scholarly journals An Ancient Virtue and Its Heirs: The Reception of Greatness of Soul in the Arabic Tradition

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 688-731
Author(s):  
Sophia Vasalou
Keyword(s):  
Greatness Of Soul

Greatness of Soul

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-64
Author(s):  
Sophia Vasalou
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Philosophical Ethics ◽  
The Status ◽  
Greatness Of Soul ◽  
Religious Morality ◽  
Ideal Part

Part 1 explores how thinkers in the Islamic world received the ancient virtue of greatness of soul by focusing on one particular ‘virtue of greatness’ found in works of Arabic philosophical ethics. Greatness of soul appears in the works of prominent Muslim thinkers such as al-Fārābī, Miskawayh, and al-Ghazālī under the Arabic term kibar al-nafs. In Miskawayh’s and al-Ghazālī’s classifications of the virtues and vices, it is defined in terms approximating to Aristotle’s account. The overall treatment of the virtue is cursory yet apparently approving. This will seem surprising given the oft-remarked conflict of the virtue, particularly in its Aristotelian version, with an ideal of humility. Did thinkers in the Arabic tradition take a different view of this ideal? Part 1 investigates this question by offering a substantive reading of Miskawayh’s and, more concertedly, al-Ghazālī’s account of the ethics of esteem and self-esteem. There are delicate interpretive issues to be navigated in piecing together an account of al-Ghazālī’s ethical commitments. Yet the author’s conclusion is that al-Ghazālī privileges the virtue of humility and denigrates the status of honour as a good. The virtue of magnanimity he incorporates in his tables of the virtues thus appears to be in profound conflict with his considered ethical viewpoint, and with values central to Islamic religious morality more broadly. Why then does al-Ghazālī (like Miskawayh) pass this conflict over in silence? Part 1 concludes with some suggestions about this puzzle and about what it may have to tell us about these thinkers’ engagement with ancient philosophy.

Greatness of Soul Across the Ages

2019 ◽  
pp. 292-318
Author(s):  
Robert C. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Mutual Exclusion ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Greatness Of Soul ◽  
The Way ◽  
Strength And Toughness

That a virtue should be called magnanimity suggests that souls come in sizes. But what makes for this sizing? This chapter is framed between the Homeric heroic ideal embodied in the megalêtôr and the gentle but resolute American hero, the magnanimous Abraham Lincoln, interacting along the way with the other chapters in the volume. This chapter compares conceptions of greatness of soul (heart, spirit, mind), touching on Socrates, Aristotle, the New Testament, Stoicism, Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī and al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, the Scottish Enlightenment, Kant, and Nietzsche. The story is one of diversity, indeed in some cases mutual exclusion, with overlap and continuities. But in the end the chapter suggests a certain evolution of our conception of human greatness in which the virtues of strength and toughness are integrated with those of generosity and compassion.

Aristotle's Great-Souled Man

2002 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Howland
Keyword(s):  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Posterior Analytics ◽  
Greatness Of Soul

Aristotle's discussion of the great-souled man (megalopsuchos) is crucial to any interpretation of the Nicomachean Ethics. Yet there is no scholarly consensus about the nature and significance of the megalopsuchos. This article examines Aristotle's treatment of the great-souled man within the context of the Ethics as a whole and in connection with other relevant passages elsewhere in the Aristotelian corpus. In particular, Aristotle's identification of Socrates as a great-souled man in the Posterior Analytics provides an interpretative key to his discussion of greatness of soul in the Ethics. Aristotle's presentation of the great-souled man reflects an ambiguity at the heart of virtue itself, and underscores the Socratic character of the fundamental lessons of the Ethics. According to Aristotle, the true megalopsuchos is Socrates.

Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Aristotle's Great-Souled Man

2007 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carson Holloway
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Greatness Of Soul ◽  
The One ◽  
Moral Convictions

This paper seeks to illuminate magnanimity by examining Shakespeare's Coriolanus in light of Aristotle's account of greatness of soul in the Nicomachean Ethics. I contend that contemplation of Coriolanus's similarity to Aristotle's magnanimous man allows us to harmonize two apparently discordant elements of the magnanimous man's character: his seriousness about the good, on the one hand, and his apparently status-oriented intolerance of insult, on the other. Nevertheless, Coriolanus falls short of Aristotle's standard; reflection on his defects reveals that genuine magnanimity requires prudence and a philosophic detachment from the city's moral convictions that Shakespeare's hero lacks.

A Great Philosopher's Not So Great Account of Great Virtue: Aristotle's Treatment of Greatness of Soul'

1990 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard J. Curzer
Keyword(s):  
Character Traits ◽  
Greatness Of Soul

Once again it is becoming fashionable to ask ‘What character traits are virtues?’ Naturally, it behooves us to try to recapture the insights of our predecessors, as well as forging ahead on our own. In this paper I shall examine one such insight.

Thomas Hobbes: Magnanimity, Felicity, and Justice

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Corsa
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Final Word ◽  
Greatness Of Soul

Thomas Hobbes’s concept of magnanimity, a descendant of Aristotle’s “greatness of soul,” plays a key role in Hobbes’s theory with respect to felicity and the virtue of justice. In his Critique du ‘De Mundo’, Hobbes implies that only genuinely magnanimous people can achieve the greatest felicity in their lives. A life of felicity is a life of pleasure, where the only pleasure that counts is the well grounded glory experienced by those who are magnanimous. Hobbes suggests that felicity involves the successful pursuit of desires, a pursuit at which the magnanimous are particularly adept. Additionally, Hobbes implies that those who possess the virtue of justice must also possess magnanimity; it is the just person’s “Nobleness or Gallantnesse of courage, (rarely found).” Leo Strauss and Dorothea Krook suggest that this cannot be Hobbes’s “final word” on justice, because, they say, Hobbes considers magnanimity a type of pride, which he derogates and cannot consistently associate with virtue. I argue that magnanimity, associated with well-grounded glory, is not a type of pride; only vain glory is.

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