Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-nwzlb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-26T23:04:29.627Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Character and Explanation in Aristotle's Ethics and Poetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Marguerite Deslauriers
Affiliation:
McGill University

Extract

Aristotle discusses character in four contexts: ethics, poetic theory, the study of rhetoric and zoology. What he means by character is different in each of these cases, but not radically different. He always uses it as a device to explain actions or behavioural patterns: in animals, in people, and in fictional people. The similarities between the character exhibited by different species, moral character, and tragic character have gone unexamined. As a result, the notion of character as explanatory, and the possibilities and limitations of explanation by means of character are still undetermined.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Hutchinson, D. S., The Virtues of Aristotle (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 76.Google Scholar

2 Nussbaum, Martha Craven,Aristotle' de Motu Animalium: Text with Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 38.Google Scholar

3 Halliwell, Stephen, Aristotle's Poetics (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1986), p. 150.Google Scholar

4 This is the account of the practical syllogism found in Nussbaum's commentary on the De Motu Animalium.