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Aristotle Vs Aquinas Essay

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Aristotle Vs Aquinas Essay
Marquis Rios
Professor Seltzer
Intro. To Ethics
22 October 2015
Aristotle vs. Aquinas
There are multiple philosophers who have expressed their views on how a person should live his/her life. Despite the agreeance that god is the highest power, the conflicting views between philosophers is how a life of virtue should be lived. People containing different perspectives on life, distinguishing what is truly good from bad is extremely difficult. Aristotle was not religious, did not think god was compassionate, and did not believe one would meet god himself in the “life after death”. Aristotle believed that being virtuous was why one should be moral as Aquinas believed that a person should be moral since that is where led life. Regardless of the …show more content…
Thus the middle ground would be virtuous like being courageous. Being rash would make someone have too much vice as being a coward would be having too little vice. As a result, the ability to control desires is what makes someone virtuous. Aquinas and Aristotle both believed that humans lived to get to an end. The perception of good is what led humans to their own end, but there are a plethora of different opinions that determine what is and is not good. People are naturally able to be rational, which allows people to act in regards to knowledge and crave to do things. That’s why the ability to perform tasks well, is what makes a person good.
Aquinas believed that god created everything and people should look to him for the actions needed to obtain happiness and believed in reasoning, but did not think that it led people like Aristotle thought. Aquinas believed that divinity was where the soul would be most fulfilled, not within the virtue of intellect like Aristotle. Both Aristotle and Aquinas believed that a person could obtain virtue through habits. Aquinas said that in order to reach their end, they must follow the “eternal law” placed by god, in order to control the world on the basis of perfect reasoning. Due to the ability of reasoning, people shared a natural law that allowed individuals to know what was good. Aquinas and Aristotle, although very similar were extremely different within their views of
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