Practical Truth in Aristotle

In explaining the nature of phronēsis in Nicomachean Ethics 6, Aristotle invokes what he calls ‘practical truth’. The paper distinguishes and adjudicates between several interpretations of the puzzling phrase, including that of G. E. M. Anscombe. Its main tool of analysis is a distinction between semantic or assertoric truth, and truth in some richer-than-semantic sense. This distinction is illustrated from Aristotelian texts outside the Nicomachean Ethics. In conclusion, the paper reflects on the question of what the notion of practical truth contributes to the argument of the Nicomachean Ethics.

Practical Nous in the Nicomachean Ethics

The paper presses an analogy between Aristotle’s conception of practical reasoning and theoretical reasoning. It argues that theoretical reasoning has two optimal cognitive states associated with it, episteme and (theoretical) nous, and that practical reasoning has two counterpart states, phronēsis and (practical) nous. Theoretical nous is an expertise which enables those who have it to understand principles as principles, i.e. among other things, to know how to use them to derive other truths in their domain. It is a cognitively demanding state, which only experts have. Aristotelian practical nous is structurally similar to theoretical nous in that it requires the agent not only to know certain everyday truths, but also to know how and when to use them in deliberative reasoning. It is also a cognitively demanding notion, and only moral experts will have it.

Faking Wisdom

In the Sophist, Plato makes the Eleatic Visitor define sophistic as an expertise (τέχνη‎), in stark contrast to the account of sophistic in the Gorgias. This paper focuses on the almost entirely overlooked problem of what it could mean for sophistic to be an expertise. Sophistic, in the Sophist, is the ability to appear wise (without being so). This paper argues that sophistic counts as an expertise because the sophist can explain the causes of sophistic success and failure in terms of a true but incomplete account of wisdom as irrefutability. The account of wisdom as irrefutability is true, but it turns out that irrefutability, too, can be real or merely apparent. The full account of wisdom must include an account of true, by contrast with merely apparent, refutation. The knowledge of true refutation turns out to be identical with the knowledge of forms and their exclusion relations. Recent arguments of Lesley Brown’s that sophistic is not, by Plato’s own criteria, an expertise, are rebutted. The paper’s positive account of sophistic as an expertise relies on the distinction between likenesses (proportion-preserving copies) or appearances (proportion-distorting copies). This distinction, which has no parallel in earlier dialogues, makes it possible to see how there can be an expertise of producing merely apparent Fs without knowledge of what is really F.

The Academy at Work

Zeno’s argument against plurality in the Parmenides does not support the view that there is only one object in the world—only the view that every object in the world is one. Socrates counters that every sensible object can be many by participating in Forms, but none of the Forms can be many. Parmenides retorts that participation is not consistent with the Forms’ unity. The dialectic Parmenides offers derives a series of contradictions from supposing either that each Form is one or that it is many (that is, qualified by any other feature). The implicit solution is that participation must allow the Forms to participate in one another without losing their essential unity. The net result, central to the Academy’s educational programme, is to articulate, for the first time, the concept of predication as we understand it today. Its results are summarized in the Sophist’s discussion of ‘Greatest Kinds’.

Cynicism

Historians of philosophy (such as Hegel, Hadot, Cooper, among others) tend to marginalize the ancient Cynics as philosophically uninteresting, and moreover as irrelevant for a proper understanding of the sense in which philosophy in antiquity used to be a way of life. To be sure, the Cynics lived very distinctive and unconventional lives, but whatever it was that they were doing, it cannot have been—so the historians claim—a conduct rooted in philosophical reason and argument. This paper first musters the grounds typically given for this kind of deflationary view and then proceeds to examine the sparse but nevertheless suggestive evidence about ancient Cynicism that the (predominantly Stoic) doxographical tradition handed down to us. In the end, it comes to a conclusion that is diametrically opposed to the prevailing opinion of the cynics as inconsequential non-philosophers.

Pleasure and Human Good in Epicurus

In this paper, I argue that Epicurus is a psychological hedonist but not an ethical one. Though he holds a unitary conception of pleasure, he also maintains a distinction between kinetic and katastematic pleasures. This is designed to serve diagnostic purposes by identifying categorially distinct psychological conditions in which an agent may experience pleasure. I show that the evidence does not commit Epicurus to ethical hedonism but rather provides grounds for doubting it. I then sketch a proposal regarding Epicurus’ conception of the human good. Though not hedonistic, this conception does justice to Epicurus’ well-attested preoccupation with pleasure and pain by pointing to these feelings as the only reliable epistemic tool available to humans in pursuing their final end. Finally, this conception identifies the individual human being’s phusis as the fundamental bearer of value.

Becoming Bad

Aristotle says little about moral badness [kakia], but his four central claims about it suffice to entail a rich and plausible account. Badness is the disposition opposed to virtue, and so symmetrical with it in various ways; it is acquired by habituation; it is unlike akrasia in that the bad person’s reason endorses his wrong actions; and this endorsement involves the exercise of a corrupted reason. The activity of corrupted reason must be a kind of (as we now say) motivated reasoning—rationalization, denial and the like—which serves to conceal the correct ends of action from the corrupt person and to sustain their habitual bad behaviour. Although badness is located in the non-rational soul, it is this corruption of reason which turns it into a stable disposition.

Virtue and Goals of Actions in Aristotle’s Ethical Treatises

The present paper focuses on Aristotle’s claim in the Eudemian Ethics that the virtues of character are ‘states to do with decision’, by which he means that they are somehow responsible for decisions. In the paper’s first two sections, I explicate the way in which he thinks the character-virtues contribute to the correctness of the virtuous person’s decisions. In two subsequent sections, I articulate two philosophical objections to the picture that will have emerged. I defend Aristotle against the first objection. In articulating the second objection, I rely on texts from the Nicomachean Ethics and the De motu animalium that John Cooper’s work on Aristotle’s moral psychology has greatly illuminated. I argue that the second objection cannot be answered in a satisfactory way, and that it identifies a philosophical weakness in the moral psychology of the Eudemian Ethics, namely that it operates with an overly restrictive conception of practical reason.

Technē and archē in Plato’s Republic Book 1

Socrates’ refutation of Thrasymachus in Republic Book 1 is usually read as hinging on the nature of technē (often translated as ‘craft’ or ‘skill’; I translate as ‘profession’). This paper argues that it hinges at least as much on a link drawn between technē (or at least between a group of therapeutic technai), and the phenomenon of rule (archē, noun; archein, verb). It is this move by Socrates that ultimately enables him to sublate Thrasymachus’ original definition. Whereas Thrasymachus had offered a claim about the political domination by the strong over the weak, Socrates invokes a general claim about rule as such to argue that the advantage of rulers can lie only in exercising their rule as completely and perfectly as possible. It is the nature of rule and not the nature of crafts or professions alone that generates this result.

Plato on Why Human Beauty is Good for the Soul

This essay examines Socrates’ Palinode in the Phaedrus in order to understand why the experience of another person’s beauty plays such a central role in Plato’s account of moral development. I argue that the answer depends in part on his account of the human soul as having a nature in common with, but also falling short of, divine soul. This anthropology allows for a conception of moral progress as a matter of becoming more perfectly what one in some sense already is. The answer also depends on Plato’s conception of beauty as being, in general, the manifestation or appearing of goodness, and of human beauty in particular—both beauty of soul and beauty of body—as the splendid manifestation of godlikeness. When the lover is struck by the sight of the beloved’s beauty, he is therefore reminded of who he is and what he should aspire to become.