Building on influential work in virtue ethics, this collection of essays examines the categories of self, person, and anthropology as foci for comparative analysis. The papers unite reflections on theory and method with descriptive work that addresses thinkers from the modern West, Christian and Jewish Late Antiquity, early China, and other settings. The introduction sets out central methodological issues that are subsequently taken up in each essay, including the origin of the categories through which comparison proceeds, the status of these categories in the process of comparison, and the goals of comparison. In considering the question of goals, the introduction draws connections between comparative study and historical study within one tradition. Both types of analysis can bridge the gap between historical and normative work by attending to the ways in which the questions a scholar asks-not just the answers found-vary from one context to another.

This paper formulates the categories of "ethics," "self," and "subject" for an analysis of classical rabbinic ethics centered on the text, The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan. Early rabbis were concerned with the realms of life that today's scholars describe as ethics and self-cultivation, yet they had no overarching concepts for either the self/person or for ethics. This analysis, then, cannot rely only upon native rabbinic terminology, but also requires a careful use of contemporary categories. This paper first sets out basic features of Rabbi Nathan and presents appropriate formulations of the relevant scholarly terms. The latter sections address possibilities for employing and revising these categories in descriptive and comparative studies more broadly, first surveying relevant scholarship on Christian, Muslim, and Manichaean sources, and then turning to ancient East Asian sources with a particular focus upon passages in the Zhuangzi.EARLY RABBIS HAD A LARGE VOCABULARY through which they set out norms for action and character: ideals that the sages prescribed for students, the ways that the tradition (torah) interacted with basic impulses (yetzer, lev), and the motivations and emotions that a person was to maintain in relation to God, particularly love ('ahavah) and fear or reverence (yir'ah). Through such categories, and others, they discussed the nature of human emotions and desires, ideal states, and ways to transform oneself to attain such ideals. That is, they were concerned with ethics and self-cultivation, yet they had no overarching concepts either for the self/person or for ethics. A study of rabbinic ethics, then, cannot rely only upon native rabbinic terminology, but also requires a careful use of contemporary categories. In this paper, I first set out basic features of rabbinic ethics in the sources I examine, and then I present accounts of "ethics," the "self," and the "subject" that I argue are appropriate for expositing this particular case. My theoretical work aims not only to open up an account of this cultural group, but also to contribute to descriptive, JRE 33.2:255-291. C 2005 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc.

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The turn to descriptive studies of ethics is inspired by the sense that our ethical theorizing needs to engage ethnography, history, and literature in order to address the full complexity of ethical life. This article examines four books that describe the cultivation of virtue in diverse cultural contexts, two concerning early China and two concerning Islam in recent years. All four emphasize the significance of embodiment, and they attend to the complex ways in which choice and agency interact with the authority of tradition. In considering these books, this article examines the relations between our academic claims concerning the self and ethics, conceptual or theoretical claims made in the elite writings of traditions, and the lived experiences of the people we study. The conclusion turns to our methodological foundations for studying these topics both comparatively and constructively. THESE FOUR STUDIES OFFER SIGNIFICANT RESOURCES for understanding the complex dynamics of choice and emotion, grounding research on these topics in the materiality of the body, and attending to a wide range of practices for ethical transformation. Two of these books address early Chinese thought, and two examine recent Islamic revitalization movements. Through considering them together, we gain a glimpse into the theories and practices of ethical formation in very different places, and we see some of the scholarly debates surrounding each context. The juxtaposition raises broader questions concerning the topics of our research as well as the relation between ethical theory and descriptive work.Though none of these books has its disciplinary home in ethics, all can be seen as advancing the empirical or descriptive study of ethical traditions upheld by Robin Lovin and Frank Reynolds in Cosmogony and the Ethical Order (1985,(4)(5)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31), attending with more detail to gender, power, cultural particularity, and historical change. In a similar vein, studying these books as resources for religious ethics extends the "cultural turn" recently advocated by Richard Miller:Religious ethics that makes a cultural turn will thus be characterized by three features. First, it will endeavor more vigorously to provide an ethics of ordinary life, drawing from and assessing vernacular traditions, folk heritages, popular culture, and lay perspectives in the life-world of a people.

Some modern and postmodern readers consider ethics to be at the heart of Judaism, perhaps its essence. This view appears, in very different ways, through formulations of “ethical monotheism” and through the primacy that Emmanuel Levinas gives to ethics in his phenomenology. Other modern and postmodern readers contrast ethics with Jewish law, attributing lesser significance to ethics or even questioning whether the category of ethics is appropriate for classical Judaism at all (Levinas 1969; Gibbs 2010; Newman 1998; Vial and Hadley 2001; Schweiker 2004). Such positions presume very different understandings of what ethics entails. Louis Newman (1998) concludes his extensive examination of Jewish law and Jewish ethics by arguing that we need to clarify the relation between law, ethics, and religion.