A good life is something inherently worth having, unlike justice which is worth having because it leads to a good life. Aristotle defined good as something that fulfils its end purpose and the telos of humanity is to be rational, Aristotle then went on to say
Aristotle and Kant were both brilliant philosophers, who each strongly supported and believed in their own arguments. They were similar in their approach to ethics; they both admire reason and rationality. The basic beliefs of Aristotle contrasted with the modern ideas of Immanuel Kant which offered a great match for an interesting view of human good and good will. However, after a thorough inspection of each philosopher's theories, I found that after initially leaning toward Aristotle’s theories I discovered that Kant's idea of good was found to be more captivating than Aristotle's, in that Kant's view addressed good in a complete sense through categorical obligations of man. Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and was passionate about the virtue ethics, as were a lot of the early philosophers in Greece.
Intellectual virtue owes its existence to teaching and moral virtue to habits. Virtuous habits, therefore, leads a man to continually experience moral virtue, eventually leading to the development of the individual’s character. Continually, he argues that, a virtuous man is not virtuous by solely performing virtuous actions. Rather, there are criteria to how the man should act virtuously: the agent needs to be fully conscious of what he is doing, he needs to deliberately choose or will his action, and the action must be derived from a fixed moral disposition. Moreover, according to Aristotle, to be truly happy in and of itself is for a man to be virtuous.
Hadot investigates the Socratic notion that virtue is knowledge and that an examination of your soul is necessary to become a ‘good’ man and live in a moral way. This analysis will investigate the many ‘masks’ of Socrates, through Plato, Kierkegaard and the ancient playwright Aristophanes and ask whether the examined life is truly the only way to live or whether this wisdom is beyond our human understanding and perhaps even our nature. Socrates is an illusive philosopher; a wandering hermit of ancient Athens who made philosophy and the true love of wisdom a personal life quest. He is also a figure we have such little factual evidence on it is difficult to argue who he really was and what he represented. This is ironic; as for many people Socrates has become a revered character both in his time and ours.
Given Socrates’ statement, toward the beginning of the Apology, that he has gained his reputation by “a sort of wisdom” that he calls “human wisdom” (par. 8), and, given that he does assert in several other places that he is reputed to be a “wise man” whom people think of as knowing things that others do not, one might imagine that this phrase “human wisdom” could therefore be applied to anyone who has achieved a certain level of knowledge. However, taking into account Socrates’ persistent claims about his own lack of knowledge as well as the fact that the only other places in the dialogue that he ever admits to having any wisdom at all are moments in which he is also claiming to be ignorant, Socrates’ apparent admission that he has the kind of wisdom that his reputation suggests would appear to be ironic, and that what he really means by the phrase “human wisdom” is knowing and admitting one’s own ignorance. Towards the beginning of the text, after discussing how the Sophists came to obtain their reputation for being wise and differentiating himself from them, Socrates introduces his argument against his earlier accusers by saying: Men of Athens, this reputation of mine has come of a certain sort of wisdom. What kind of wisdom?
Instead of focusing more on teaching his Socratic Method, also known as dialectics, to the adults who didn’t really care to much about them, he decided to teach younger children because they were willing to learn and their minds were still open to learning and he really enjoyed teaching them. Socrates, being a teacher to the young, they looked up to him and did what they were told. So at that time, one of his students went to Sparta where he advised the Spartans during the war. In people’s minds, they thought of that to be an act of betrayal and Socrates was responsible for the student’s actions. Unfortunately, many Athenians found Socrates to be a threat to them due to some events that occurred during the time.
Santa-Maria also says that while Franklin promotes the idea of being like Socrates, Franklin is in fact more like Epicurus. Santa-Maria ends his essay by stating that he believes that Franklin’s interpretation of virtue is a failure, and that moral perfection is impossible. I believe that Santa-Maria’s critical essay was very clearly written and thought-provoking. He expresses his ideas very clearly, and has a lot of background information to back it up. It was very easy to comprehend what he believed, and easy to see why he felt this way.
I feel I fit into this paradigm the best is because I use reason to understand things around; I don’t base my decisions on an imaginary ominous being. I use rational, logical thoughts. The classical paradigm is a large piece of the puzzle of how we live today. One of the most important philosophers of the classical era was Socrates. He was put to death because of his thoughts and words.
From there, the unpredictable Socrates proceeded to teach Millman the "way of the peaceful warrior." At first Socrates shattered every preconceived notion that Millman had about academics, athletics, and achievement. But eventually Millman stopped resisting the lessons, and began to try on a whole new ideology--one that valued being conscious over being smart, and strength in spirit over strength in body. Although the character of the cigarette-smoking Socrates seems like a fictional, modern-day Merlin, Millman asserts that he is based on an actual person. Certain male readers especially appreciate the coming-of-age theme, the haunting love story with the elusive woman Joy, and the challenging of Western beliefs about masculine power and success.
It is what he sees as making life worthwhile. Aristotle held that the key feature of humankind was its ability to thing – man is a ‘thinking animal’. But, for Aristotle, reason was not just the ability to think logical thoughts, but of living the good life, in line with the precepts of reason. Aristotle goes on to say that it is difficult to establish what the ultimate good is, we have formulated general ethical principles. We then establish that those principles are working, Aristotle assumes that there are natural tendencies we should follow, which help in making moral judgements