This paper explores the concept of skill in Zhuangzi and Stoicism, and argues that the role of the Stoic techne in practicing the art of living can be better understood if we introduce some perspec...

This dissertation deals with the tragic vision that motivates certain key aspects of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy. While in the formative early work, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with Max Horkheimer, the tragic views are clear, in later works, such as the Aesthetic Theory and the Negative Dialectics, they are only implicit. The study reconstructs the tragic vision found in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and uses it as a key to understand Adorno’s mature philosophy. A tragic vision is born when (...) specific philosophical convictions regarding agency and morality coalesce with certain ethical and political conditions. A tragic vision forms the grounds for tragic views. For Adorno, the key convictions rise out of the failures of reason and culture to enable the eradication of unnecessary suffering by creating the kind of conditions in which human beings could flourish. These convictions give rise to a view of humanity as blind to its own shortcomings and thus doomed to perpetuate suffering in the name of progress and growth. Adorno’s persistent negativism prevents him from offering practical solutions for changing the world, but he does offer a scathing critique of the modern world that continues to resonate with new generations of readers. The analysis of the tragic vision presented in this dissertation will highlight the fundamental philosophical and ethical commitments underlying Adorno’s views and will thus allow both situating his work into a larger cultural context and juxtaposing it with the work of other philosophers, as well as other writers, thereby opening new vistas for research not just on Adorno but on continental philosophy, social theory, and the domain of arts and letters at large. (shrink)

Plato’s theory of virtue in the Laws could be striking for someone who is more familiar with Aristotle’s ethics for conceptual complementarity between the two positions (contrary emotions, the ordering element of reason, virtue as a mean which lies between two forms of vice, typically linked to excessive actions, etc.). Plato’s theory, however, still differs from that of Aristotle in two crutial points. First, the source of emotional dynamism is, according to Plato, supraindividual as far as the psyche is a (...) cosmological principle. Only if it comes to be formed and ordered, it separates from the universal cosmic context and make up the emotional nature of an individual soul. But the soul is not, and this is the second point of difference, ordered by some external element (training or education, organized by a rational agent). Plato counts on a pre-arranged order of emotions at a particular ontological topos of the individual soul into which reason eventually descends. Emotions, on their part, seem to include a nexus between formable and forming that is chronologically and methodocally prior to that between the biological substratum and its rational organization, as assumed by Aristotle. (shrink)

This article examines the operation of “skilled feelings” in metaphors for the heart-mind (xin 心) as ruler of the body. It focuses on three Chinese philosophical texts in contexts outside of the “Confucian” texts that have dominated the emerging field of comparative virtue ethics—the Zhuangzi 莊子, Sunzi Bingfa 孫子兵法 (Sunzi’s Art of War), and Huangdi Neijing 黃帝內經 (The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine)—and briefly contrasts the Chinese accounts to influential Greek metaphors of the mind as ruler of the body (...) and passions. (shrink)

The Greeks knew a virtue term that represented the ability to determine which norms deserved commitment, a virtue term usually misunderstood as “prediction of likely outcomes” or “being hesitant”:promêtheia. Plato’s uses of this term, almost completely ignored by scholarship, show a sensitivity to the prerequisites for the capacity for rational agency. We must add this virtue term to the usual suspects related to acting as a rational agent:sôphrosunê, dikaiosunê, phrônesis, andsophia.Promêtheiastands out for its importance in times of ignorance of the (...) future. (shrink)

Resumen:Este artículo se propone mostrar, en contra de las interpretaciones dominantes, que Platón debió tempranamente postular la supervivencia del alma como un sujeto independiente de daño y beneficio moral con el objeto de completar su defensa de la ética socrática - en particular el principio de Soberanía de la Virtud, central en diálogos tempranos como la Apología, el Critón y el Gorgias. Al dualismo metafísico que resulta de este postulado le denomino ‘dualismo socrático’, para diferenciarlo del dualismo maduro expuesto por (...) Platón en el Fedón.Palabras clave: alma; beneficio; cuerpo; daño; dualismo; ética; Sócrates; supervivencia; virtud. (shrink)