Veatch quotation in Rasmussen and Den Uyl

Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s strong The Perfectionist Turn opens with this quotation from Henry B. Veatch’s Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics:

“In Aristotle’s eyes, ethics does not begin with thinking of others; it begins with oneself. The reason is that every human being faces the task of learning how to live, how to be a human being, just as he has to learn how to walk or to talk. No one can be truly human, can live and act as a rational man, without first going through the difficult and often painful business of acquiring the intellectual and moral virtues, and then, having acquired them, actually exercising them in the concrete, but tricky, business of living.”

Let’s forget the “neo-neo-Aristotelian” label and simply note that Aristotle is forever new.

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