Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

The fragility of goodness: fortune and ethics in tragedy and Greek philosophy was published in 1986, its author, Martha Nussbaum, was relatively unknown outside the academic world, but was already respected as a scholar of classical antiquity.
Until the publication of the Brazilian edition (2001, it became known in the Anglo-Saxon world for an involvement in the American political debate, with special emphasis on political philosophy.
A rough summary of the book can be said to say that from the discussion of the Greek tragedy of the fifth century BC and like the philosophers of the fourth century BC, the book addresses the tensions between the role of fortune (in the Greek sense it is more luck that money) in human existence and the aspiration to a morally fulfilled life.
So this discussion lies in the idea that there may be “a gap between being a good person and being able to live a flourishing human life,” so it speaks of a “rebirth”.
One of the strengths of the text is the way in which the meaningful knowledge of the textual corpus of classical antiquity and the philosophical competence of its author combine with the approach, so it is as if we are revisiting Greek philosophy, then “revival” is also philosophical, until certain point questionable because this was the project of rebirth.
Its merit is to read Western philosophy from the Greeks, and not exclusively in the Greeks, where it emphasizes the central role of morality that will reach the present day, the revival is then an adherence of the author to the Aristotelian method of approaching things but it can be said that there are three questions in a kind of “phenomenology” of human ethical life and the role that fortune plays there, and this can be observed in the text:
There are three Aristotelian aspects, the good way: love, friendship, political activity, etc., would be by definition vulnerable to risk, perish and impregnated with uncertainty.
Secondly, things regarded as valuable are plural, they may be incompatible with each other, and ultimately they are irreducible to a higher value, which can generate, at specific moments when they are not subject to human control, con fl icting and compelling requirements.
Thirdly, emotions, desires, and feelings bind us to objects, by definition, particular and contingent, exposing us to the precariousness and constitutive indeterminacy of the later.

It is a good Aristotelian trait, but I consider Gadamer’s analysis to combine the three Aristotelian aspects and the four platonic virtues: courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice.

I think it is necessary today.

NUSSBAUM, Martha. (2001) The fragility of goodness: luck and ethics in greek tragedy and philosophy. 2. ed. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.