Moral intellectualism
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Moral intellectualism or ethical intellectualism is a view in
Ancient moral intellectualism
For Socrates (469–399 BC), intellectualism is the view that "one will do what is right or best just as soon as one truly understands what is right or best"; that virtue is a purely intellectual matter, since virtue and knowledge are cerebral relatives, which a person accrues and improves with dedication to reason.[3][4] So defined, Socratic intellectualism became a key philosophic doctrine of Stoicism.[5] The Stoics are well known for their teaching that the good is to be identified with virtue.[5]
The apparent, problematic consequences of this view are "Socratic paradoxes", such as the view that there is no
- No one desires evil.
- No one errs or does wrong willingly or knowingly.
- Virtue – all virtue – is knowledge.
- Virtue is sufficient for happiness.
However, it is clear in Meno that virtue is not knowledge, rather True Belief.
Contemporary philosophers dispute that Socrates's conceptions of knowing truth, and of ethical conduct, can be equated with modern, post-Cartesian conceptions of knowledge and of rational intellectualism.[7]
Typically, Stoic accounts of care for the self required specific
See also
References
- ISSN 1467-9205.
- ^ The Moral Intellectualism of Plato's Socrates The Case of the Hippias Minor
- ^ "Ancient Ethical Theory". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 7 July 2020.
- ^ "FOLDOC". Archived from the original on 2007-07-15. (Definition and note on Socrates)
- ^ a b Ancient Ethical Theory
- ^ p. 14, Terence Irwin, The Development of Ethics, vol. 1, Oxford University Press 2007; p. 147, Gerasimos Santas, "The Socratic Paradoxes", Philosophical Review 73 (1964), pp. 147–164.
- ISBN 978-0470996218.
- ^ Gros, Frederic (ed.) (2005) Michel Foucault: The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Lectures at the College de France 1981–1982. Picador: New York
Further reading
- Virtue Is Knowledge: The Moral Foundations of Socratic Political Philosophy, Lorraine Smith Pangle, University Of Chicago Press, 2014