Online Class Enrolling: Aristotle On The Moral Virtues
an opportunity to study Aristotle’s virtue ethics with an expert guide!
Responding to requests from subscribers, viewers, listeners, readers, and other fans, wanting me to provide online courses on key philosophical thinkers and texts, I’ve designed and taught several so far. They include:
Ancient Philosophers on Friendship (10-week)
Five Platonic Dialogues: Ion, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo (6-week)
Aristotle On The Moral Virtues (8-week)
Stoicism And The Cardinal Virtues (6-week)
Each of these courses offers 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
So, here’s the Big News: Back by popular demand, I’m offering a new section of the most popular of these classes, Aristotle On The Moral Virtues, starting on Saturday, April 13. You can head straight to the class site here, if you’d like to learn more about it, or to enroll in it!
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.
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. 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 10:00 AM to 11:30 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 each 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.
I created a short video about the class, which you might find interesting or useful to watch:
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.
I will be offering additional online synchronous courses this year as well. These include:
Rene Descartes’ Meditations, Objections, and Replies (8–week)
Five Platonic Dialogues: Ion, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo (6–week)
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Genealogy of Morals (8-week)
If you’re interested in any of these other courses I’ll be offering later this year, just stay tuned and you’ll see information coming out on each of them before too long as well!