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Article: Family matters: Aristotle's appreciation of women and the plural structure of society.
- Article from:
- American Political Science Review
- Article date:
- March 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Cambridge University Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Courtesy is probably not the first criterion that comes to mind when one ponders the current scholarly debate over Aristotle's view of women. But a similar controversy, reported in Baldassare Castiglione's sixteenth-century dialogue, The Courtier, is judged on precisely this basis. Castiglione's interlocutors discuss the perfect courtier, in whom, they agree, all human excellences, moral and intellectual, are rightly ordered. Thus, they hold true courtesy to be the consummate or architectonic human virtue. But they clash over the possibility that this virtue might be possessed by a woman. The interlocutors do concur in their deference in such matters to the magisterial ...