Category: Fleming

For more on this subject, see The Autodidact’s Reading List on the Ancient Greeks: https://fleming.foundation/2015/09/the-autodidacts-reading-list-i-the-ancient-greeks/ Orestes puts his case to Menelaus.  His uncle owes Agamemnon for all he did in launching an expedition to regain Menelaus’ wife.  After all, Orestes is not asking Menelaus to kill his own daughter to fulfill his duty—a look back at Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia and forward to Orestes’ plot to kidnap Hermione. In what should be a clinching argument for a normal Greek, Orestes points out that if he and Electra die, so does the line of Agamemnon.  Menelaus (682 ff) agrees—up...

For more on this subject, see The Autodidact’s Reading List on the Ancient Greeks: https://fleming.foundation/2015/09/the-autodidacts-reading-list-i-the-ancient-greeks/ The Orestes, performed in 408, is one of Euripides’ last surviving plays–the poet died only two years later.  It was very popular in the Hellenistic and Byzantine eras, much cited and taught in schools.   It is a vivid melodrama (in the modern not the ancient sense), but it is also a profound and difficult meditation on the meaning of friendship. One caveat before I make a few remarks on the play.  Though Euripides was, in the following centuries, the most popular writer of tragedies,...

Individualism Smith derived his much of his approach to moral questions from his teacher Hutcheson, but he also broke with his mentor on a central point.  Hutcheson had grounded the moral sense exclusively on benevolence, which promoted the greatest happiness of the greatest number (He appears to have been the first to formulate the utilitarian calculus), and he regarded self-love or, as we should say now, concern for self interest or self esteem as contaminating any virtuous motive. Smith, by contrast, thought this left too little room for the power of self-love: “Regard to our own private happiness and interest,...

(Much of what is in these paragraphs has been lifted from The Morality of Everyday Life.) Although he is held up as an exemplar of the Scottish Enlightenment that is supposedly in conflict with the French Enlightenment, Smith was profoundly influenced, not only by the economic ideas of the Physiocrats, but also by the Philosophes’  attack on tradition, religion, and conventional morality.  While not an immoralist, so far as I know, Smith’s contribution to moral philosophy would not have offended his French colleagues. His Theory of Moral Sentiments begins with the common-sense observation that morality is not invented by isolated...