It is interesting that you talk about Buddhist understandings of this, and then the Greek, yet you do not here engage with the Christian tradition on this point (which gathered the Aristotelean threads). The different religious traditions are ways of educating our desires, and the dominant one in the West is the Thomist system. If anyone is interested in this, Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue is where to begin.
Thank you for this post, and indeed the whole sequence. I’ll go back to lurking now.
I’m not as familiar with Christian views on temperance (though I am very fond of After Virtue—https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/16106951). I associate Christian temperance with “Thy will be done”—trying to discern God’s desires and aligning one’s own with those—but I haven’t looked into it very closely beyond that superficial guesswork. Is there any resource you would suggest beyond After Virtue to get the Thomist viewpoint on temperance (without having to read the ginormous Thomist corpus)?
It is interesting that you talk about Buddhist understandings of this, and then the Greek, yet you do not here engage with the Christian tradition on this point (which gathered the Aristotelean threads). The different religious traditions are ways of educating our desires, and the dominant one in the West is the Thomist system. If anyone is interested in this, Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue is where to begin.
Thank you for this post, and indeed the whole sequence. I’ll go back to lurking now.
I’m not as familiar with Christian views on temperance (though I am very fond of After Virtue—https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/16106951). I associate Christian temperance with “Thy will be done”—trying to discern God’s desires and aligning one’s own with those—but I haven’t looked into it very closely beyond that superficial guesswork. Is there any resource you would suggest beyond After Virtue to get the Thomist viewpoint on temperance (without having to read the ginormous Thomist corpus)?