The paper addresses the following question: why do human beings, on Aristotle’s view, have an innate tendency to badness, that is, to developing desires that go beyond, and often against, their natural needs? Given Aristotle’s teleological assumptions (including the thesis that nature does nothing in vain), such tendency should not be present. I argue that the culprit is to be found in the workings of rationality. In particular, it is the presence of theoretical reason that necessitates the limitless nature of (...) human non-rational desires. (shrink)

Aristotle’s account of voluntariness (to hekousion) lacks a sufficiently precise positive definition of ‘voluntary’. This is a problem: in Aristotle’s ethics, voluntariness is an important and unifying joint between psychological (character) and practical matters (action). I contend that Aristotle implicitly defines voluntariness as positive causal relation to an agent’s desire, where one’s character is the state of one’s faculty of desire. Since desires always have particular ends (final causes), a voluntary action is one which originates in the agent’s desire for (...) that action’s end. Using this interpretation, I answer questions about ‘mixed’ actions, culpable ignorance, and non-voluntariness. Without this interpretation, these questions cannot be systematically answered. (shrink)

This paper is a discussion of Aristotle’s account of actions that come about because of ignorance as found in his Nicomachean Ethics 3.1. I argue that such actions do not originate in the agent, bu...

I argue that in Eudemian Ethics II 8 Aristotle provides us with a general definition of force applicable to all natural phenomena. This definition points us to an important, though rarely not...

I explain what Aristotle means when, after puzzling about the matter of motion in incomplete animals (those without sight, smell, hearing), he suggests in De Anima III 11.433b31–434a5 that just as incomplete animals are moved indeterminately, desire and phantasia are present in those animals, but present indeterminately. I argue that self-motion and its directing faculties in incomplete animals differ in degree but not in kind from those of complete animals. I examine how an object of desire differs for an incomplete (...) animal. Using a comparison with Aristotle’s account of recollection, especially in unfavorable circumstances, I describe indeterminate self-motion. Finally, I discuss implications for our understanding of Aristotle’s accounts of the faculties of the soul and incomplete animals. (shrink)

Aristotle famously distinguishes between merely doing a virtuous action and acting in the way in which a virtuous person would. Against an interpretation prominent in recent scholarship, I argue that ‘acting virtuously,’ in the sense of exercising a virtue actually possessed, is prior to ‘virtuous action,’ understood generically. I propose that the latter notion is best understood as a derivative abstraction from the former, building upon a reading of a neglected distinction between per se and coincidentally just action in Nicomachean (...) Ethics 5, and thus shed light on the meaning and philosophical significance of the priority of acting from virtue. (shrink)