| Research Abstract |
1.It is characteristic of this study to consider the problems concerning the theory of action and value from a linguistic atandpoint, reviewing usage of evaluative adverbials of the classical languages. The adverbials in question modify both agent and action at the same time ; so we can obtain, from the review of those adverbials, a new theory of action and value which unifies evaluative points of view of acion and agent. 2.First, we certified what the common understanging of adverbial usage was between Plato and other contemporary writers ; and we recognized that Aristotle never had used advebials as sentence-advebials, and that he never had given attention to the correspondences between advervials, ajectives, and preposition plus abstract noun phrases, to which Plato gave so much attention in his earlier and middle dialogues. 3.Next, we studied the Hellenistic philosophy of action and value and the Hellenistic philosophers' uses of evaluative adverbials. Eventually, we can say that the structure of the theory of action and value was drastically altered after Aristotle's death, which is not unconnected with the fact that the'common understanding' of adverbial usage was lost in this period ; and that we inherited, indirectly, the theory of action and value from the Hellenistic philosophy through the tradition of European humanism, which is problematic in many respects. We must reconsider now the Hellenistic tradition of understanding human action and value from a new standpoit we reach.
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