The Unity of Virtue

1973 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Penner
Keyword(s):  
1902 ◽  
pp. 337-364
Author(s):  
George Trumbull Ladd
Keyword(s):  

1984 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Schofield ◽  
Keyword(s):  

2005 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Long

If we look to the Protagoras for philosophical lessons, it may seem an irritating patchwork of niggling argument, irrelevant digressions, false starts and downright fallacy. Read as a play in which the most outstanding and individual minds of a brilliant period meet and engage in a battle of wits, it will give a different impression. That is how it should be read. A serious discussion of the nature of virtue, and how it is acquired, must be left, as Protagoras said, for another occasion - and, we may add, for different company: it is not to be achieved in the competitive atmosphere of a public gathering of Sophists.The Protagoras is palpably interested in character, vividly reviving a lost intellectual generation. But it also seems to argue for a conclusion, albeit a very provisional one. How should we relate the dialogue's array of luminaries to its argument? A reader may be tempted, as in the quotation above, to use the dialogue's literary lustre merely to excuse its arguments from charges of philosophical clumsiness. But by the end of the work we have been shown apparently successful arguments for the unity of virtue, with Protagoras' attempt at a counter-example refuted (360d8–e5).


Noûs ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neera K. Badhwar
Keyword(s):  

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-346
Author(s):  
George Rudebusch ◽  

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Cooper

Philosophers have recently revived the study of the ancient Greek topics of virtue and the virtues—justice, honesty, temperance, friendship, courage, and so on as qualities of mind and character belonging to individual people. But one issue at the center of Greek moral theory seems to have dropped out of consideration. This is the question of the unity of virtue, the unity of the virtues. Must anyone who has one of these qualities have others of them as well, indeed all of them—all the ones that really do deserve to be counted as virtues? Even further, is there really no set of distinct and separate virtuous qualities at all, but at bottom only a single one—so that the person who has this single condition of “virtue” (and only he) is entitled also to the further descriptions “honest” and “well-controlled” and “just” and “friendly” and “courageous” and “fostering” and “supportive,” and so on, as distinguishable aspects or immediate effects of his unitary “virtue”?


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