cardinal virtues prudence (practical wisdom), courage, temperance, and justice. Medievals deemed them cardinal (from Latin cardo, ‘hinge’) because of their important or pivotal role in human flourishing. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates explains them through a doctrine of the three parts of the soul, suggesting that a person is prudent when knowledge of how to live (wisdom) informs her reason, courageous when informed reason governs her capacity for wrath, temperate when it also governs her appetites, and just when each part performs its proper task with informed reason in control. Development of thought on second aleph. CH was shown to be independent of the usual assumptions of set theory by Gödel (1938) and Cohen (1963). Extensions of trine of the unity of the virtues, i.e., that a person possessing one virtue will have them all. See also VIRTUE ETHICS. J.L.A.G. Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881), Scottish-born essayist, historian, and social critic, one of the most popular writers and lecturers in nineteenth-century Britain. His works include literary criticism, history, and cultural criticism. With respect to philosophy, his views on the theory of history are his most significant contributions. According to Carlyle, great personages are the most important causal factor in history. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) asserts, ‘Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.’
Carlyle’s doctrine has been challenged from many different directions. Hegelian and Marxist philosophers maintain that the so-called great men of history are not really the engine of history, but merely reflections of deeper forces, such as economic ones, while contemporary historians emphasize the priority of ‘history from below’ – the social history of everyday people – as far more representative of the historical process.
See also PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. N.C.