Take An 8-Week Online Class With Me — Aristotle On The Moral Virtues!
an opportunity to study Aristotle’s virtue ethics with a scholar, teacher, & practitioner
My subscribers, viewers, listeners, readers, and other fans have been asking for me to provide online classes with weekly sessions on key philosophical thinkers, texts, and topics. I’ve done precisely that for close to twelve years, usually partnering with an online platform or organization.
Last year I began offering online courses, meeting regularly for class sessions, hosted in my Study With Sadler Academy. These are high-quality synchronous online classes for lifelong learners. One of the first courses I offered is the one I’ll be teaching again shortly, beginning in mid-April. Here’s the link that will take you directly to the course site.
I have been teaching two other courses that are currently approaching their ends, and I’ll offer enrollment in new sections of them next year.
- Ancient Philosophers on Friendship (10–week)
- Stoicism and the Cardinal Virtues (6-week)
We also have additional online courses coming up later this summer and fall, which you might be interested in
- Rene Descartes’ Meditations, Objections, and Replies (8–week)
- Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Genealogy of Morals (8-week)
- Five Platonic Dialogues: Ion, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo (6–week)
Each of these classes offers weekly interactive 90-minute class sessions with me, the instructor, hosted on Zoom, and recorded so participants can go back over the sessions at their leisure. We will also be continuing 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
The new section of the Aristotle class starts with its first class session on Saturday, April 13.
You can look for another announcement post like this for the Descartes class coming up down the line. There will be others as well for the Nietzsche and Plato classes that start later on in the Summer. For right now, I’d like to tell you a little bit about the Aristotle On The Moral Virtues class.
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 Class
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.
If you’re interested in any of the other three 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!
Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of highly popular YouTube videos on classic and contemporary philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast.
If you’d like to support his ongoing work, bringing philosophy to the broader public, he has a Patreon site where you can donate. You can also make a one time donation at Buy Me A Coffee.
You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to learn about upcoming events, classes, and offers, you can get on his mailing list at Substack. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.
