Aristotle essays

Aristotle essays Virtue or excellence is a psychic phenomenon. Is it an emotion, or the capacity to experience an emotion? An emotion is something we feel or undergo and we cannot hold ourselves responsible for that; but it is an essential feature of virtue that we praise it, of vice that we blame it. But we do not praise and blame that for which we cannot be held responsible. Therefore, neither virtue nor vice can be an emotion or the capacity to experience an emotion. Virtue and vice should be understood, rather, as dispositions, a certain habitual stance we take in regard to our emotions. Someone who is habitually afraid of everything has developed a disposition of cowardice in regard to the emotion of fear, for which he can be blamed; someone who is habitually inclined neither to indulge in pleasures excessively nor to shun them at all costs has developed a disposition of moderation in relation to the desire for pleasure, for which he can be praised. These praiseworthy and blameworthy dispositions are not something we are born with; nor, on the other hand, can they be taught theoretically. They are acquired by a process of habituation, which begins with parents training of children. As humans, we take pleasure in being praised, and are pained by the shame that accompanies blame; this pleasure and pain can be used to mold an immediate or natural attraction to pleasure and repulsion from pain which would not prove to be the good for us. It is, then, by practicing moderation that we develop a moderate disposition; of course, we can only be said to be virtuous when we practice moderate actions motivated by a disposition of moderation, which is different from the motive governing our practice such actions in the process of acquiring that virtue. Aristotle believed that a person who has difficulty behaving ethically is morally imperfect. His ideal person practices the "golden mean of moderation." He believed that this moral virtue ...

Gwendolyn Brooks essays

Gwendolyn Brooks essays Gwendolyn Brooks is the female poet who has been most responsive to changes in the black community, particularly in the communitys vision of itself. The constant in Brooks poetry has been her loyalty to characters who find themselves trapped in an environment scarred by racial discrimination, poverty, and violence. Gwendolyn Brooks, the daughter of David Anderson Brooks, the son of a runaway slave, and Keziah Corinne (Wims) Brooks, was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka Kansas. Brooks was the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950, and the first African-American woman to be inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Brooks family moved to Chicago shortly after her birth. Her parents set a high priority on literature, and she began to collect her poems in notebooks at age eleven. Gwendolyn had a difficult time in school and was rejected for her shyness as well as her skin Brooks attended Hyde Park High School, the leading white high school in the city, but transferred to the all-black Wendall Phillips, then to the integrated Englewood High School. In 1936 she graduated from Wilson Junior College. These four schools gave her a perspective on racial dynamics in the city that continued to influence her work. Brooks was influenced at first by the Harlem Renaissance. Her early work featured the sonnet and the ballad, and she experimented with adaptations of conventional meter. Later, development of the black arts movement in the sixties, along with conceptions of a black aesthetic, turned her toward free verse and an abandonment of the sonnet as inappropriate to the times. However, she retained, her interest in the ballad, its musicality and accessibility, and in what she called "verse journalism." Brooks died in December 2000. Brooks writing is objective, but her characters speak for themselves. She uses ordinary speech. ...