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Adversity, Wisdom, and Exemplarism

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Notes

  1. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

  2. Alasdair Macintyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need The Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), p. 8 f.

  3. Macintyre, Dependent Rational Animals, p. 1 f.

  4. J. W. von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 195.

  5. The intrinsic vulnerability of human beings to affliction and painful dependence as it manifests in experiences of somatic illness is explored by Havi Carel, Phenomenology of Illness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Ian James Kidd ‘Phenomenology of Illness, Philosophy, and Life’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 62 (2017): 56–60.

  6. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, revised edition (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 82. See further Marilyn Friedman, ‘Feminism in Ethics: Conceptions of Autonomy’, in Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminism and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 205–224.

  7. See Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labour: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999).

  8. See Linda Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

  9. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World (London: Granta, 2009).

  10. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 3.

  11. See, inter alia, Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Havi Carel, ‘Virtue without Excellence, Excellence without Health’, Aristotelian Society: Supplement 90.1 (2016): pp. 237–253; [redacted].

  12. See Alessandra Tanesini, ‘Teaching Virtue: Changing Attitudes’, Logos & Episteme 7.4 (2016): pp. 503–527.

  13. See Craig T. Palmer, Ryan O. Begley, and Kathryn Coe, ‘Saintly Sacrifice: The Traditional Transmission of Moral Elevation’, Zygon 48.1 (2013): 107–127. (Quotations from p. 108.)

  14. Interestingly, a standard pattern emerges in many exemplarist traditions. After an initial narrative describing an exemplar’s character and life, there emerge texts with more argumentative and style and theoretical content – discourses and treatises, say. [redacted].

  15. Mark 14.32–36.

  16. Mark 15.34.

  17. Confucius, Analects: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries, translated by Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), § 6.3.

  18. Confucius, Analects, § 6.3.

  19. Amy Olberding, ‘The Consummation of Sorrow: An Analysis of Confucius’ Grief for Yan Hui’, Philosophy East and West 54.3 (2004): 279–301.

  20. Maha-parinibbana Sutta: Last Days of the Buddha, trans. Sister Vajira and Francis Story, 2.28–30.

  21. Maha-parinibbana Sutta, 1.25.

  22. Arthur Frank, At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), pp. 14 and 5.

  23. Amy Olberding, ‘Confucius’ Complaints and the Analects’ Account of the Good Life’, Dao 12 (2013): 417–440.

  24. Manyul Im, ‘A Good Life, an Admirable Life, or an Uncertain Life’, Dao 14 (2015): 573–577. Quotation from p. 576.

  25. Michael D.K. Ing, ‘The Limits of Moral Maturity’, Dao 14 (2015): 567–572. Quotations from pp. 571 and 572, respectively.

  26. Olberding, ‘Confucius’ Complaints and the Analects’ Account of the Good Life’, p. 439.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the editors, a referee, and especially to Amy Olberding for very helpful correspondence, which deepened and extended the ideas explored here.

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Kidd, I.J. Adversity, Wisdom, and Exemplarism. J Value Inquiry 52, 379–393 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-017-9621-x

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