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It is very difficult to translate some of Aristotle's moral virtues. 'Liberality' and 'Magnificence' (popular in many translations) both seem to mean generosity. The following list is an attempted translation: courage, temperance, big-heartedness, generosity, high-mindedness, right ambition, patience, truthfulness, wittiness, friendliness, modesty, righteous indignation

Cardinal Virtues The cardinal virtues are temperance, courage, wisdom and justice. These virtues work together, and it would not be enough to have one of these alone. Temperance and courage are moral virtues - we get into the habit of acting bravely. We learn self-control by practicing restraint. Developing right judgement requires training - we are educated in the skill of weighing up a situation. In out courts, judges don't just learn on the job, they require years of training before they earn the title 'Justice'. Wisdom sits above all of the other virtues, the culmination of years of learning.

irtue ethics is criticised for not giving clear answers to ethical dilemmas, but it allows us each to make our own responses to situations life throws at us.

We should each aim at acheiving eudaimonia in our own lives.

Sociologists will tell you the difference between living in a close-knit community or a big city, but we can see it for ourselves. People in cities often get 'lost', not belonging to anything and turning to drugs, crime etc. There is far less crime and drug abuse in smaller, rural communities. Aristotle sees our communal relationships as an essential part of our moral growth and flourishing.

Also significant here is Aristotle's view (one also held by Plato) that the virtues are inter-dependent. For instance, Aristotle held that it is not possible to be courageous if one is completely unjust. Yet, such interrelations are also too complex to be meaningfully captured in any simple rule.

For Aristotle, this ideal state would be one which would allow the greatest habituation of virtue and the greatest amount of the activity of contemplation, for just these things amount to human happiness (as he had argued in his ethical works).

(1214a) Eudemian Ethics (or Ethica Eudemia)

249a) On Virtues and Vices (or De Virtutibus et Vitiis Libellus, Libellus de virtutibus)*

or philosophy to work, it needs to work with both the rational-conscious system and the automatic system. We need to make the automatic conscious, and then make the conscious automatic.

ll the philosophies in the Socratic Tradition follow Step 4. But they all take it in different directions. They have differing conceptions of the good life – some think the end of life is to have a good time, others think the end of life is to bring yourself into harmony with God. And they have differing conceptions of the philosopher’s relationship to society – some think the philosopher should leave the masses to their delusions without trying to change them, while others think the philosopher should try and mould society according to their particular vision of the good.

Otherwise we’ll say one thing and behave completely dif

We should resist the idea that science can ‘prove’ one particular model of the good life, and therefore this version can be imposed upon an entire country without their consent. Empirical science cannot ‘prove’ that one particular version of Step 4 is objectively true, no matter what some over-exuberant well-being scientists may claim. For one thing, science can’t measure if there’s a God nor if a person is close to it – which is an important part of many people’s definition of well-being. It’s also impossible for scientists to measure how a person actually lives and how their life impacts on others’ lives (unless they employ private detectives to follow them around).

We also need to find the right balance between the Greeks’ idea of the good life, and the liberal insistence on freedom, practical reasoning, autonomy, and our right to choose our own path in life. What I have tried to put forward in the book is a synthesis, combining evidence-based well-being techniques with ethical discussion of values and ends, balancing empirical science with the arts and humanities. This is the educational approach to the good life I’d like to develop.

Epicurus identifies the eudaimon life with the life of pleasure. He understands eudaimonia as a more or less continuous experience of pleasure, and also, freedom from pain and distress. But it is important to notice that Epicurus does not advocate that one pursue any and every pleasure. Rather, he recommends a policy whereby pleasures are maximized “in the long run.” In other words, Epicuric claims that some pleasures are not worth having because they lead to greater pains, and some pains are worthwhile when they lead to greater pleasures. The best strategy for attaining a maximal amount of pleasure overall is not to seek instant gratification but to work out a sensible long term policy.

s with all other ancient ethical thinkers Socrates thought that all human beings wanted eudaimonia more than anything else. (see Plato, Apology 30b, Euthydemus 280d–282d, Meno 87d–89a). However, Socrates adopted a quite radical form of eudaimonism (see above): he seems to have thought that virtue is both necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia. Socrates is convinced that virtues such as self-control, courage, justice, piety, wisdom and related qualities of mind and soul are absolutely crucial if a person is to lead a good and happy (eudaimon) life. Virtues guarantee a happy life eudaimonia. For example, in the Meno, with respect to wisdom, he says: “… everything the soul endeavours or endures under the guidance of wisdom ends in happiness…”[Meno 88c].

Epicurus identified eudaimonia with the life of pleasure. Epicurus’ ethical theory is hedonistic. (His view proved very influential on the founders and best proponents of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. See the article on utilitarianism.) Hedonism is the view that pleasure is the only intrinsic good and that pain is the only intrinsic bad. An object, experience or state of affairs is intrinsically valuable if it is good simply because of what it is. Intrinsic value is to be contrasted with instrumental value. An object, experience or state of affairs is instrumentally valuable if it serves as a means to what is intrinsically valuable. To see this, consider the following example. Suppose you spend your days and nights in an office, working at not entirely pleasant activities, such as entering data into a computer, and this, all for money. Someone asks, “why do you want the money?” and you answer, “So, I can buy an apartment overlooking the Mediterranean, and a red Ferrari.” This answer expresses the point that money is instrumentally valuable because it is a means to getting your apartment and red Ferrari. The value of making money is dependent on the value of commodities. It is instrumentally valuable: valuable only because of what one obtains by means of it[citation needed].

he Stoics make a radical claim that the eudaimon life is the morally virtuous life. Moral virtue is good, and moral vice is bad, and everything else, such as health, honour and riches, are merely ‘neutral’.[7] The Stoics therefore are committed to saying that external goods such as wealth and physical beauty are not really good at all. Moral virtue is both necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia. In this, they are akin to Cynic philosophers such as Antisthenes and Diogenes in denying the importance to eudaimonia of external goods and circumstances, such as were recognized by Aristotle, who thought that severe misfortune (such as the death of one’s family and friends) could rob even the most virtuous person of eudaimonia. This Stoic doctrine re-emerges later in the history of ethical philosophy in the writings of Immanuel Kant, who argues that the possession of a "good will" is the only unconditional good. One difference is that whereas the Stoics regard external goods as neutral, as neither good nor bad, Kant’s position seems to be that external goods are good, but only so far as they are a condition to achieving happiness.

nterest in the concept of eudaimonia and ancient ethical theory more generally enjoyed a revival in the twentieth century. Elizabeth Anscombe in her article "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958) argued that duty based conceptions of morality are conceptually incoherent for they are based on the idea of a "law without a lawgiver".[8] She claims a system of morality conceived along the lines of the Ten Commandments depends on someone having made these rules.[9] Anscombe recommends a return to the eudaimonistic ethical theories of the ancients, particularly Aristotle, which ground morality in the interests and well being of human moral agents, and can do so without appealing to any such lawgiver.

Eudaimonia depends on all the things that would make us happy if we knew of their existence, but quite independently of whether we do know about them. Ascribing eudaimonia to a person, then, may include ascribing such things as being virtuous, being loved and having good friends. But these are all objective judgments about someone’s life: they concern a person’s really being virtuous, really being loved, and really having fine friends. This implies that a person who has evil sons and daughters will not be judged to be eudaimonic even if he or she does not know that they are evil and feels pleased and contented with the way they have turned out (happy). Conversely, being loved by your children would not count towards your happiness if you did not know that they loved you (and perhaps thought that they did not), but it would count towards your eudaimonia. So eudaimonia corresponds to the idea of having an objectively good or desirable life, to some extent independently of whether one knows that certain things exist or not. It includes conscious experiences of well being, success, and failure, but also a whole lot more. (See Aristotle’s discussion: Nicomachean Ethics, book 1.10–1.11.)

he presence of many sophists in the city was a primary reason for the transformation of Athens into the main center of Greek intellectual life.

. To understand Socrates the philosopher is to understand how much he stood against the very essence of the culture of his age

n conjunction with these social and cultural developments, the sophists (most of whom did not hail from Athens) had made it a regular feature of their teachings to point out the great variety of human cultures and the apparent relativity of all moral values, systems, and feelings. Some of the sophists had, in fact, drawn rather nihilistic conclusions from their relativistic views. Some of them taught that there was no such thing as right and wrong, or that right was whatever the most powerful individuals or groups would declare to be right. (The Athenian presentation during the Melos negotiations quoted above is an example of how the might-is-right doctrine was actually used by Athenian officials.)

Such teachings and the actual erosion of traditional Athenian values through the growing internationalization of Athenian life unnerved many of the more conservative citizens. In spite of the general open-mindedness and tolerance that characterized Athenian society, a number of Athenians grew quite hostile toward the sophists and their non-traditional teachings. Some sophists and philosophers were, in fact, expelled from the city, and their books publicly burned.

While "The Clouds" is, of course, a farce, produced primarily to make people laugh, the arsonists’ murderous fury nevertheless gave expression to a deep-seated hostility that many Athenians felt toward the man who taught their sons to ask critical questions about their values and way of life. There is little doubt that by making his caricature of Socrates the hate-target of his play, Aristophanes helped a great deal in preparing the philosopher's later fate.

It seems to have been typical for the historical Socrates to not have come up with any final answers to the questions that he raised in his various discussions. (There are, to be sure, answers to some of his questions in the Socratic dialogues that Plato and Xenophon wrote down. But most scholars think that these answers were provided by the students, rather than by Socrates himself.) For Socrates the questioning was always more important than the answers. His primary task was not to teach any specific doctrines, but to make people think. Invoking the profession of his mother, Socrates compared himself to a midwife who helps to deliver the ideas of other people, not his own. As far as his own knowledge was concerned, Socrates never tired of proclaiming his own ignorance

One of Socrates' friends once asked the oracle at Delphi: Who is the wisest man in Greece? The alleged answer was: Socrates. When Socrates was told about this he was puzzled. Thinking the matter over, he still insisted that he was as ignorant as everybody else. The only way in which he thought he may be wiser than other people was by knowing that he was ignorant, while most people thought they were not. "I know that I do not know" is a center piece of Socrates’ wisdom.

What was ultimately most important about Socrates' inquiries was, indeed, the unceasing practice and habit of being critical and thoughtful--of not being blind to one's own unfounded convictions and presuppositions. Thoughtfulness and critical self-awareness as a way of life is what Socrates stands for. That is why he adopted “Know thyself” as the main maxim for his life, and why his best known pronouncement is "the unexamined life is not worth living." Life, according to him, is not something that is just to be lived--lived by following blindly and headlong primal instincts, popular convictions, or time-honored customs. The good life is a life that questions and thinks about things; it is a life of contemplation, self-examination, and open-minded wondering. The good life is thus an inner life—the life of an inquiring and ever expanding mind.

To the chagrin of prominent businessmen, Socrates openly rejected all this. In his eyes the business life was not much of a life. Repeatedly he described the total investment of a man's passions and time in commerce as unworthy of a true gentleman and lover of wisdom.

Socrates advocated a simple life, a life of only minimal production and consumption--a life of voluntary poverty, as it would be called today. According to him material production and consumption could not possibly be a serious end in itself, but at best a mere means to achieve something of greater importance and value. Thus he advised the son of the influential politician Anytus not to take over the family's business, a tannery, but to devote his life to philosophical studies instead—a piece of advice that was to cost him.

Socrates, of course, did not think that happiness is a result of affluence and material consumption. A rich and active mind is happier by far than a consumer of opulent foods and fine clothing. “My belief is that to have no wants is divine, and to have as few as possible is next to divine,” he tells Antiphon during the above confrontation

About Athenian politics Socrates was as disdainful as he was about the world of rampant commerce. It is in connection with politics that Socrates' untiring polemics against rhetoric and sophistry become most cutting. His contempt for the kind of manipulation and mass deception that pervade much of political discourse is well expressed at the beginning of Plato's dialogue Menexenus. Concerning the customary patriotic speeches at the graves of the war dead (like the one delivered by Pericles in 431) Socrates sarcastically remarks: O Menexenus, death in battle is certainly in many ways a noble thing. The dead man gets a fine and costly funeral, although he may have been poor, and an elaborate speech is made over him by a wise man who has long ago prepared what he has to say, although he who is praised may not have been good for much. The speakers praise him for what he has done and for what he has not done—that is the beauty of them—and they steal away our souls with their embellished words. In every conceivable form they praise the city, and they praise those who died in war, and all our ancestors who went before us, and they praise ourselves also who are still alive, until I feel quite elevated by their laudations, and I stand listening to their words, Menexenus, and become enchanted by them, and all in a moment I imagine myself to have become a greater and nobler and finer man than I was before. (7)

Socrates undermined all this by his insistent emphasis of the mind and inner life. The general and enthusiastic cultivation of beautiful appearances struck him as superficial, and the often obsessive dedication to sexual pursuits seemed to him a sort of primitivism that a well-educated person would outgrow as quickly as possible. For Socrates a person's true self was not in the flesh and its passions, but in the intellect and its intangible pursuits. Even the feelings of love were not to be directed toward other persons in their physical individuality, but rather toward the love of ideas. The raw power of sexual energy, in other words, was to be transformed and sublimated into the activities of the mind.

ocrates' distance from the practical political life of Athens, as well as his inner remoteness from the way of life of his fellow-citizens, gives us a measure of his principled individualism. His entire life and work has come to stand for a sharp contrast between individual and society, and for the individual's independence from any kind of social pressure. For all his individualism, however, Socrates was not an anti-social thinker; solitary egotism was neither his style nor his message. During his entire life he was not only fond of socializing and cultivating warm friendships, but he also showed himself to be a most conscientious and law-abiding citizen. Significantly, his philosophizing was not carried out in brooding isolation, like that of later Western philosophers, but in lively dialogues with friends and opponents. His basic form of communication still belonged to the oral tradition, not to that of the silently written word. As for most ancient Greeks, being social for him was not an incidental choice, but an essential part of human nature. In spite of his dissent from the ways and norms of the majority, Socrates understood himself to be a political being. How, then, did he reconcile these two basic conceptions of himself--Socrates the independent individualist, and Socrates the conscientious member of his community?

In 399 Socrates was summoned to defend himself in court against the charges of "corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in gods of his own invention, instead of the gods recognized by the state." (8) It is possible that the charges were trumped up for political and personal reasons. Anytus, whose son had been advised by Socrates to give up business in favor of philosophy, was the main accuser. Socrates, because of his close personal relationships with upper class Athenians, was also suspected of having been too sympathetic to the oligarchs who had launched a coup d'état just a few years earlier. Nevertheless, the charges concerning impiety were a serious matter in 5th and 4th century Athens, and Socrates was on trial for his life. The case was to be decided by the usual jury of 501 citizens. The rules allowed the accusers to state their case, and the defendant to defend himself in one speech. A verdict had to be reached within one day. There was no appeal.

Socrates spent a month in jail before he was made to drink the fatal cup of hemlock. Influential friends offered to rescue him by way of a jailbreak. Socrates refused the offer. He argued that a righteous person has to respect the law, even if convicted unjustly. He calmly drank the poison, and thus died at the hands of a democracy that proved too weak to endure the critical inquiries of one of her most remarkable minds.

It was precisely because of his individualism and independence of mind, in other words, that Socrates could be useful to his community. By his very withdrawal from the immediate social consensus, including any ongoing political disputes, Socrates was able to provide his crucial social service. By keeping his distance from ordinary life and taking a step back from everything other people were involved in, he was able to expose those underlying assumptions that usually remained hidden to most of his contemporaries. Questioning underlying assumptions was, according to Socrates, what would save a society from blindness and self-destructive complacency. The stings of a critical mind are what keeps a culture alive and in motion. No society that is too pleased with itself will remain strong and healthy for long. Not self-congratulatory speechwriters and flattering politicians, but society's probing skeptics and possibly disturbing critics are its most valuable friends.

Ataraxia meant the happiness from being of good cheer because of being at peace with oneself and the world.  Such a person gets much more enjoyment form studies and learned discussion, and he doesn’t tire from the company of like-minded friends.  It is Nirvana stripped of religion.  Epicurus states that such pleasure is endless (one of the maxims not included by Strodach).        Freedom from fear and worries is central to his ethics.  The good life consists of maximizing happiness.  Fears reduce the production.  Thus science is taught so as to eliminate fear of the gods, whom he says are blissful and unconcerned.  Friendship is desired not just to satisfy the drive for companionship, but for security, for in the Greek society protection from harm by fellow citizens rested primarily in their fear of consequences brought about the victim’s friends and relatives.  They taught not to fear death for there is no afterlife and thus no hell.  Pains from illness are at worse chronic and not acute, thus the Epicurean should not worry about future illnesses.  By realizing that wealth is not important to happiness, there will not be worry over the loss of wealth.  These teachings lay a foundation so that those who brace his teachings will be of a calm temperament for the sake of the maximization of ataraxia; a foundation needed given the pervasiveness of superstitions.

Let nothing be done in your life, which will cause you fear if it becomes known to your neighbour (44).

A man cannot dispel his fear about the most important matters if he does not know what is the nature of the universe but suspects the truth of some mythical story.  So that without natural science, it is not possible to attain our pleasures unalloyed (36).

The Greeks philosophers justified their moral system upon consequences.  The system which best promoted the good life was the one a rinker would choose.  In that tradition and approach, the Epicurean school and its progeny utilitarianism best promote the good life. 

am was more effective as a writer than he would have been as an MP.           Epicurus silence on love and his negative comments on sex[i] leave an inadequate position.  Love for a woman because relationships he observed always deteriorate to such an extent as to disturb inner tranquility.[ii]  This is not necessary.  Epicurus thought it better to substitute friendships for the sake of satisfying our social drive.

Still, the principle of state neutrality, on its common formulations, remains an anti-perfectionist principle—one with wide, if not completely unrestricted, scope. Its proponents seldom present it as a foundational normative commitment, however. As mentioned above, state neutrality is often defended as an appropriate response to the fact that reasonable people in modern societies disagree in good faith over the nature of the good and/or the good life for human beings. But how exactly would state neutrality constitute an appropriate response to this purported fact?

This point can be pushed further. Autonomy, it can be argued, requires that one have access to an adequate range of valuable or worthwhile options (Raz 1986). This adequacy requirement does not imply that every time an option is closed off one's autonomy will be set back. Moreover, what may be of value is not autonomous agency per se, but valuable autonomous agency. Joseph Raz explains: “Since our concern for autonomy is a concern to enable people to have a good life it furnishes us with reason to secure that autonomy which could be valuable. Providing, preserving or protecting bad options does not enable one to enjoy valuable autonomy” (Raz 1986, 412). If valuable autonomy, and not autonomy per se, is what has perfectionist value, then when governments eliminate, or make it more costly for persons to pursue, worthless options, then they may do no perfectionist harm and much perfectionist good.

here are at least some indications that Plato already saw the need for a holistic conception of the good life at the time when he composed his ‘Socratic’ dialogues. At the end of the Laches he lets Nicias founder with his attempt to define courage as the ‘knowledge of what is to be feared and what should inspire confidence’. He is forced to admit that such knowledge presupposes the knowledge of good and bad tout court (La. 199c-e). In a different but related way Socrates alludes to a comprehensive knowledge at the end of the Charmides in his final refutation of Critias' definition of moderation as ‘knowledge of knowledge’ by urging that this type of knowledge is insufficient for the happy life without the knowledge of good and bad (Chrm. 174b-e). But pointing out what is wrong and missing in particular arguments is a far cry from an explanation of what is good and bad in human life. The fact that Plato insists on the shortcomings of a purely ‘technical’ conception of virtue suggests that he was at least facing up to these problems. The discussion of the ‘unity of the virtues’ in the Protagoras — regardless of the perhaps intentionally unsatisfactory structure of his proofs — confirms that Plato realized that a critique of the inconsistencies implied in the conventional values must be insufficient to justify such a unitary point of view. But the evidence of a definitive conception of the good life remains at most indirect at this early stage

The Republic shows, at any rate, that he saw that the time had come for a positive account of morality and the good life. If elenchos is used in Plato's later dialogues it is never used in the knock-down fashion of the early dialogues.

Before we turn to that question, a final review of the kind of good life Plato envisages in the dialogues under discussion here is in order. In the Symposium the emphasis lies on the individual's creativity: the quality of life attainable for each person differs, depending on the kind of ‘work’ each individual is able to produce in its search for self-perpetuation. This is what the scala amoris is all about. In the Phaedrus the emphasis is more on the ‘joint venture’ of kindred souls. True friends will get to the highest point of self-fulfillment that their souls' conditions permit them to attain. Just as in the Symposium, the philosophical life is deemed the best. But then, this preference is not unique to Plato: all ancient philosophers are prejudiced in favor of their own occupation. If there are differences between them, they concern the kind of study that is deemed appropriate to philosophy. The individualistic view of happiness espoused in the Symposium and the Phaedrus need not be seen as a later stage in Plato's development than the Republic's communitarian conception. They may be complimentary rather than rival points of view, and no fixed chronology need be assumed for their accommodation.

What kind of ‘binding force’ does Plato attribute to ‘the Good’? His reticence about this concept, despite its centrality in his metaphysics and ethics, is largely responsible for the obscurity of his concept of happiness and what it is to lead a happy life — apart from the fact that individuals are best off if they ‘do their own thing’. In what way the philosophers' knowledge provides a solid basis for the good life of the community and the — perhaps uncomprehending — individual remains an open question. What, then, is ‘the Good’ that is responsible for the goodness of all other things? A lot of ink has been spilt over the much quoted passage in Republic book VI, 509b: “not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the Good, but their being (ousia) is also due to it, although the Good is not being, but superior (epekeina) to it in rank and power.” The analogy with the sun's maintenance of all that is alive suggests that the Good is the intelligible inner principle that determines the nature of every object capable of goodness in the sense that it is able to fulfill its function in the appropriate way. How such a principle of goodness works in all things Plato clearly felt unable to say when he wrote the Republic. That he was thinking of an internal ‘binding force’ is indicated, however, in book X when he elucidates the ontological difference between the Forms, as the products of a divine maker, their earthly copies, and the imitation of these copies by an artist (R. 596a ff.). In that connection he explains that in each case it is the use or function that determines its goodness, 601d: “Aren't the virtue or excellence, the beauty and correctness of each manufactured item, living creature, and action related to nothing but the use (chreia) for which each is made or naturally adapted?” Since he does not limit this account to instruments, but explicitly includes living things and human actions in it, it seems that he has a specific ‘fittingness’ in mind that constitutes each thing's excellence. A similar thought is already expressed in Republic I (353a-e) when Socrates in his refutation of Thrasymachus employs the argument that the ability to fulfill one's own task (ergon) well constitutes the excellence of each object. In the case of human beings this means ‘doing well’, and ‘doing well’ means ‘living well’, and ‘living well’ means ‘living happily’. The stringency of these inferences is far from obvious; but they show that Plato saw an intimate connection between the nature, the function, and the well being of all things, including human beings.

The importance of measure in a literal sense becomes more explicit, however, in the Philebus. In that dialogue number (arithmos), measure (metron), and limit (peras) play a crucial role at various points of the discussion. First of all, the Philebus is the dialogue where Plato requires that numerical precision must be observed in the ‘divine gift’ of dialectical procedure by collection and division (16c-17a). The dialectician must know precisely how many species and subspecies a certain genus contains; otherwise he has no claim to any kind of expertise. Despite this emphasis on precision and on the need to determine the numerical ‘limit’ in every science, Socrates does not provide the envisaged kind of numerically complete division of the two contenders for the rank of highest good in human life, pleasure and knowledge, because he suddenly remembers that neither of the two candidates suffices for the good life, but a mixture of the two is preferable.

To explain the mixture Socrates introduces a fourfold division of all beings (23c-27c), which uses the categories of ‘limit’ and ‘measure’ in a different way than in the ‘divine method of dialectic’. As he now states, all beings are in the class of either (a) limit (peras), (b) the unlimited (apeiron), (c) the mixture (meixis) of the unlimited and limit, or (d) the cause (aitia) of such a mixture. As his subsequent explications concerning the four classes show, unlimited are all those things that have no exact grade or measure in themselves, such as the hotter and colder, the faster and slower; though at first only relative terms are used as examples, the class of the unlimited is then extended to things like hot and cold, dry and moist, fast and slow, and even fever and frost. Mixture takes place when such qualities take on a definite quantity (poson) or due measure (metrion) that puts a stop to such vagaries. That only stable entities qualify as mixtures is not only suggested by the examples Socrates refers to: health, strength, beauty, music, and the seasons, but much later in the dialogue he asserts that a mixture without due measure or proportion does not deserve its name, 64d-e: “it will necessarily corrupt its ingredients and most of all itself. For there would be no blending in such cases at all but really an unconnected medley, the ruin of whatever happens to be contained in it.” The upshot of the discussion is that all stable entities (mixtures) consist of a harmonious equilibrium of their otherwise unlimited ingredients. Since indeterminate elements usually turn up in pairs of opposites the right limit in each case is the right proportion necessary for their balance. In the case of health there must be the right balance between the hot and the cold, the dry and the moist. The cause of the proper proportion for each mixture turns out to be reason; it is the only member of the fourth class. As Socrates indicates, divine reason is the ultimate source of all that is good and harmonious in the universe (26e-27c; 28a-30e), of which human reason is just an inferior replica.

Plato's confidence in the Laws in the power of due measure in all matters finally culminates in the famous maxim that God is the measure of all things, 716c-d: “In our view, it is God who is preeminently the ‘measure of all things’, much more so than any man, as they say. So if you want to recommend yourself to someone of this character, you must do your level best to make your own character reflect his, and on this principle the moderate man is God's friend, being like him, whereas the immoderate and unjust man is not like him and is his enemy; and the same reasoning applies to the other vices too.” Since Plato — just like Aristotle after him — carefully refrains from any kind of specifications on actual right measures we may treat the ‘arithmetic’ of the good life with more than a pinch of salt. That individuals differ in their internal and external conditions is as clear to Plato as it was to Aristotle. This does not shake the faith he expresses in the Laws that right habituation through the right kind of education, most of all in the arts, will provide the right inner equilibrium for the good citizen.

Price, A. Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Russell, D. Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005

Kraut, R. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992.

And, John Kekes maintains that, “What a wise man knows, therefore, is how to construct a pattern that, given the human situation, is likely to lead to a good life” (1983, 280). More recently, Valerie Tiberius (2008) has developed a practical view that connects wisdom with well being, requiring, among other things, that a wise person live the sort of life that he or she could sincerely endorse upon reflection. Such practical views of wisdom could be expressed, generally, as follows.

Although this Hybrid Theory has a lot going for it, there are a number of important criticisms to consider. Dennis Whitcomb (2010) objects to all theories of wisdom that include a living well condition, or an appreciation of living well condition. He gives several interesting objections against such views. Whitcomb thinks that a person who is deeply depressed and totally devoid of any ambition for living well could nevertheless be wise. As long as such a person is deeply knowledgeable about academic subjects and knows how to live well, that person would have all they need for wisdom

. With respect to a very knowledgeable and deeply depressed person with no ambition but to stay in his room, he claims, “If I ran across such a person, I would take his advice to heart, wish him a return to health, and leave the continuing search for sages to his less grateful advisees

Although this Hybrid Theory has a lot going for it, there are a number of important criticisms to consider. Dennis Whitcomb (2010) objects to all theories of wisdom that include a living well condition, or an appreciation of living well condition. He gives several interesting objections against such views. Whitcomb thinks that a person who is deeply depressed and totally devoid of any ambition for living well could nevertheless be wise. As long as such a person is deeply knowledgeable about academic subjects and knows how to live well, that person would have all they need for wisdom

And I would think he was wise despite his depression-induced failure to value or desire the good life. So I think that wisdom does not require valuing or desiring the good life.”

Some sales never end. After 8 A.M. all merchandise is 10% off. An unbounded or infinite interval of real numbers is missing at least one endpoint. It may extend infinitely far to the right or left on the number line. In this case the infinity symbol ∞ is used as an endpoint in the interval notation. Note that parentheses are always used next to ∞ or −∞ in interval notation, because ∞ is not a number. It is just used to indicate that there is no end to the interval. The following box shows the five types of infinite intervals for a real number a

Infinite Intervals Verbal Description Interval Notation Graph The set of real numbers greater than a (a, ∞) The set of real numbers greater than or equal to a [a, ∞) The set of real numbers less than a (−∞, a) The set of real numbers less than or equal to a (−∞, a] The set of all real numbers (−∞, ∞)