scholarly journals Aristotle on Natural Slavery

Phronesis ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Heath
Keyword(s):  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Practical Deliberation ◽  
Natural Teleology ◽  
Hypothetical Necessity

AbstractAristotle's claim that natural slaves do not possess autonomous rationality (Pol. 1.5, 1254b20-23) cannot plausibly be interpreted in an unrestricted sense, since this would conflict with what Aristotle knew about non-Greek societies. Aristotle's argument requires only a lack of autonomous practical rationality. An impairment of the capacity for integrated practical deliberation, resulting from an environmentally induced excess or deficiency in thumos (Pol. 7.7, 1327b18-31), would be sufficient to make natural slaves incapable of eudaimonia without being obtrusively implausible relative to what Aristotle is likely to have believed about non-Greeks. Since Aristotle seems to have believed that the existence of people who can be enslaved without injustice is a hypothetical necessity, if those capable of eudaimonia are to achieve it, the existence of natural slaves has implications for our understanding of Aristotle's natural teleology.

scholarly journals Caring and the Boundary-Driven Structure of Practical Deliberation

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Seidman
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
Practical Deliberation ◽  
Single Index ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Arbitrary Decision ◽  
Heuristic Device ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Determinate Meaning

When a reasonable agent deliberates about what to do, she entertains only a limited range of possible courses of action. A theory of practical reasoning must therefore include an account of deliberative attention: an account that both explains the patterns of deliberative attention that reasonable agents typically display and allows us to see why these patterns of deliberative attention are reasonable. I offer such an account, built around two, central claims. (i) A reasonable agent who cares about some end is disposed to exclude courses of action which she believes to be incompatible with that end from the range of possibilities that she will entertain as options in practical deliberation. As I shall put it, an agent’s cares establish deliberative boundaries for her practical thought. (ii) The stability of a deliberative boundary varies with the depth of the care that explains it. These two claims motivate the Boundary-Driven Model of the path that a reasonable agent’s deliberative attention will take in temporally extended deliberation. If we locate the model within a maximizing conception of practical rationality, then boundary-driven deliberation, of the sort that the model describes, can be understood and justified instrumentally, as a heuristic device. But if we suppose that there is no single index of value that successful practical choice maximizes, then boundary-driven deliberation is partly constitutive of reasonableness in practical thought. It allows an agent facing plural and incommensurable values to frame her deliberative problems narrowly enough that, in conjunction with deliberative devices which are not part of the model but which are compatible with it, she may be able to reach a non-arbitrary decision – and so give a determinate, verdictive sense to the phrase “the best course of action available to me” in cases in which a determinate meaning for this phrase would otherwise be lacking.

Reconsidering Hobbes’s Account of Practical Deliberation

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurens van Apeldoorn
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Practical Deliberation ◽  
Adequate Treatment

Thomas Hobbes has been frequently criticised for his account of deliberation that purportedly consists merely of, in his own words, an ‘alternate succession of appetite and fear’ and therefore lacks the judgement and reflection commentators think is essential if he is to provide an adequate treatment of practical rationality. In this paper Hobbes’s account of deliberation is analysed in detail and it is argued that it is not vulnerable to this critique. Hobbes takes so-called ‘mental discourse’ to be partly constitutive of the process of practical deliberation, and this provides the cognitive judgement and reflection that critics have claimed it lacks.

Plato’s Teleology

Teleology ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 14-38
Author(s):  
Jeffrey K. McDonough
Keyword(s):  
Causal Account ◽  
Natural Teleology ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Hypothetical Necessity ◽  
Basic Features

This chapter analyses the basic features of Plato’s teleology. His dialogue Phaedo presents certain requirements for a proper causal account which, it is claimed, only the good can satisfy. It is particularly the demand for holism that singles out the good as the only proper cause. It is then argued that the cosmology of the Timaeus is consistent with the Phaedo’s requirements. While the Timaeus introduces “Necessity” as an additional cause, this can also be understood as a cause that contributes to good ends and to that extent as part of an overall teleological account. Hereby a notion of necessity comparable to Aristotle’s hypothetical necessity emerges, which the Timaeus’s craft model of the creation helps articulate. The chapter ends with a partial comparison of Plato’s with Aristotle’s natural teleology.

Engineering knowledge: philosophy and ponstructive meanig

2018 ◽  
pp. 10-16
Author(s):  
V. I. Onoprienko
Keyword(s):  
Information Technologies ◽  
Knowledge Engineering ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Engineering Knowledge ◽  
World Today ◽  
The World ◽  
Technological Area

An expansion of information technologies in the world today is caused by progress of instrumental knowledge. It has been arisen a special technological area of knowledge engineering, which is related to practical rationality and experts’ knowledge for solving urgent problems of science and practice.

The Interplay of Intention and Reason

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Bratman
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Pragmatic Theory ◽  
Related Idea ◽  
David Gauthier ◽  
Extended Agency ◽  
Extended Life

In a series of essays—in particular, his 1994 essay “Assure and Threaten”—David Gauthier develops a two-tier pragmatic theory of practical rationality and argues, within that theory, for a distinctive account of the rationality of following through with prior assurances or threats. His discussion suggests that certain kinds of temporally extended agency play a special role in one’s temporally extended life going well. I argue that a related idea about diachronic self-governance helps explain a sense in which an accepted deliberative standard can be self-reinforcing. And this gives us resources to adjust Gauthier’s theory in response to a threat of what Kieran Setiya has called a “fragmentation of practical reason.”

Vagueness and Decision

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Bacon
Keyword(s):  
Decision Theory ◽  
Practical Deliberation

If linguistic vagueness is more fundamental than propositional vagueness, it is natural to think that vague propositions won’t play a substantive role in decision theory. On a linguistic picture, what it is rational for an agent to do is completely determined by their attitudes towards precise propositions. This is vacuously true if all propositions are precise, but it also seems like a natural idea if, like the expressivist discussed in Chapter 8, a distinction is drawn between metaphysically ‘first-rate’ precise propositions and metaphysically ‘second-rate’ vague propositions. This chapter considers how to formulate decision theory in a setting where there are vague propositions, and discusses ways in which vague beliefs, desires, and actions can have concrete impacts on practical deliberation and action.

Constitutivism about Reasons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Schafer
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Rationality

Contemporary forms of Kantian constitutivism generally begin with a conception of agency on which the constitutive aim of agency is some form of autonomy or self-unification. This chapter argues for a re-orientation of the Kantian constitutivist project towards views that begin with a conception of rationality on which both theoretical and practical rationality aim at forms of understanding. In a slogan, then, understanding-first as opposed to autonomy-first constitutivism. Such a view gives the constitutivist new resources for explaining many classes of reasons, while also offering a new way of understanding the unity of theoretical and practical reason. The chapter concludes by arguing that the resulting view is best understood, not so much as an alternative to autonomy-first constitutivism, but as a complement to it.

Towards a Social Conception of Persons

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bennett W. Helm
Keyword(s):  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Peter Strawson ◽  
The One

This Chapter examines three sources of motivation for individualistic conceptions of persons (responsibility, identity, and practical rationality), all of which are in conceptual tension with the sorts of authority we can have over each other. We can relieve this tension in part by following Peter Strawson in understanding responsibility to depend on “human communities”—communities of respect by which we hold each other responsible to certain norms and so to certain practices or way of life. Yet the authority by which we hold others responsible presupposes the worth not only of the norms but also of the agent and the one holding her to those norms. We can understand such worth, it is suggested, in terms of communities of respect—in terms of its members’ joint respect for each other and for its norms and practices.

The Teleological Argument in Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

Kant-Studien ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-77
Author(s):  
Khafiz Kerimov
Keyword(s):  
Human Reason ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Teleological Argument ◽  
Natural Teleology ◽  
Metaphysics Of Morals ◽  
Natural Purpose

Abstract The first section of Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals contains a teleological argument, the aim of which is to show that the natural purpose of human reason lies not in securing happiness but in morality. While the teleological argument is widely considered to be digressive and unconvincing in the secondary literature, in this article I attempt to show that the argument is neither digressive nor unconvincing. I argue that it fulfills an important synthetic task in the Groundwork (even if in a preliminary manner), that it is consistent with Kant’s views on natural teleology at the time, and that the criticism of happiness contained therein is as convincing as Kant’s criticism of happiness in the rest of the treatise.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document