List Of Virtues

Robert Walch: 'Vegetable Chant' showcases Central Coast's chief product

"Rah, Rah, Radishes! A Vegetable Chant," by April Pulley Sayre (Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster. $14.99).

ª Local connection: If ever a picture book was created with the Central Coast in mind, this is it. Virtually every vegetable that appears in this book is grown someplace between Santa Cruz and King City.

ª Content: Featured on each page is a large color photo of a vegetable with a short bit of text at the bottom. The rhymed text is actually a chant that extols the virtues of veggies.

"Rah, rah, radishes! Red and white," reads the first page. Then you flip the page and it's, "Carrots are calling. Take a bite!"

By the time the reader has finished paging through the book, he or she will have seen Brussels sprouts, bok choy, cauliflower, broccoli, a variety of peppers, beans, eggplant, corn and zucchini.

The list goes on as you add garlic, cabbage, Swiss chard, fennel, tomatoes, asparagus and potatoes.

Aside from introducing children to an eclectic array of vegetables and showing them what each one looks like, this picture book's concluding sentence — "Veggies rock!" — is one a lot of Central Coast agricultural families will heartily endorse.

An added feature of this colorful book is an informative page that contains more information about vegetables. For example, you'll learn that in 1893 the U.S. Supreme Court declared the tomato a vegetable (for tax purposes), even though scientists insist the tomato is technically a fruit.

ª Quote: The author encourages the young reader to become a vegetable expert. "Read about it. Ask cooks, grocers, and farmers about it. Learn how to choose it, clean it, and cook it. Gather new recipes. Then, when, you have learned that vegetable, move on to another."

ª Audience: Ideal for youngsters 3 years of age and older, this is a picture book that should be included in every Central Coast school and public library. Households connected to the ag industry as well as parents who wish to introduce their small children to the wide range of veggies available will also want to get a copy of this book for bedtime reading.

After you have enjoyed the book for a while, see how many veggies your child can identify on a trip to the weekly farmers market or the produce section of the food store. Better still, go out to the fields where some of these vegetables are grown and show the youngster what they look like "in the ground" or at harvest time.

ª Robert Walch of Monterey writes about Central Coast Authors for the Arts & Books page Saturday in The Salinas Californian. Contact him in care of Central Coast Authors, The Salinas Californian, 123 W. Alisal St., Salinas 93901; fax to 754-4293; or email to newsroom@thecalifornian.com .

Individuating the virtues « Blogistikon

. I hope this will be the launching point for a more comprehensive project on intellectualism and moral education from Socrates to the Stoics. I’d welcome comments on the current version.

Another was a paper I wrote for the MPhil and gave at the inaugural Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Politics conference at London Met in June. The paper tries to bring together some research in personality psychology with a (neo-)Aristotelian approach to virtue ethics to argue that one of the components of personality identified by psychologists, called openness to experience, constitutes in its developed form a virtue. In order to make the case, I found that I had to do some thinking about the nature of Aristotle’s list of virtues and what the structure of a virtue theory ought to be like. In a recent book Daniel Russell has argued that contemporary neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics can’t do without the concept of phronesis , and he makes a number of intriguing arguments about how we ought to individuate the virtues from each other, a problem Aristotle doesn’t explicitly wrestle with, and what work virtues in the plural do in such ethical theories [1]. Indeed, Aristotle’s list looks conspicuously flabby when compared to the taut tetrad of Plato’s Republic VI.1, 1138b25-32). But looking at things on the metaethical level, we could easily imagine a very different list with a similar structure – virtues that picked out means in feeling and action, but ones governing different spheres of life than those Aristotle identifies. What does this possibility say about the nature of Aristotle’s own theory and what we are licensed to do with it? I think we should see the various virtues in an Aristotelian theory as identifying characteristically important features of situations, isolating kinds of reasons for actions (Russell, following Philippa Foot, focuses on this angle), and serving as ideals for approximation. Hence, virtues-talk, as opposed to mere goodness-talk, lets us single out aspects of a virtuous action for praise or blame, an activity central to our communal or interpersonal ethical practices, and especially to moral education.