The Milgram and other situationist experiments support the real-life evidence that most of us are highly akratic and heteronomous, and that Aristototelian virtue is not global. Indeed, like global theoretical knowledge, global virtue is psychologically impossible because it requires too much of finite human beings with finite powers in a finite life; virtue can only be domain-specific. But unlike local, situation-specific virtues, domain-specific virtues entail some general understanding of what matters in life, and are connected conceptually and causally to our (...) traits in other domains. The experiments also make us aware of how easily unobtrusive situational factors can tap our susceptibilities to obedience, conformity, irresponsibility, cruelty, or indifference to others’ welfare, thereby empowering us to change ourselves for the better. Thus, they advance the Socratic project of living the examined life. I note a remarkable parallel between the results of the baseline Milgram experiments and the results of the learned helplessness experiments by Martin Seligman et al. This provides fresh insight into the psychology and character of the obedient Milgram subjects, and I use this insight to argue that pusillanimity, as Aristotle conceives of it, is part of a complete explanation of the behavior of the obedient Milgram subjects. (shrink)

Considerable debate has occurred about the proper role of philosophers when offering ethics consultations. Some argue that only physicians or clinical experienced personnel should offer ethics consultations in the clinical setting. Others argue still further that philosophers are ill-equipped to offer such advice, since to do so rests on no social warrant, and violates the abstract and neutral nature of the discipline itself.I argue that philosophers not only can offer such consultations but ought to. To be a bystander when one's (...) discipline does offer insights and methods of value discernment is pusillanimous. But this position requires a view of clinical medical ethics as one that arises out of the clinical practice of medicine, and not just from an application of general ethical principles to the practice of medicine. I conclude with some skills that trained philosophers can bring to the consultation service, and note that all consultations are in the form of recommendations that the patient, family, and physician are still free to accept or reject. Philosophers in the clinical setting do not make decisions. (shrink)

This paper compares Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s accounts of the virtue of magnanimity specifically as a corrective to the vice of pusillanimity. After definingpusillanimity and underscoring key features of Aristotelian magnanimity, I explain how Aquinas’s account of Christian magnanimity, by making humandependence on God fundamental to this virtue, not only clarifies the differences between the vice of pusillanimity and the virtue of humility, but also showswhy only Christian magnanimity can free us from improper and damaging forms of dependence on (...) the opinions and standards of others, enabling us toavoid the moral pitfalls of both pusillanimity and presumption. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics IV Aristotle exposes the characteristics of the moral virtue of the μεγαλοψυχία and offers a detailed description of the conditions of the magnanimous. St. Thomas in his commentary on Ethics follows the Aristotelian text apparently without disagreeing with the Greek author, and completes this exposition with other texts found in the Summa Theologica. The aim of this paper is to highlight the differences, if there are any, between the Aristotelian conception of the μεγαλοψυχία and that of Saint (...) Thomas, considering also whether the virtue of humility that appears in the Thomist texts can be equated to the vice of the pusillanimity of which Aristotle speaks. (shrink)

Introducing the sixth and final installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Apology for Quietism,” Allen looks at the symposium retrospectively and concludes that it has mainly concerned “sage knowledge,” defined as foresight into the development of situations. The sagacious knower sees the disposition of things in an early, incipient form and knows how to intervene with nearly effortless and undetectable (quiet) effectiveness. Whatever the circumstance, the sage handles it with finesse, never doing too much but also never leaving anything undone (...) that must be accomplished. Quiet, when it is knowingly and effectively quiet (not pusillanimous or poor in spirit), is about what not to do, how not to approach a problem, what not to decide, what is not known, what will not work. Allen explains these principles in terms of traditional Chinese thought, Daoist and Confucian: wei we wei, or “doing-not-doing,” means effective inaction. What makes such wisdom possible is not mystical insight, he argues, but discipline in a certain kind of art. The sage has no need of reasons (let alone doctrines), only effectiveness; and he does not need truth or justice, only subtlety. The detachment of a quietist has little, if anything, to do with transcending perspectives. Detachment is good as a means to flexibility, and instead of transcending perspectives, a sage is skilled in the quiet art of never getting stuck in one. To be effectively quiet is not so much to be silent as to be inaudible, invisible; the sage “vanishes into things.”. (shrink)

S’agissant de la réparation des préjudices résultant d’un accident de la circulation, le droit prospectif de la responsabilité civile oscille entre rafistolage déceptif et procrastination pusillanime, alors qu’un véritable chamboulement eût été le bienvenu.

The ninth story of the first day, the shortest in Boccaccio's Decameron, tells of una gentil donna di Guascogna, a gentlewoman of Gascony, who stops off at Cyprus on her return from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Assaulted and humiliated by a group of ruffians, the woman proposes to seek justice from the king of Cyprus but is told that the king is too weak and pusillanimous either to correct wrongs done to others or to avenge insults to himself. (...) Indeed, when people in the kingdom are angry about anything, they freely insult the king with impunity. The gentlewoman, despairing of justice but now bent on revenge, goes to the king and asks him to explain to her how he is able to bear his great shame, since she would like to learn how to bear her own. Her words sting the king, and, like one roused from a sleep, he avenges the injury to the woman and goes on to become the scourge of all those who have shamed him and dishonored his crown. (shrink)

Nous proposons de voir dans le Chant III de l’ Enfer une explication éminemment philosophique de l’Enfer, en montrant que ce que Dante y met en place n’est rien moins qu’une théodicée. Dante proclame ainsi ouvertement que non seulement l’Enfer est l’œuvre de Dieu, mais peut-être même ce qu’il y a de plus réussi dans la création. Se dessinent dans ces vers une théorie grandiose de la justice et du libre arbitre, mais aussi une théorie de l’histoire, puisque c’est au (...) titre de l’usage de son libre arbitre que l’individu peut exister et entrer dans l’histoire pour s’inscrire, ensuite, dans le récit dantesque. D’où l’exclusion des « pusillanimes » qui refusent de choisir entre le bien et le mal et n’usent point de leur libre arbitre – lâcheté qui leur vaut de ne pas même être admis en Enfer. Il y a peut-être là comme la racine de l’extraordinaire violence dont est capable Dante et qui fait la puissance de La Divine Comédie. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Grief, and the Imagination in Early Modern EnglandStephen PenderIn 1633, the Northampton physician James Hart warned that excessive grief "will to some procure irrecoverable Consumptions," dry the brain and bone marrow, hinder digestion, interrupt rest, and "by consequent prove a cause of many dangerous diseases." The risk was grave: "Galen himself maketh answer that one may dye of these passions, and to this doe all Physicians assent; and (...) experience maketh it so appeare" (1633, 393–95).1 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, physicians routinely treated grief and its effects, since it was commonly held that the passions were realized in matter.2 They applied an ensemble of remedies—bleeding, emetics, laxatives—predicated on sympathetic connection between bodies and souls, for disturbance "in the emotional climate of the body alters its inner temperature and causes in turn dangerous mutations in the balance and composition of the humours" (MacDonald 1981, 182).3 The spirits, too, were enlisted: for "the spirit being either withdrawne from the outwarde parts by vehement passio[n] of griefe," the "outward partes not only faile in their sense and motion, but even nourishment & growth thereby are hindered" (Bright 1586, 60; see also 47, 51–52). But grief also "besieged" the mind, weakened reason, hampered discourse, and impugned the will (Reynolds 1640, 229–30). By affecting mental faculties, passions subvented affliction, and thus physicians offered various prophylactics against fulminant emotion in the sick, most [End Page 54] of which focused on the imagination as potentially harmful faculty that prolonged or intensified suffering. A sufferer, Hart writes, "by reason of his sicknesse, hath sorrow enough, especially, if the party be of a feeble, fearfull and pusillanimous spirit, the phansie still framing unto it selfe new fears of some bad and sinistrous event." As wards against excessive passion, Hart recommends vigilance and circumspection, accommodation and distraction. First, physicians must guard against visitors who "prove the causes of infinite evills to the sicke" by occasioning overweening feeling. Drawing on Paul's distinction between worldly and "godly" sorrow in his second letter to the Corinthians, Hart recognizes that sufferers have just cause for fear, and physicians should not interrupt or retard "true sorrow for sinne," which offers comfort to a "drouping and sorrowfull soule." But the effects of any lenitive passion are endangered by "indiscreetly" compounding fear and grief "at an unseasonable time" (1633, 400). To avoid odium, a counselor's efforts must conform to "time, place, and person" (Wilson 1994, 120). Second, a physician should "accommodate himselfe to the severall dispositions of his patients, and to many particular circumstances concerning them," adjusting therapies and practices to individual sufferers. Finally, if not too fragile, the sick should be distracted with mirth (1633, 400).Those expressing "true sorrow for sinne" should read. Hart recommends one of the "many volumes written by our learned Divines, concerning this subject," Robert Bolton's 1631 Instructions for a Right Comforting Afflicted Consciences with Speciall Antidotes Against Some Grievous Temptations. Bolton, who was rector of Broughton, Northamptonshire, and a popular conformist preacher, insists that divines sometimes held even "godly sorrow" unseasonable, "when it unfitteth the body or minde to good duties" (1641, 587). Excessive grief is particularly foul: of "all other passions of the Soule," he writes, "sadnesse, and grief grates most upon the vitall spirits; dries up soonest the freshest marrow in the bones; and most sensibly suckes out the purest, and refinedst bloud in the heart" (1641, 21). Bolton's remedies are to avoid idleness and solitude, for both render the soul susceptible to disquiet (1641, 582), and to read: the sorrowful and the melancholy find succor in scripture. Although both forms of suffering may be treated medically, one remedy for an afflicted conscience is "Gods blessed Booke" (1641, 211–15). One early seventeenth-century Sussex physician turned to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) for assistance.4Like most physicians in the period, both Hart and Bolton differentiate grief occasioned by humoral imbalance from sorrow born of a repentant conscience, and both confirm that the "phantasie" is central to physical and [End Page 55] moral therapy.5 For Bolton, grief, melancholy, and "terror of conscience" dwell chiefly in the imagination (1641, 212... (shrink)