Il coraggio in Aristotele. Tra virtù maschile e identità femminile.

Aristotle dedicates the Book II of the Nichomachean Ethics to his reflection on the virtue of courage. As far as the defence of the polis is concerned, courage is a proper civic virtue and, consequently, it belongs to male nature. From the other side, as it appears also in the Politics, women are endowed with a different kind of virtue, related to the care of the oikos and the offspring. In fact, as it is explained in Biological works, female and male body constitutions and characters differs because of their different social roles. Nonetheless, in biology, in the act of defending their offspring, female of a large variety of animal species are presented as courageous and fearless, by using the same terminology which generally distinguish male. The male prerogative of courage, in this case, is directed at describing the most feminine property: taking care of the offspring.