Ethos – between vir bonus and VIA: Virtue ethics in contemporary rhetorical education

The aim of this article is to present an original didactic concept that integrates the classical ideal of vir bonus dicendi peritus with the theory of rhetorical ethos and contemporary positive psychology, represented by the VIA character strengths model. The point of departure is the assumption that the speaker’s ethos – as a rhetorical category – has deep roots in the tradition of virtue ethics, developed from Aristotle through Quintilian to contemporary philosophers such as MacIntyre, Nussbaum, and Hursthouse. The article demonstrates that contemporary psychological tools, such as the VIA test, can serve as practical instruments for cultivating ethos in rhetorical education. The proposed didactic project, implemented within the framework of practical rhetoric classes, is based on an individual analysis of students’ character strengths and their mapping onto various rhetorical genres. The article seeks to build a bridge between rhetorical theory and the ethical and psychological formation of the speaker.