Ancient Virtue Ethics: Three Main Traditions

an online course I'm offering here for paying subscribers from August to December

I teach classes and lead workshops on various topics, thinkers, texts, and traditions in philosophy in a variety of settings, and I’ve been looking forward to experimenting with a “class” of sorts here in Substack. The platform at this point in its development offers a number of opportunities and capacities for engaging in robust philosophical education, provided I do my part as a teacher and the learners on their side put in some reading, thought, and effort on their own.

Offering an ongoing, lifelong learning-style course exploring some area of philosophy I’m already deeply invested in struck me as something I could offer subscribers who more actively support the work that I do in bringing philosophy to those outside traditional academia. I’ll be quite straightforward with you about this: my hope is that the opportunity to participate in regular classes like this (of which this will be the first) will be an attractive incentive for people to choose to subscribe (or keep subscribing), which then helps me earn my living doing this kind of work.

When I polled people about three potential topics for the class, I proposed those I have been researching, teaching, and applying for decades at this point. They were:

• friendship, love, desire, pleasure

• understanding and managing anger

• differing virtue ethics accounts

If you’ve been following my work, you know how often I’m discussing something related to these topics. And in fact, I’ll be teaching the first one in two sections of my Foundations of Philosophy classes at Marquette University this Fall.

I was rather surprised at the consistent results, which remained steady in their proportions over the three days I ran the poll. The majority for the entire time the poll ran chose virtue ethics, hovering around 55% of respondents choosing that topic. the friendship, love, desire topic drew a consistent 30-35% as well. There was some interest in the anger topic, but far outweighed by the other two. I’m very pleased with this strong preference, actually, since it provides an opportunity to focus on actively exploring, comparing and contrasting, and applying some well-developed traditions that fall into the family of virtue ethics.

So that is precisely what we’re going to focus upon in the online course. I’ll get a bit more specific. We will have one week at the start devoted to virtue ethics in general, and then a second week where we’ll talk about ancient virtue ethics schools in terms of traditions (in MacIntyre’s sense) and philosophies as ways of life (in Hadot’s sense). And then for much of the remaining sixteen weeks, we will focus in on texts and thinkers from three main traditions in virtue ethics: Platonist, Aristotelian, and Stoic. We will be reading a number of different works central to these three traditions, either in their entirety or particularly key portions.

In just two days from now (Tuesday, 1 PM Central Time), I will be hosting a Substack Live “Open House” specifically about this upcoming class, the schedule of texts and thinkers, and what I and the students will be engaged in during the class. So if what I’m posting below doesn’t address all the questions you might have about it, or if you’re just interested to hear what I have to say, or you’re excited to join and follow along with the class, feel free to drop in for the session, which is open to all!

You’re probably at this point wondering precisely who and what we’ll read and discuss, so let’s jump into that right now. If you’d like to download a PDF of this class schedule, you can do so right here:

Ancient Virtue Ethics Online Class Schedule

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Here’s what I have in mind (subject to changes, if need be). Live sessions all take place on Saturdays, and pre-recorded videos will generally be released on Fridays or Saturdays. We will have the first live class session (most likely meeting by Zoom), which will also be recorded on Saturday, August 22.

• Week 1: What is virtue ethics? Different understandings and interpretations (live class session)

• Week 2: Traditions of ancient virtue ethics and philosophy as a way of life.

• Week 3: the Platonic tradition: Plato, The Meno, Protagoras (selections) (live class session)

• Week 4: the Platonic tradition: Plato, The Republic book 4

• Week 5: the Aristotelian tradition: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics books 1-2 (live class session)

• Week 6: the Aristotelian tradition: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics books 3 and 7

• Week 7: the Aristotelian tradition: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics books 3-4

• Week 8: the Aristotelian tradition: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics books 3-4

• Week 9: the Stoic tradition: selections from Arius Didymus, Cicero, Seneca (live class session)

• Week 10: the Stoic tradition: Cicero’s On Duties book 1

• Week 11: the Stoic tradition: selections from Seneca’s works

• Week 12: the Stoic tradition: selections from Musonius Rufus and Epictetus

• Week 13: the Platonic tradition: Alcinous, Handbook of Platonism (live class session)

• Week 14: the Platonic tradition: Plutarch, Can Virtue Be Taught, On Virtues and Vices, On Moral Virtue

• Week 15: the Platonic tradition: Plutarch, How a Man May Become Aware of his Progress in Virtue, On Tranquility

• Week 16: the Platonic tradition: Philo of Alexandria, On The Virtues, Every Good Man Is Free, On Allegorical Interpretation (selections) (live class session)

• Week 17: neo-Pythagoreans and Eclectics: TBD

• Week 18: Wrapping up the study of virtue ethics for now (live class session)

The videos will all be posted here in Substack as posts, labeled as portions of the course, along with some summary notes. The course will also include additional posts here that provide students with a number of other useful resources related to those virtue ethics texts, including reflective writing or discussion prompts, examples and applications, suggested resources, and occasional explanations or clarifications. Since we’re using Substack, participating students will of course be able to carry out conversations with me or with other students using comments on posts.

While a few of the components from the course will be made available to all of my subscribers, the full set of course resources will be just for paying subscribers. They’ll remain here in my Substack for good, and I’ll actually create one resource page that will link to all of the videos and posts comprising the course materials.

You might have a few questions. In fact, people interested in the course have already brought up several with me. One set stem from thinking of it as analogous to an academic course one might take at a college or university, where there are usually regularly scheduled assignments, attendance requirements, and a definite starting and ending date for the course.

This is a course that is intended for personal enrichment, so there isn’t any required or assigned work that students have to complete. The suggested activities and prompts are just that, suggestions for what you might find enjoyable, useful, or interesting to do with the ideas that we are examining. If you can’t make it to a live session, you can certainly watch the videorecording later, if you’d like to. And while I will be sticking to the schedule for thinkers, traditions, and texts, there’s zero requirement that you have to do that. The course content that I’m developing here is “evergreen”, and can be watched, listened to, read, and thought about whenever you wish, even after this particular course ends.

Another set of questions might arise after you’ve read the schedule for the course. You notice that I’m centering the course around three major schools of ancient philosophy that contributed significantly to the development of virtue ethics as a field. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism not only were incredibly important during ancient times, but exercised influence after that, down to the present day.

All right, you might say, I grant that and get why you would focus on those three traditions. But why just those? Why not discuss other schools, like the Epicureans or the Cynics? Why stop with the middle Platonists instead of going on to the neo-Platonists? Why not extend your study to later schools and writers? There’s two simple answers to those. The first is that you can only do so much, if you intend to do it well. The second is that, if this course goes well, I plan to follow it next year with several additional similar courses.

I expect that people will have other questions they might want to ask about the class. There will be time for that in the upcoming livestream “Open House” about the class. But if you’d like to ask your questions here in comments, I’d be happy to answer them.

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Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.