This paper aims to shed light on Plato’s myth of Er contribution to the emergence of a conception of choice as a principle of identity. Our hypothesis is that this myth brings out what is a real choice and that only philosophy enable us to make it. Philosophy as a way of life is that according to it our choice of life become a free choice and a principle of identity — because this first choice determines all the others in (...) the entire life. From this view, I propose to assign Cicero’s voluntas and Epictetus’s prohairesis — as faculty of choice and principle of personal identity — to this point of the myth : philosophy appears as the way to make the choice to choose. In this regard, we are our choices. (shrink)

The notion of prohairesis is one of the key notions of Epictetus’ Stoicism. While this notion was of minor importance in ancient Stoicism, being a kind of impulse consis­ting of a « choice before a choice » and was rarely associated with a broader meaning (to the noteworthy exception of Diogenes of Seleucia), Epictetus borrowed from Aristotelian philosophy a notion of prohairesis as a preferential choice strictly bound to the notion of eph’ hemin (« what depends on us »). But (...) Epictetus introduced numerous alterations within the Aristotelian concept, extending its scope to all the active faculties of soul, including assent, and making prohairesis the only thing which depends on us, and not a choice concerning what depends on us, as is the case in Aristotle. A close analysis of the various senses of prohairesis in Epictetus shows that the word applies alternatively to cases of decision, to the faculty of making decisions, and, in a more restricted sense, to the preliminary choice of a way of life. Therefore, prohairesis is not strictly speaking a « moral person », as is often assumed, but contributes to constitute her, being the essence of good and evil. (shrink)

Virtue ethics interprets human action as pursuing good ends through practices that develop qualities internal to those final goals. The philosophical approach has been identified as critical of economics, leading in turn to the innovative response that by viewing the market as mutually beneficial exchange, economic practice is in fact defendable on virtue ethics grounds. This defends economics using arguments drawn from virtue ethics, but there is a need also to explore space for virtue ethics within economic theory. Examining key (...) contributions of Kenneth J. Arrow, Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom, the article notes that virtue ethics’ appreciation of persons’ communicability of ends is increasingly being relied upon within economics, though sometimes under different names. Its strength to interdisciplinary work between economics and philosophy lies in presenting a methodology able to capture how human beings are capable of, though not fixated on, cooperation. (shrink)

Exeinai bedeutet, dass es jemandem offensteht, eine bestimmte Handlung zu tun. Damit verbinden sich die Vorstellungen des Handlungsspielraums, des Anders-Könnens und des Anders-gekonnt-Habens wie auch die Vorstellung, selbst über sein Tun und Lassen bestimmen zu können. Exousia ist eng verknüpft mit eleutheria, Freiheit, und seit Aristoteles ist exeinai auch mit dem Begriff ep’ autō(i): etwas liegt bei einem, verbunden. Der Aufsatz bietet die erste detaillierte Untersuchung der Verwendung, der begrifflichen Verbindungen und der Signifikanz von exeinai und exousia. Damit fällt neues (...) Licht auf eine frühe Phase in der Geschichte der Freiheitsidee. (shrink)

This paper argues that Shaftesbury differs from other moral sentimentalists (Hutcheson, Hume, Smith) because he conceives of the moral sentiments as partial and first-personal, rather than impartial and spectatorial. This difference is grounded in Shaftesbury’s distinctive notion that moral self-governance consists in the self-examination of soliloquy. Breaking with his Stoic influences, Shaftesbury holds that the moral sentiments play the role of directing and guiding soliloquy. Because soliloquy is first-personal reflection that is directed to achieving happiness, claiming that the moral sentiments (...) direct soliloquy leads Shaftesbury to conceive of the moral sentiments as arising from the internal perspective of an agent focused on her own happiness. This provides Shaftesbury with a stronger framework for understanding moral sentiments, for it avoids the difficulty of explaining why the sentiments of others or those arising from an imagined spectator’s perspective are motivating or authoritative for us. (shrink)