The Refinement of Character

The best-known work of philosophical ethics in Arabic, by Miskawayh, a historian who served Buyid rulers and their ministers. It aims to show how good character can be acquired so that right actions flow from it easily. Drawing on Plato and Aristotle, it divides the soul into rational, irascible and appetitive powers, whose virtues are wisdom, courage and temperance, with justice as their proper balance, and it treats each virtue as a mean between extremes. It argues that character can be changed by habit and education, against those who hold it fixed, and includes an influential section on the upbringing of the young. Later chapters treat human happiness, love and friendship as the bonds of society, and the healing of diseases of the soul such as anger, fear of death and grief. It shaped later ethical writing, including Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī's Persian Nasirean Ethics.

It is the clearest example of how Greek virtue ethics was absorbed and reworked in Islamic civilisation, and its practical advice on habit and education is still usable.