Many authors have argued that Aristotle does not stay true to his official account on which every instance of choice must be preceded by deliberation, and it is a good thing that he does so because his official account has catastrophically bad theoretical implications. I argue that Aristotle does not deviate from his official account, and that the official account does not have the decisively bad implications others have claimed it to have. These objectionable entailments only obtain on a certain (...) conception of what deliberation is like, and I argue that this conception is not Aristotle’s. Once Aristotle’s own conception of deliberation is understood, the terrible putative entailments clearly do not follow from the official account, and so textually Aristotle remains consistent while conceptually he remains plausible. (shrink)

Three times in Book 1 chapter 13 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says desire partakes of reason in a way. There is a consensus view in the literature about what that claim means: desire has no intrinsic rationality, but can partake of reason by being blindly obedient to the commands of reason. I argue this consensus view is mistaken: for Aristotle, adult human desire has its own intrinsic rationality, and while it is to be obedient to reason, it is not (...) blind obedience, for when reason tells desire to obey, it includes an explanation supporting its order which desire can at least potentially understand. Thus, the nature of human desire, and also of the characteristic interaction of desire and reason, is much different than it is standardly taken to be. (shrink)

I offer a novel analysis of the relations between Aristotle’s three species of desire - appetite, temper, and wish - and the three things he says in EN 2.3 lead to pursuit - the pleasant, the beneficial, and the noble. It has long been tempting to think that these trios line up with one another in some way, ideally relating their members in one-to-one fashion. One account, by John Cooper, has gathered prominent adherents, but other authors, notably Giles Pearson, have (...) argued we should give up on even trying to correlate the two trios. I attempt to show that the two trios do relate in interesting ways, but not in a way that correlates their members in a one-to-one fashion. Instead, I argue that both appetite and temper are ultimately for the pleasant, while all things that an agent takes as objects of wish are conceived of as either pleasant, beneficial, or noble. This account conflicts with a dominant understanding of the species of desire as differentiated by their objects. I reply defend the view by showing that there is a second criterion for differentiating the species of desire. (shrink)

Caleb Cohoe helms another excellent entry in the Cambridge Critical Guides series. The volume consists of thirteen contributions, nominally ordered to proceed through the De Anima in the order of the text (more on the qualification in a moment). Cohoe writes in the introduction that the volume has three tasks. First, it seeks to ‘properly situate Aristotle in the context of his predecessors’; secondly, to ‘draw on his natural and first philosophy to elucidate his key philosophical doctrines’; thirdly, to ‘show (...) how he uses soul as a unified principle to explain the activities of life and examine the sorts of causation this involves’ (p. 2). Of course, the works included do not all need to tackle all these tasks, or focus on only one. We can safely say, though, that chapters 2–4 focus primarily on the first task, chapters 1, 5, and 6 on the second, and chapters 7–13 on the third. In all cases, the contributors offer erudite analyses of their target questions and advance substantive answers that make valuable contributions to the literature on Aristotle's philosophy. It will be a matter of dispute, of course, how plausible these answers or their supporting arguments are, but all clearly deserve to be taken seriously as entries into the literature on their respective focal topics. (shrink)

At EN VII.6 1149a24-b3, Aristotle offers an argument for the conclusion that akrasia due to thumos is less shameful than akrasia due to epithumia. The reasoning in this argument is obscure, for Aristotle makes two claims in particular that are difficult to understand; first, that in some way thumos “hears” reason when it leads to akrasia, and second, that thumos responds to what it hears “as if having syllogized” to a conclusion about how to act. This paper argues that previous (...) attempts to understand these two points have failed. It offers an account of the first difficult claim, but concludes there is not enough material in the text to determine what Aristotle means when he says thumos responds “as if having syllogized”. Nevertheless, the paper ends by offering an account of this remark that is Aristotelian in inspiration, even though it admittedly goes beyond anything that can be gleaned from the text. (shrink)

Three times in Book 1 chapter 13 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says desire partakes of reason in a way. There is a consensus view in the literature about what that claim means: desire has no intrinsic rationality, but can partake of reason by being blindly obedient to the commands of reason. I argue this consensus view is mistaken: for Aristotle, adult human desire has its own intrinsic rationality, and while it is to be obedient to reason, it is not (...) blind obedience, for when reason tells desire to obey, it includes an explanation supporting its order which desire can at least potentially understand. Thus, the nature of human desire, and also of the characteristic interaction of desire and reason, is much different than it is standardly taken to be. (shrink)