Michael Roth - Practical virtue : from classroom to life

Many of us today are asking: how can we take what people learn in a classroom, especially in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, and apply that outside the classroom?

About Michael Roth

"I'm the President and a professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

My work is on how people make sense of the past. I have spent many years thinking about the philosophy of history through films, political theory, psychology and psychoanalysis. Most recently, I've written a couple of books around education, how it changes one's history and how it uses the past to create a different kind of future."

Key Points

• A current question in the humanities and social sciences is how to apply classroom learning to people’s lives.
• Philosophy can be useful for developing habits of reflection that lead to a better life.
• Ideas of virtue change over time. The capacity to survive suffering wasn’t key to moral elevation in the ancient world, but today the survivor is ennobled in popular culture.

From classroom to real life

Many of us today are asking: how can we take what people learn in a classroom, especially in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, and apply that outside the classroom?

I teach a course called Virtue and Vice in Literature, History and Philosophy. We begin with Confucius and we end with Spike Lee, Maggie Nelson and Danielle Allen. The course is about the idea of virtue and how it changes over time. I want my students to have a sense of what Aristotle meant by moderation, or what Aquinas meant by beatitude or Machiavelli by virtuosity. That’s important; I want them to learn from the texts. But it’s even more important that they learn about virtue as something they can practise outside of class.