The Art of Living Well: Moral Experience and Virtue Ethics

by Paul van Tongeren, Thomas Heij

Overview

In this first English translation of the prize-winning Dutch title Leven is Een Kunst, Paul van Tongeren creates a new kind of virtue ethics, one that centres on how to 'live well' in our contemporary world.

While virtue ethics is based on the moral philosophy of Aristotle, it has had many interpretations and iterations throughout history and features prominently in the thinking of the Stoics, Christian narratives and the writings of Nietzsche. The Art of Living Well explores and expands upon these traditions, using them as a basis to form a new interpretation; one that foregrounds art and creativity as paramount to the struggle to act in an authentic and moral way.

Acting as both a clear introduction to virtue ethics and moral philosophy and a serious work of original philosophy, this book connects philosophy with real lived experience and tackles, head-on, the perennial philosophical question: 'how do we live well?'

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350012875
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/11/2020
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.41(d)

About the Author

Paul van Tongeren is Professor of Moral Philosophy and Ethical Theory at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Special Professor of Ethics at the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven, Belgium; and Associate Researcher at the University of Pretoria, South Africa

Thomas Heij studied philosophy at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and works as editor at the Nexus Institute

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Art 3

I Ethics And Meaning 7

1 Life as art 7

2 Ethical cases 9

3 Facts and opinions 12

4 Meaning and quality 15

5 Aristotle 19

6 'Objective' and 'subjective' 22

7 Dissensus and consensus 25

8 Socrates and the beginning of ethics 27

Literature 30

Attention 31

II Hermeneutics and Experience 35

1 A critique on the philosophical pretensions of ethics 36

2 Hermeneutics of moral experience 38

3 Happiness 44

3.1 Subjective versus objective 44

3.2 Form versus content 47

3.3 Descriptive versus normative 48

3.4 Autonomous versus heteronomous 50

4 Human dignity 51

4.1 Violating the inviolable 52

4.2 'Foundation'? 53

4.3 Religious explanation 54

4.4 Dignity as a task 56

4.5 Relationality 57

5 Experience? 59

5.1 Experiences are not facts 60

5.2 What makes experiences moral? 61

5.3 Experiences and texts 62

Literature 64

Relations 66

III Virtue and the Art of Living Well 71

1 Virtue ethics 73

2 The art of living well 79

2.1 Pierre Hadot: philosophy as a way of life 80

2.2 Wilhelm Schmid and Joep Dohmen: the art of living well as self-responsibility 87

3 The art of living well, virtue ethics and the human deficit 92

Literature 95

Love 97

IV Greek and Christian 99

1 Translation and interpretation 100

2 Differentiating and arranging 107

3 Addition 111

3.1 'In us, without us' 113

3.2 The evil in sin 115

3.3 Faith, hope and love 119

4 Evaluation and continuation 124

4.1 The two sides of theological virtues 124

4.2 Virtues after the death of God 126

Literature 127

Patience 129

V Nietzsche and/or Aristotle 131

1 The immoralist and virtue ethics 132

2 Socratic, Christian and Nietzschean virtues 134

2.1 Honesty 135

2.2 Temperance 137

2.3 Faith, hope and love 139

3 Nietzschean virtue ethics 141

3.1 What remains 142

3.2 What changes 146

3.3 Problems 150

Literature 152

Shame 154

VI Virtue Ethics in a Disenchanted World 159

1 Ethics and (human) sciences 161

2 Scientific knowledge and interpreting meaning 166

3 The structure of desire 168

4 The ethics of psychoanalysis 172

5 The challenge for ethics 175

6 Can ethics provide answers? 177

7 (Virtue) ethics and (the) art (of living well) 180

Literature 183

Aphorisms 185

Editorial Reviews

"Ambitious in scope, clearly written, and accessible to both academics and laymen, Paul van Tongeren's proposed 'hermeneutical ethics' ventures to construct a modern virtue ethics for a secular world in tension with its own meaninglessness, while still respecting alternative ethical theories as interpretations of unique aspects of moral experience." --Matthew Valentine, Instructor in Philosophy, Duquesne University, USA

"Human relations and the will to practise ethics, as opposed to merely theorising about its foundations, are the main focus of this work that enables us to transform our life in such a way as to consider it the privileged object of a special, refined, and philosophically oriented form of art." --Emidio Spinelli, Professor of the History of Ancient Philosophy, Università di Roma La Sapienza, Italy

"Paul van Tongeren's highly readable book not only updates MacIntyre's After Virtue by putting it in dialogue with new and different thinkers, it also recalls its predecessor's philosophical ambition and impressive breadth of reference. One of its key accomplishments is to bring together virtue ethics with philosophy as a way of life. Anglophone readers will particularly benefit from the author's attention to Dutch and German exponents of the ethics of self-cultivation. Students of Aristotle and Nietzsche will also find much here to think over. It deserves to be widely read, enjoyed, and debated." --Kurt Lampe, Senior Lecturer of Classics, University of Bristol, UK

From the Publisher