This chapter argues that, for Aristotle, human emotions are both different from, and also importantly continuous with, the emotions experienced by non-human animals. On the one hand, the repertoire of emotions experienced by human beings differs significantly from the repertoire experienced by non-human animals. The difference stems from the fact that only human beings have reason. Some human emotions (for example, shame) require the possession of reason and hence cannot be experienced by non-human animals. Other human emotions have counterparts in non-human animals, but they differ from these counterparts because, when functioning correctly, they are guided by reason. For instance, the disposition to feel fear is reason-governed in a human being but not in an animal. On the other hand, in spite of these striking differences between human and animal emotions, Dow argues that the emotions also reveal an important continuity between human beings and other animals: both human and animal emotions are fundamentally capacities to respond with pleasure or pain to situations that are apparently good or harmful to the subject. In this sense, emotion plays a similar role in the lives of humans and non-human animals.

This chapter uses Aristotle’s account in the Nicomachean Ethics to reconstruct Eudoxus’ argument for the thesis that pleasure is the good. He sets out and explains Eudoxus’s argument from universal pursuit: pleasure must be the good because all animals pursue pleasure in all natural and fitting choices. Eudoxus’ naturalism is an important background assumption here. He assumes that each animal, by nature, successfully chooses in all situations what is good for itself. This allows him to move from an observation about the universal pursuit of pleasure to the claim that pleasure is a feature of all natural and good choices. The pleasure that features in such choices is overall pleasure. Thus, Eudoxus can allow that animals sometimes naturally choose things that are painful, provided that what they choose contains more pleasure than pain overall. Aufderheide ends by suggesting how Eudoxus might defend the claim that pleasure is not merely a good, but moreover the good. This is not to claim that pleasure is the only thing that is good, but rather that pleasure plays a unique role in relation to choice: it is the only thing that features in all natural and good choices as a good.

This chapter discusses Aristotle’s puzzling claim that ‘craft does not deliberate’ (Physics II.8). This claim is made in answer to an imagined objection: craft and nature cannot be analogous because craft-production involves deliberation. The claim is puzzling, as it seems obvious that certain craftsmen will need to deliberate if they are to do their jobs well. In response, Coope argues (following Sedley) that Aristotle is not denying that particular craftsmen deliberate. His point is rather that the craft itself does not deliberate. However, this response itself gives rise to a second puzzle: how is this claim (that the craft itself does not deliberate) relevant to defending Aristotle’s analogy between craft and nature? In response, Coope argues that Aristotle’s point is that it is the craft that explains the purposiveness of a process of craft-production and, analogously, it is the nature that explains the purposiveness of a natural process. In each case, the source of purposiveness is something that does not deliberate. The chapter ends by suggesting that this solution itself raises a new difficulty for Aristotle: can he give an analogous account of the purposiveness of those ordinary human intentional actions that are not cases of craft-production?

This chapter looks at Plato’s take on the nomos-phusis antithesis in his Laws. He argues that the goal of the Laws, of legislating in accordance with nature, should be distinguished from the much-studied idea of 'natural law' in two ways. First, in the relevant parts of the Laws, the focus is primarily the right way to conduct an activity, legislation, rather than its product (laws or law). Secondly, the Laws draws a comparison with other specialised or technical activities that can be performed well or badly, such as medicine or building. Legislation is natural, among other things, when it is undertaken in a certain ‘natural’ order, from the starting point of life to death. This order ensures that no stage of life is ignored during the legislative process and thus guarantees its comprehensiveness. Plato’s comparison between the legislator and other craftsmen presents a view of natural procedure within an art or profession: the craftsman is not subjected to constraints that are external to the subject matter and he is able to give full attention to the objectives and questions that belong to his craft. Finally, the legislation considered here is ‘natural’ without being underpinned by theology.

This chapter investigates the critique of anthropomorphism that we find in Xenophanes of Colophon and Heraclitus of Ephesus. Hesiod’s Theogony is assumed as background and as paradigm for the tendency to treat either the world’s components or gods generally as humanlike. With Xenophanes of Colophon we have the first and one of the fiercest attacks on such a kind of anthropomorphism, inasmuch as Xenophanes not only challenges anthropomorphism in traditional religion and myth but also intimates that at the root of religious beliefs and practices, among his fellow Greeks as well as among foreigners, is a motive of philautia, of self-love. Another strong early critique of anthropomorphism is found in Heraclitus of Ephesus, who curtly dismisses the idea of world-making by a god and stridently attacks certain traditional forms of religious worship. And yet neither thinker can avoid sliding into a particular kind of anthropomorphism, namely into what Mourelatos calls ‘epistemic anthropo-philautia’ – philautia understood not as the ‘self-love’ or ‘vanity’ an individual may show, but rather as the species-philautia we indulge in when we project upon the cosmos structures and forms that cognitively afford special intuitive appeal to us human beings.

According to Aristotle there is an important distinction between human beings and the rest of nature: while all other creatures develop as they do ‘necessarily or for the most part’, the development of human beings depends on their own efforts. This applies not only to their acquisition of technical and intellectual accomplishments, but to their character as well. Emotions or affections (pathē) play an important role in that development; they have an interesting ‘passive-cum-active’ character. Although their experience is not determined by choice, it is due to understanding and evaluating the particular situation. Reasoning is therefore in a way involved in the formation of human affections by habituation. The process of habituation determines not only how human beings act, but also how they feel. The affective part of the soul, though it is non-rational, is capable of ‘listening’ to reason more or less well and thereby the person acquires good or bad dispositions to act. Thus, in a human being, affections can be reasonable or unreasonable: The distinctive reason-responsiveness of the affections helps to explain why, despite certain natural predispositions, successful human development cannot simply be attributed to nature.

Christopher Rowe argues that Aristotle in the Eudemian Ethics develops a naturalised account of Socrates’s divine sign: even people lacking in practical wisdom, Aristotle proposes, can act appropriately, and achieve a kind of happiness, because of something divine in them. But this ‘something divine’ is not (as it is for Socrates) a private inner voice, rather a kind of well-naturedness. For Aristotle, goodness is natural. The goodness of human nature explains how it is possible to do the appropriate things even without reasoning, and even do so reliably. This offers Aristotle an answer to a puzzle about our relation to the natural world. Humans, he holds, are good by nature, yet he also holds fully virtuous human beings to be relatively rare: two claims that are hard to reconcile, given Aristotle’s usual view that what occurs ‘by nature’ occurs ‘always or for the most part’. By allowing there to be a level of decency that is achievable through well-naturedness, even by those who lack full virtue, Aristotle can answer this puzzle. If this decency is achieved by many people, then there is, after all, a kind of good human development that occurs by nature and occurs regularly.

This chapter shows that theories of natural catastrophes in Greek and Roman literature in general presuppose the repetition of devastating events rather than their singularity, but that the ancient evaluations of natural catastrophes differ widely. Long shows that Plato and Aristotle tend to be detached and dispassionate in their accounts of such natural catastrophes by treating them simply as inevitable phases in the natural world’s cyclical history. By contrast, the Epicurean Lucretius and the Stoic Seneca clearly acknowledge human fragility in the face of catastrophes. Both philosophers register the dangers of presuming mastery over the natural environment and are sensitive to the human toll that nature can extort from exceeding such limits.

In contemporary discussions, ethics and inquiry into the natural world are often treated as two completely independent fields of study. By contrast, many ancient thinkers took them to be intimately connected. This volume aims to shed light on the various ways in which ancient thinkers drew connections between these two fields. We human beings are in some sense part of the natural world, and live our lives within a larger cosmos, but yet our actions are governed by norms whose relation to the natural world is up for debate. The chapters in this volume discuss how these facts about our relation to the world bear upon both ancient accounts of human goodness and also ancient accounts of the natural world itself. The chapters focus primarily on Plato and Aristotle. But we have also included some discussion of earlier and later thinkers, with a chapter on the Presocratics and a couple of chapters that at least in part point ahead to later Epicurean, Stoic, and Neoplatonist philosophers.

This chapter investigates the apparent conflict in Plato presenting two apparently rather different things – fulfilling human nature and godlikeness – as the human telos. Fan argues that these two accounts are in fact compatible, if we understand the fulfilment of human nature as making the divine part in us flourish. If virtue is understood as a disposition to cope with evils that exist in the human condition but not in the divine life, it is hard to see how becoming virtuous fits with becoming godlike. In the Theaetetus, however, Plato understands becoming virtuous as a flight from the world. This has traditionally been understood as engaging in theory as opposed to praxis. However, such an understanding raises the problem that in the Theaetetus and in the Republic, justice, and thus being concerned with treating other people appropriately, is presented as a central virtue which speaks against understanding the flight idea merely in theoretical terms. Fan argues that instead of identifying the idea of fleeing from the world with withdrawing from practical affairs, we should understand it as a kind of self-transformation, in such a way that we are no longer rooted in the natural world, but in divine, transcendent reality.