Aristotle on virtues and emotions

Conclusion Aristotle is certainly right to suggest that a philosophical psychology of the virtues will importantly involve tracing the connections between virtues and emotions. But while he is admirably diligent about scouting some kinds of differences between virtues, (notably what virtues are about — dangers, bodily pleasures, spending and getting money, distributions of honor or money, etc.), he does not seem prepared to admit that their logical/psychological structure can differ in respect of their general relations with emotions. Instead, he wishes to see them as homogeneous in this respect. But the main two connections he discovers — the propriety of affect relation and the index relation — are not general. They are true at best only of some virtues, and then only in improved formulations. Our brief investigation of his claims has shown, I think, that the virtues do display variety that is in part a function of their relations to emotion-types. We await a psychology of the virtues in which the connections of particular virtues to emotions, and the connections between the virtues that would become visible in the light of this structural variety, are fully traced.