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My remarks will outline, from a philosopher’s perspective, challenges and opportunities that I see for a science of virtue. I will touch on three topics: (1) ensuring that the studies are philosoph...

We introduce a special issue of articles that emerged from teams of interdisciplinary researchers, social scientists and philosophers, who were funded under the auspices of the Self, Motivation and...

Aristotelian-inspired accounts of virtue acquisition stress guided practice and habituated action to develop virtue. This emphasis on action can lead to the ‘paradox of striving’. The paradox occurs when we try too hard to act well and thereby spoil our efforts. I identify four forms of striving—forcing, impulsivity, overthinking, and holding oneself to too high a standard—and explain how they can cause our actions to miss the virtuous mark. Though neo-Aristotelians can offer remedies for these ills, I turn in the rest of this article to explore an approach to virtue inspired by the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi stresses receptivity to personal transformation and turning inward through meditative practice as ways in which we can attain the inner states needed for virtuous action. In consequence, a Gandhian approach offers a rather different analysis of the paradox of striving than that given by neo-Aristotelianism.

The psychological construct of ‘generativity’ was introduced by Erik Erikson in Childhood and Society in 1950. This rich and complex notion encompasses the constellation of desires, concerns and commitments that motivate individuals and societies to pass on legacies to future generations. ‘Flourishing,’ which means, very roughly, living life well, is another rich and complex notion, interpretations of which are found in ancient philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. In this article I relate interpretations of these two concepts by arguing that certain forms of generativity can be considered an Aristotelian-type virtue, and that the virtue of generativity is necessary, but not sufficient, for flourishing in the Aristotelian sense. In other words, one can be generative without flourishing. The reverse, however, does not seem true: it is hard to see how one can fully flourish without being generative.