Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > After Virtue > Status Update

A central virtue / is phronêsis. Phronêsis like sôphrosunê is originally an aristocratic term of praise. It characterizes someone who knows what is due to him, who takes pride in claiming his due. It comes to mean more generally someone who knows how to exercise judgment in particular cases. P. is an intellectual virtue; but it is that intellectual virtue W/O which none of the virtues of character can be exercised.

Nietzsche v. Aristoteles

In many pre-modern societies a man’s honor is what is due to him and to his kin and his household by reason of their having their due place in the social order. To dishonor someone is to fail to acknowledge what is thus due.

But in Goffman’s social world imputations of merit are themselves part of the contrived social reality whose function is to aid or to contain some striving, role-playing will.

The problem then is how to construct in an entirely original way, how to invent a new table of what is good and a law, a problem which arises for each individual. This problem would constitute the core of a Nietzschean moral philosophy.

weberiansk makt

Reason does not comprehend essences or transitions from potentiality to act; these concepts belong to the despised conceptual scheme of scholasticism. Hence anti-Aristotelian science sets strict boundaries to the powers of reason.

Practical reason, according to Kant, employs no criterion external to itself. It appeals to no content derived from experience; hence Kant’s independent arguments against the use of happiness or the invocation of God’s revealed will merely reinforce a position already entailed by the Kantian view of reason’s function and powers.

”The early uses of ‘moral’ in English translate the Latin and move to its use as a noun where ‘the moral’ of any literary passage is the practical lesson that it teaches. In these early uses ‘moral’ contrasts neither with such expressions as ‘prudential’ or ‘self-interested’ nor with such expressions as ‘legal’ or ‘religious’.”

the conceptual incommensurability of the rival arguments in each of the three debates. Every one of the arguments is logically valid or can be easily expanded so as to be made so; the conclusions do indeed follow from the premises. But the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another.