Metaphysics of Goodness: Reading Schedule

  • Week One: Six Claims about a Claim about a Claim about the Good
    • Aristotle, EN i 6
    • Aristotle, EE i 8


  • Week Two: Plato’s Metaphysics of Goodness
    • Plato, Phaedo
    • Plato, Republic v-vii
    • Shields, 'Surpassing in Dignity and Power: the Metaphysics of Goodness in Plato's Republic,' Philosophical Inquiry XXX (2008), 1-17


  • Week Three:  Problems in the Metaphysics of Goodness
    • Readings:
      • Chang, Ruth ‘Introduction,’  Incommensurability, Incomparability and Practical Reason, ed. Ruth Chang (Harvard University Press, 1997), 1-34 (IIPR)
      • Kraut, Richard, Against Absolute Goodness, Chs. 1-15, 30, Appendix F 1-2
      • Geach, ‘Good and Evil,’ Analysis  17 (1956), 32–42
      • Griffith, ‘Incommensurablity: What’s the Problem?’ in IIPR
      • Wiggins, ‘Incommensurability: Four Proposals,’ in IIPR


  • Week Four: Forms, Goods, Series
    • Readings:
      • Plato, Parm. 132a1-b2
      • Aristotle, Met. i 9 (= xiii 3), iii 3
      • Aristotle, Soph. Elench. xxii 178b36-179a1
      • Aristotle, APO.  i 22
      • Aristotle, DA ii 4
      • Aristotle, Pol. iii 1
      • Lloyd, A. C., ‘Genus, Species, and Ordered Series in Aristotle,’ Phronesis 7 (1962), 67-90


  • Week Five: Goods across the Categories
    • Readings:
      • Aristotle, Categories i-v
      • MacDonald, Scott, ‘Aristotle and the Homonymy of the Good,’ Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 71 (1989), 150-174
      • Shields, Christopher, Order in Multiplicity (Oxford: 1998), Chs. Eight-Nine


  • Week Six: Goodness and the Diversity of the Sciences


  • Week Seven: A Dilemmic Argument from the Varieties of Intrinsic Goodness
    • Readings:
      • EN 1096b8-26
      • Korsgaard, ‘Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value,’ Ethics 96 (1986), 486-505
      • Santas, ‘Plato on Goodness and Rationality,’ Revue Internationale de Philosophie 40 (1986), 97-114


  • Week Eight: Analogical Goodness
    • Readings:
      • Aristotle, APo. ii 13-17
      • Aristotle, Poetics 21
      • Aristotle, Topics i 16
      • Aristotle, Met. iv 2-3
      • Hesse, ‘Aristotle’s Logic of Analogy,’ Philsophcial Quarterly15 ( 1965), 328-340


  • Week Nine
    • Topics: 
      • Commensurability in a Homonymous Value World
      • Non-commensurability and Practical Reasoning 
    • Readings:
      • Politics iii 12-13
      • Regan, 'Value, Comparability, and Choice,’ in IIPR
      • Lukes, ‘Comparing the Incomparable,’ in IIPR
      • Raz, ‘Incommensruablity and Agency,’ in IIPR


  • Week Ten 
    • Topics: Quodlibetal


© Christopher Shields 2014