Philosophy Courses 110. An introduction to philosophical thinking through intensive reading of primary philosophical sources and careful discussion and writing about them and the philosophical issues they raise.
All sections follow a discussion format and require several brief papers.
There are no prerequisites. Virtue and Vice Instead of thinking primarily about duties and rights and thus about right and wrong actions, many moral philosophers have focused on the question of moral character, asking which character traits make one a good person or a bad one, where those traits are spoken of, respectively, as virtues and vices. The class will begin by dealing at length with Aristotle's account of character and virtue and then will consider several contemporary variations on that theme, all by way of critically formulating our own accounts of virtue and vice as such and of several particular virtues and vices. We will devote some attention to the intellectual and historical context of the work, but our main concern will be with the arguments it presents and the agenda it established for subsequent thinkers. In this course we shall dwell on this question by examining the roots of moral obligation.