Character - Aristotle And Virtue Ethics, Kantian Ethics, Utilitarianism, Challenges, Bibliography
person actions greek english
The word character, when applied to persons, has two sources, distinguished lexically in ancient Greek by the terms êthos and charaktêr. Êthos, originally referring to a disposition or custom, from Aristotle on refers to the stable dispositions that guide a person's actions and that are suitable objects of moral praise and blame. The earliest uses of charactêr in Greek, like the earliest uses of character in English, refer to an impression such as would be carved or stamped onto a coin or tablet; metaphorically, "characters" are signs (actions, facial features, social positions) that reveal something about a person's soul. During the seventeenth century, the sense of "character" in English came to include a person's psychological traits themselves.
Additional Topics
An ancient tradition in natural philosophy, and particularly medicine, sought to explain an individual's character (ēthos) in
terms of the four humors, or bodily fluids—namely the melancholy, phlegmatic, sanguine, and choleric. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) sweeps such speculation to one …
Not himself a utilitarian, the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) characterizes virtuous character traits as those that tend to the good, of mankind or at least of their possessor, and vicious ones as those that tend to the bad. Hume thus shares with utilitarians the view that the moral value of a character trait depends on its nonmoral value for people. Given its first w…
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, questions have been raised about whether there is such a thing as character at all. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) charged that to explain a person's (one's own or someone else's) action in terms of his or her character is to assimilate the action to an event in the natural world (for which the ch…
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Christopher Rowe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Bentham, Jeremy. The Principles of Morals and Legislation. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1988. Boyce, Benjamin. The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. 2nd ed. O…
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