Perception in Aristotle's Ethics seeks to demonstrate that living an ethical life requires a mode of perception that is best called ethical perception. Specifically, drawing primarily on Aristotle’s accounts of perception and ethics in De anima and Nicomachean Ethics, Eve Rabinoff argues that the faculty of perception (aisthesis), which is often thought to be an entirely physical phenomenon, is informed by intellect and has an ethical dimension insofar as it involves the perception of particulars in their ethical significance, as things that are good or bad in themselves and as occasions to act. Further, she contends, virtuous action requires this ethical perception, according to Aristotle, and ethical development consists in the achievement of the harmony of the intellectual and perceptual, rational and nonrational, parts of the soul. Rabinoff's project is philosophically motivated both by the details of Aristotle’s thought and more generally by an increasing philosophical awareness that the ethical agent is an embodied, situated individual, rather than primarily a disembodied, abstract rational will.

This text looks at Aristotle's claims, particularly the much-maligned doctrine of the mean.

The ethics of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), and virtue ethics in general, have seen a resurgence of interest over the past few decades. No longer do utilitarianism and Kantian ethics on their own dominate the moral landscape. In addition, Aristotelian themes fill out that landscape, with such issues as the importance of friendship and emotions in a good life, the role of moral perception in wise choice, the nature of happiness and its constitution, moral education and habituation, finding a stable home in contemporary moral debate. The essays in this volume represent the best of that debate. Taken together, they provide a close analysis of central arguments in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. But they do more than that. Each shows the enduring interest of the questions Aristotle himself subtly and complexly raises in the context of his own contemporary discussions.

Gregoric investigates the Aristolian concept of the common sense, which was introduced to explain complex perceptual operations that can't be explained in terms of the five senses taken individually. Such operations include perceiving that the same object is white and sweet, or knowing that one's senses are inactive.

Desire is a central concept in Aristotle's ethical and psychological works, but he does not provide us with a systematic treatment of the notion itself. This book reconstructs the account of desire latent in his various scattered remarks on the subject and analyses its role in his moral psychology. Topics include: the range of states that Aristotle counts as desires (orexeis); objects of desire (orekta) and the relation between desires and envisaging prospects; desire and the good; Aristotle's three species of desire: epithumia (pleasure-based desire), thumos (retaliatory desire) and boulêsis (good-based desire - in a narrower notion of 'good' than that which connects desire more generally to the good); Aristotle's division of desires into rational and non-rational; Aristotle and some current views on desire; and the role of desire in Aristotle's moral psychology. The book will be of relevance to anyone interested in Aristotle's ethics or psychology.

This book elaborates a moral realism of phenomenological inspiration by introducing the idea that moral experience, primordially, constitutes a perceptual grasp of actions and of their solid traces in the world. The main thesis is that, before any reference to values or to criteria about good and evil—that is, before any reference to specific ethical outlooks—one should explain the very materiality of what necessarily constitutes the ‘moral world’. These claims are substantiated by means of a text- centered interpretation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in dialogue with contemporary moral realism. The book concludes with a critique of Heidegger’s, Gadamer’s and Arendt’s approaches to Aristotle’s ethics.