New Class Section Enrolling: Aristotle On The Moral Virtues!

join us for a fourth year of this popular online course on the Nicomachean Ethics

One of the most popular online classes offered in the Study With Sadler Academy is my Aristotle on the Moral Virtues course. I have taught it for three years in a row, and the new fourth section of it is now enrolling! If you’d like to jump straight to the course site, check it out, and perhaps enroll, you can click right here and do so.

We’ll be starting with the first class session on Saturday, September 27. The course include weekly interactive 90-minute class sessions with me, hosted on Zoom, and recorded so participants can go back over the sessions at their leisure. We will continue our conversations through discussion forums in the class site. Students also get access to resources intended to deepen and foster their learning, including:

• downloadable handouts on key ideas from the texts we’re studying

• downloadable worksheets allowing students to apply the concepts

• examples concretely illustrating the subject matters we are studying

• prompts for personal reflection

This is my 26th year of teaching philosophy classes, and my 13th year designing and teaching high-quality online philosophy classes. My students have included not just traditional-age college students, but also working professionals looking to improve their skills, lifelong learners engaging in personal development and intellectual enrichment, inmates working towards college degrees in three different state prison systems, and other people from all walks of life.

In order to take and benefit from this Aristotle On The Moral Virtues course, there’s no requirement that you have previously studied Aristotle or even philosophy. You’ll be guided through books 2-6 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics by someone who at this point has taught it to more than 1,000 students over several decades. One of my skills as an educator is taking complex philosophical concepts from classical texts and, without throwing away rigor or accuracy, making those concepts accessible and applicable for students.

Basic Information About The Class

“Aristotle On The Moral Virtues” is a fully online, synchronous, open-enrollment class. “Online” means that all the resources and activities a student will use for the class are provided in the course site. “Synchronous” means that we will meet at regularly scheduled times for class sessions. And “open enrollment” means that the class is not-for-credit and open for anyone who wants to learn about the subject.

This particular class has 90-minute class sessions that will take place for 8 weeks, from 90:00 AM to 10:30 AM Central Time. If you’re in a different time zone, you will want to check what the local time would be for you. All of the class sessions will be recorded, and those videos will be embedded in the class site as resources for students who can’t make class sessions or who would like to go back over the sessions.

Tuition for the class is $249.00. Registering for the class gives students participation in the class sessions and discussion forums, as well as lifetime access to the class site and to all of the resources hosted there.

We like to keep class sizes for these interactive courses fairly small so that discussions allow everyone ample opportunities to participate, so we are capping the class at 25 students maximum.

The main text for this class is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and we will be studying books 2–6 of that work. As you will see below, in some of the weeks, we will be focusing on an entire book of the work, while the readings for other weeks will be portions of a book of the Ethics.

During the class sessions, I will be leading all of the students through the materials we are studying that week. So there will be some lecturing, some discussion, some consideration of helpful examples, and lots of opportunities for students to ask questions or seek clarifications.

The Curriculum For The Course

Aristotle is one of the earliest philosophers to adopt a genuinely systematic approach to ethics. His ethics centers on the notions of virtue and vice, and on understanding, analyzing, and developing specific virtues, and shifting ourselves away from their opposites, particular vices.

By contrast to some of the other main schools of ancient philosophy, which framed their ethics in terms of four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, courage, and temperance), Aristotle and his followers distinguished 11 main moral virtues and one intellectual virtue integrally connected with the moral virtues (prudence).

Here is the sequence of topics for our class:

Week 1 Class Session — General Features of Virtues and Vices. Nicomachean Ethics book 2 (1103a-1109b)

• Exactness and outlines in ethics

• Virtues and vices as habits

• The doctrine of the virtuous mean

• Elements and dimensions of virtues

• How human beings develop virtues or vices

• Pleasure’ and pain’s connection with virtue and vice

• Overview of the virtues and vices

• Advice about finding the virtuous mean

Week 2 Class Session — Virtues of Courage and Temperance. Nicomachean Ethics book 3 (1115a-1119b)

• The virtue of courage

• Vices of cowardice and rashness

• Emotions of fear and confidence

• Five conditions similar to courage

• The virtue of temperance

• Vices of self-indulgence and insensibility

• Desires and pleasures of the body

Week 3 Class Session —Session 3: Virtue of Good Temper. Nicomachean Ethics book 4 (1125b-1126b) supplemented by Eudemian Ethics book 3 (1231b), and Rhetoric book 2.

• The virtue of good temper, or gentleness, or mildness

• The emotion of anger

• Vices of spiritlessness or servility

• Vices of quick-temper, ragefulness, bitter-temperedness, troublesomeness, and abusiveness

Week 4 Class Session — Virtues of Generosity and Magnificence. Nicomachean Ethics book 4 (1119b-1123a)

• External goods of wealth and other resources

• The virtue of liberality or generosity

• The vices of prodigality and meanness

• The virtue of magnificence and public use of wealth

• The vices of vulgarity and stinginess

Week 5 Class Session — Virtues of Right Ambition and Magnanimity. Nicomachean Ethics book 4 (1123a-1125b)

• External goods of honor, respect, or social status

• The virtue of magnanimity or great-souledness

• The vices of vanity or undue humility

• The semi-virtue of modesty\

• The (unnamed) virtue of right ambition

• The vices of ambitiousness and unambitiousness

Week 6 Class Session — Virtues of Friendliness, Good Humor, and Truthfulness. Nicomachean Ethics book 4 (1126b-1128b)

• The virtue of friendliness

• The vices of obsequiousness and quarrelsomeness

• The virtue of good humor

• The vices of boorishness and buffoonery

• The virtue of truthfulness (about self)

• The vices of boastfulness and self-deprecation

Week 7 Class Session — The Virtue of Justice. Nicomachean Ethics book 5 (1129a-1138b)

• The different forms of justice

• Justice as a virtuous disposition

• Justice as complete virtue

• Legal justice as norm-following

• Modes of “particular” justice

Week 8 Class Session — Prudence and the Moral Virtues. Nicomachean Ethics book 6 (1140a-1141a, 1141b-1145a)

• Prudence or practical wisdom as an intellectual virtue

• Prudence, general principles, and particular matters

• Prudence’s relation to deliberation, conjecture, understanding, and considerateness

• Prudence’s relations with moral virtues

• Natural virtue and cleverness

• The issue of the unity of the virtues

Open For Enrollment And Starting Soon

As I mentioned earlier, we already have students enrolled in this class, and space for 25 students total. If you’d like to enroll or just to find out more, you can click here and go right to the course page in the Study With Sadler Academy.

This is my 25th year of teaching philosophy classes, and my 12th year designing and teaching high-quality online philosophy classes. My students have included not just traditional-age college students, but also working professionals looking to improve their skills, lifelong learners engaging in personal development and intellectual enrichment, inmates working towards college degrees in three different state prison systems, and other people from all walks of life.

I hope you’ll consider joining the class and enrolling in Aristotle on the Moral Virtues. I know I’m looking forward to engaging class discussions, thinking about how we can improve our characters, lives, and relationships, and once again exploring Aristotles rich text!

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, 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.