Abstract

I am here to criticize a very good book. Julia Annas’s Intelligent Virtue offers us “an account of virtue” that is manifestly indebted to Aristotle and the ancient Stoics, but is also modern and highly original, deeply and carefully thought through, with well-informed attention to contemporary issues and insights. She says “[this] account of virtue results from attending to two ideas” . I will discuss the first of them in parts 1 and 2 of my comments, and the second in part 3.The Skill AnalogyThe first of these two ideas “is that exercising a virtue involves practical reasoning of a kind that can illuminatingly be compared to the kind of reasoning we find in someone exercising a practical skill” . Professor Annas has said quite lot in her précis by way of explaining this idea. Her point that a practical “ability, though a habituated one, is constantly informed by the way the person is thinking” , does, I think, help us to understand how a sort of habituation can contribute to ..