Summum bonum

Virtue is the habit of choosing the mean between the extremes of excess and deficiency with regard to some action or emotion. Most importantly, virtue brings upon friendship since virtue is the parent and preserver of friendship and without virtue, friendship cannot exist at all. Aristotle’s aristotelian view on friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics Books 8 & 9 contrasts and compares with Cicero’s eclectic view on friendship in De Amicitia in numerous ways. Aristotle defines friendship as two…

The state of nature refers to human nature, where there is naturally liberty and no external impediment to human behaviour. Hobbes pessimistic portrayal of life in a hypothetical state as “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short” hinges on the assumption of self-interested and competitive individualism. He indicates his preference for unadulterated absolutism by an artificially appointed sovereign because by nature, then, our method of knowing the world is solipsistic. His arguments are…

How do we live ‘according to nature’ in the Stoic doctrine? Do you agree with this doctrine? Stoicism is one of the branches of ancient philosophy originally founded by Zeno of Citium (300 BC). What is Stoicism? Stoic philosophy is not a series of philosophical claims about the nature of the world, of what we can know or what is right or wrong. Instead, Stoicism is commonly described to be an attitude, a way of life (Sellar, 2006). More importantly, the stoics have repeatedly stated in their…

Once they have asserted that fact, once they have made happiness the most fundamental of all ethical terms, writers like Aristotle or Locke, Aquinas or J. S. Mill, cannot escape the question whether all who seek happiness look for it or find it in the same things. Holding that a definite conception of happiness cannot be formulated, Kant thinks that happiness fails even as a pragmatic principle of conduct. "The notion of happiness is so indefinite," he writes, "that although every man wishes to…

The last interview which Mahatma Gandhi gave to Margrate Bourka White in the early afternoon on 30th January, 1948 was on “His persistence in his theory of non-violence in the event of a nuclear attack on a city.” The Mahatma’s reply was that if the defenseless citizens died in a spirit on non-violence, their sacrifice would not in vain; they might all pray for the soul of the pilot who had thoughtlessly sprayed death on the city. This was the last message of compassion to mankind. Gandhi had…

BARE SOUL (Poetry) Kalpna Singh-Chitnis Copyright © 2013 Kalpana Singh-Chitnis Also known as Kalpna Singh-Chitnis. All Rights Reserved Unauthorized reproduction, transmission and storing of this book in any form by using any process or means for public or private use is strictly prohibited, other than the fair use of any part of this book as quotation or reference, without a written permission of the publisher. The Library of Congress has cataloged “Bare Soul”…