Dated back to Elizabeth Anscombe’s famous paper "Modern Moral Philosophy"(1958),contemporary virtue ethics has gone through 50 years of development.Aristotle plays an important yet complex role in this new trend of ethical enquiry.It is the changing role of Aristotle in virtue ethics that this paper surveys:at the beginning,Aristotle is seen as the unchallenged primary representative of virtue ethics,later pluralistic resources are explored to represent virtue ethics,and recently we even read some literatures which doubt whether Aristotle should be considered as a virtue moralist at all.Through this survey we may,on the one hand,grasp the development of virtue ethics from a particular perspective;and on the other hand,reflect upon the successes and limits of virtue ethics as a main focus of contemporary Western ethical studies.
