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A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life

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I have read the book in French and attended various meetings/panel discussions where the book was discussed. Look forward to the English edition.

The author's motivation and approach are quite interesting. Motivation: He once made a statement to the effect that "now that places of prayer are empty and supermarkets are full, I wanted to find out whether western society has still something worth living for" (I am quoting from memory). Approach: A book of practical philosophy.

The book addresses both points brilliantly. It brushes up all "Virtues" that made mankind more human. It builds up crescendo from small virtues like politeness to love "Agape". All his arguments are written clearly and are well referenced. He uses a charming sometimes quite humoristic style, which makes this book quite pleasant to read. Each chapter covers one virtue and they are all well constructed and linked together. I find the chapter on what makes humor a virtue quite interesting and rather surprising particularly as it comes towards the end, just before love. Definitely a good book to have in every home if we agree with the author's motivations.

This book is apparently very popular in France and continental Europe. It deserves equal success in North America. It is a collection of essays that explore 18 virtues. Love, Politeness, Fidelity, Tolerance, Humor among them and drws his, very readable and humorous, analysis from his own experience and from the great philosophers of all time ranging from Aristotle to Aquinas, Kant, Nietzche and Rielke to mention a few from memory. The virtues are also arranged according to an order. He starst with politeness, which he considers to be almost a virtue, to Love, the ultimate virtue. In many ways I was reminded of Alain de Botton's excellent Consolations of Philosophy. Indeed, it is equally good but interestingly different. Read them both. Also a warning to those who seek absolute truths: There aren't any to be found here, and that's part of the charm and its appeal to free-thinkers.

It's hard to believe people once discussed philosophy. The stuff today seems so dense and esoteric -- who would bother?

Readers of Comte-Spone Sponville will want to bother. "A Small Treatise" brings philosophy to where it belongs: back to the question of how should one live?

This is not "Chicken Soup for the Intellectual's Soul" nor it is a dull, moralizing tract lamenting the good old days. Comte-Sponville examines the qualities we call virtue -- from Politeness to Love -- and brings fascinating insight to each. For instance, he discusses how parents first teach their children to "act" virtuous rather than "be" virtuous. His thoughts about mercy, justice, and courage, are almost invigorating to read.

Comte-Sponville's style and candor are engaging. It's clear he's not a traditional moralist, but he's certainly not a moral relativist either. He has a good sense of his own foibles and writes quite interestingly about his experience trying to teach virtue within his family.

Who should read this? Everyone.

This is a remarkable book. We have stopped asking the question "How should we live" except in religious contexts and in looking at tough intractible problems. This book steps back and looks at what 2400 years of thinking has lead us to believe about the right way to behave. Why be polite? What is loyalty? What is courage? The price of the book is worth it for the last chapter alone, which talks about the virtue of love.

I have just recently become interested in philosophy and wanted something not too in depth, yet intellectually stimulating. This book was particularly good for me because it didn't go into much detail about the foundations of the concepts discussed, it just gave an in-depth applicable discussion on 11 or so important virtues in life. I found the frequent references to other philosophers helpful as well because I am new to the subject and now am familiar with the basic ideas of different philosophers.

Sponville has managed to remind us that virtue, the excellence in being human, is not a dogma to be left to the absolutists and fanatics. We have abandoned such wonderful human qualities to strive for such as temperance, simplicity, generosity, prudence, politeness etc. to those who seek the authorotarian tradition. Having read many of the philosophers in college it was great to bring them back and be reminded that many of our individual struggles are human struggles; that all we need to do is look for help in the wisdom of philosophers, other human beings. Our times have isolated us to the point that we have taken all human struggle and perverted to an individual psychosis. How alienating and how scary, no wonder we all have to be medicated.
Reading Sponville will educate and enlighten. No we do not have to figure out everything all by ourselves in a bubble of isolation. Ethics and morality are not to be relegated to those who believe only in fear, absolutes and authority. I have cherished each chapter reading it almost like a prayer, a prayer to humanity. Yes, I am a humanist and this book made me a better one.

Now I just hope more and more people read this book and step away from the simpleton self help drivel out there. It is not easy to be human, it is muddled complicated . There are no seven ways to joy, bliss or enlightenment. It is not just through diet, a yoga pose or self control. There are many things to balance, many values to guide us and to keep us from isolation. Enjoy the complexity and enjoy the struggle with the ideas.

The real beauty of this book is the way Comte-Sponville reminds us of philosphy's original purpose: to help us figure out the best way to live. His quotes--from Spinoza, Aristotle, Montaigne, Kant, Epicurus, Augustine, Descartes, Pascal, Plato, Acquinas, Rousseau, and Jankelevitch, among others--almost always surprise me and make me want to go back to the authors themselves. The text at times reads smoothly and at times requires us to slow down and reread. The more I read this, the more impressed I am. The ideas are brief, dense, and resonant. He has an eye for gnomic thoughts and has trained himself to write aphorisms with the best of them. The first chapter--on politeness--dazzles with its insight. It reminds me of Poe's purloined letter. Everything he says seems so obvious, but for some reason I failed to notice it until he pointed it out to me. The last chapter--on love--is a surprise, especially the way he uses it to raise questions about the nature of ethics. I keep finding myself reading this the way I read Montaigne or Aristotle--there's too much to keep in my head at one time, but I keep coming back to it, knowing that each half hour will make me pause and give me something to think about for the rest of the week.

Comte-Sponville examines the virtues virtuously, with clarity, conviction, humility, and delight. Lacking the excesses of the "sophists" as he would call them, the book is a welcome move away from postmodern confusion (itself useful, but perhaps lacking in, or glorifying its lack of, humility). Unafraid of truth and love, A SMALL TREATISE speaks to us in our own complex and fraught language of the simplest ideas that animate our lives. The book draws mostly on Spinoza, Freud, Alain, and a smattering of Greeks. At times dense but never artless; rigorous, and right.

It also must be noted that this is beautifully translated.

For people who read De Botton's "Consolation of Philosophy" this book would be so similar to it but in fact this one is at least ten times better!
It is a collection of Essays on 'all' virtues.
It is rich with smart comments by the author who was inspired by small philosophies of people like Aristotle, Spinoza etc...

Truly, this book is a must have and before you have it make sure you have a highlighter or a large notebook as there's plenty you never ever heard before!

Enjoy. ( I am jelaous of you for not being able to read this book again for the first time ) :)

André Comte-Sponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, translated by Catherine Temerson (New York, Holt Paperbacks, 2001)

The short of it is that this book will make you feel good about being good.

The long of it is:

I was doing a paper on `value ethics', and my experience was that in the world of professional philosophy, especially since 1903, with the publishing of G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica and his promulgation of the `naturalistic fallacy', the consideration of values and character had virtually disappeared. This general impression was confirmed when I looked at a few scholarly ethics texts from the 1960's and they confirmed in plain speaking, that the study of ethics had become an analysis of language, given the King Kong sized influence of the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Mighty Joe Young sized works of J. L. Austin, a direct descendent of the influence of G. E. Moore's style of philosophy.

But I kept following my nose and in a very recent ethics book by Terry Eagleton, Trouble With Strangers, he criticized both European psychologized ethics of Jacques Lacan and the 'high-toned' morality talk of law, right, duty, principle, and obligation traceable to Immanuel Kant. Eagleton also cited a relatively new collection of papers, Virtue Ethics, which headlined an important 1958 paper by Wittgenstein student, G.E.M. Anscombe on `Modern Moral Philosophy' which began a return to virtue ethics. The irony is that the flaw Anscombe pinpointed in moral philosophy is the absence of sound analysis in `philosophical psychology', a subject which always sounded odd to me, as the history of philosophy, especially from the ancient Greeks up to Descartes, was a spinning off of disciplines to children such as physics, mathematics, and psychology. But ethics, especially virtue ethics and the various flavors of Utilitarianism stand and fall by what they mean by mental states such as `pleasure' and `happiness'. So, in retrospect, I was not too surprised when I searched amazon.com for `virtues' and character, and came up with nothing but books on self-help, psychology, and `Christian values'. That last is no surprise, as the contemporary academic moral philosophy is all about rules and values for the group. It spends virtually no time on the moral perspective on the individual. But I did find one practical book on `moral values' which is a fitting complement to the new theoretical work on virtues. This is the book cited above, by a modern French professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. According to the thumbnail biographical sketch, this book has been translated into 19 languages and has been a bestseller in France.

My very first reactions were that the book was not a superficially saccharine treatment of the subject and that it did offer serious reflections on the virtues which relied on thoughts from many great philosophers and essayists such as Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Epicurus, Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Montaigne, Friedrich Nietzsche, Pascal, Plato, Spinoza, and Simon Weil. And those are just the high points. When the title says `great virtues, I half expect to find the seven virtues of Catholic theology or `the seven heavenly virtues' which contrast the seven deadly sins. Instead, I find eighteen, with far more congruence with Aristotle than with the church fathers. These eighteen, in a somewhat intuitive order, are:
(Sorry, Amazon squeezes out all the tabs and extra spaces)

Politeness Fidelity Prudence Temperance
Courage Justice Generosity Compassion
Mercy Gratitude Humility Simplicity
Tolerance Purity Gentleness Good Faith
Humor Love

The insight of prudence may have been one of Aristotle's greatest contributions to moral philosophy. It is the property which tempers the slavish devotion to rules to something which accurately reflects common sense in life.

One irony of virtue ethics is that on the one hand, it is seen as a means to establish a moral theory independent of a belief in God, while it also seems to be a far better embodiment of the Christian ethics of the Gospels than the rules based thinking of Kant or the `greatest good for the greatest number' utilitarianism of Mill. These are both `Apollonian' styles of ethics. Without checking my Nietzsche texts, I suspect `virtue ethics' is a more balanced mix of the Apollonian with the Dionysian, grounded in intuition, emotion, slightly unstable, and with an appreciation of the chaotic.