthetic autonomy and the character-based formalism of Victorian stylistic criticism.