Aristotle is said to have held that any kind of actual infinity is impossible. I argue that he was a finitist (or "potentialist") about _magnitude_, but not about _plurality_. He did not deny that there are, or can be, infinitely many things in actuality. If this is right, then it has implications for Aristotle's views about the metaphysics of parts and points.

On Zeno Beach there are infinitely many grains of sand, each half the size of the last. Supposing Aristotle denied the possibility of Zeno Beach, did he have a good argument for the denial? Three arguments, each of ancient origin, are examined: the beach would be infinitely large; the beach would be impossible to walk across; the beach would contain a part equal to the whole, whereas parts must be lesser. It is attempted to show that none of these (...) arguments was Aristotle’s. Indeed, perhaps Aristotle’s finitism applied to magnitude only, not plurality. (shrink)

What I will argue here is that the ethical potentiality of the human being that Aristotle cites in the Nicomachean Ethics refers to the general, rational capacity for someone to appropriate and develop their own specific, natural capacities which make them human; the name of this ability is called virtue, which, when expressed in actions, we call good. To separate out the concepts at work here demands an exegesis of the two kinds of dunamis in Metaphysics Theta, that is, (...) dunamis as causal power of change and dunamis as a potential way of being for an existent capacity. Once we grasp this, we can clarify the nature of virtue as the active, complete state of a capacity in human being which defines their function even though it must be acquired, and it need not ever be actualized. The concepts of habit (ethos) and practical judgment (phronesis) give Aristotle the means to solve the problem of how such a potentiality is acquired and how it is actualized, and hence we will end with a discussion of them. -/- . (shrink)

Aristotle is often thought of as one of the fathers of essentialism in Western philosophy. Aristotle’s argument for the essence of human beings is, however, much more flexible than this prejudice might suggest. In the passage about the “human function” at Nichomachean Ethics 1.7, Aristotle gives an account of the particular “function” (or “achievement,” ergon) of human beings that does not ask very much of the modern reader—only that she be prepared to analyze human beings as a (...) logical category according to certain rules. While this may trouble the naturalistic reductionist or the post-humanist thinker, it is not clear that Aristotle’s request is unreasonable, especially given what the function argument goes on to offer. It places normative thinking in the constellation of type-property-activity, a narrowing of the search for the human good, but not an overly constrictive one. The second, substantive stage of the argument gives a more narrow interpretation of what the unique property and its corresponding activity are in the case of humans—but even here Aristotle’s apparently “thick” conclusions about the ultimate human good ultimately leave more room for a pluralistic disagreement about ends than might be expected. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Naturalism The Modern Debate about Naturalism Reconstructed Naturalism Non‐cognitivist Alternatives Hume and Naturalism Reconnecting Facts and Values Aristotle and Naturalism Moral Facts and Explanation What about God? Where Now? Questions for Discussion and Reflection Thinkers and Their Works, and Further Reading Notes.

Kant said that logic had not had to take a single step forward since Aristotle, but German Idealists in the following generation made concerted efforts to re-think the logical foundations of philosophy. In this book, Jacob McNulty offers a new interpretation of Hegel's Logic, the key work of his philosophical system. McNulty shows that Hegel is responding to a perennial problem in the history and philosophy of logic: the logocentric predicament. In Hegel, we find an answer to a (...) question so basic that it cannot be posed without risking incoherence: what is the justification for logic? How can one justify logic without already relying upon it? The answer takes the form of re-thinking the role of metaphysics in philosophy, so that logic assumes a new position as derivative rather than primary. This important book will appeal to a wide range of readers in Hegel studies and beyond. (shrink)

This paper examines an important but neglected topic in Suárez’s metaphysics–—namely, his theory of efficient causation. According to Suárez, efficient causation is to be identified with action, one of Aristotle’s ten highest genera or categories. The paper shows how Suárez’s identification of efficient causation with action helps to shed light on his views about the precise nature of efficient causation, and its role in his ontology. More specifically, it shows that Suárez understands efficient causation to be a distinctive or (...) sui generis type of entity, and that he thinks we must adopt this view in order to account for the facts of efficient causation. The paper also examines several objections to Suárez’s account. (shrink)

Abstract This paper illustrates how Aristotle's topological theses about change in Physics 5-6 can help address metaphysical issues. Two distinctions from Physics 5. 1 are discussed: changing per se versus changing per aliud ; motion versus change. Change from white to black is motion and alteration, whereas change from white to not white is neither. But is not every change from white to black identical with a change from white to not white? Theses from Physics 6 refute the identity. (...) Is change from white to black at least accompanied by change from white to not white? Perhaps, but given further theses from Physics 6, this supposition yields unwelcome consequences. Most likely, when something changes from white to black it changes merely per aliud , not per se , from white to not white. Genuine change between white and not white is found elsewhere; its admission has bearing on Aristotle's theory of perception. (shrink)

What are the contents, limits, and possibilities of Aristotle’s works for critical thinking about money? Recent scholarship has (re)turned to Aristotle as an authority for two key political approaches to money. The first aims to democratize the governance of monetary institutions in order to realize more just economic outcomes. The second seeks to prevent money, or its inherently deleterious excesses, from corrupting political actors and political life. Arguing that these two approaches are insightful, important, and incomplete, I reengage (...) Aristotle’s account of money across the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics to theorize money as a vital but underexplored means of political subject formation. I illuminate how the use of money produces collective and constitutive relations that emerge by way of people’s engagements and entanglements with the things they produce, acquire, desire, and exchange. Bringing this to light also makes visible, I argue, how Aristotle understands money as something capable of being used to both bring about social justice and to pervasively corrupt the foundations of shared democratic life. Taking stock of this dual capacity of money, I show how money’s relationship to subjectivity simultaneously makes money the site of a seemingly intractable problem for politics under capitalism and the means to revive it and reconnect it to democratic life. (shrink)

Aristotle offers several arguments in Physics viii.8 for his thesis that, when something moves back and forth, it does not undergo a single motion. These arguments occur against the background of a sophisticated theory, expounded in Physics v—vi, of the basic structure of motions and of other continuous entities such as times and magnitudes. The arguments in Physics viii.8 stand in a complex relation to that theory. On the one hand, Aristotle evidently relies on the theory in a (...) number of crucial steps. Yet in other steps he seems to contradict or misapply the theory. This situation offers the occasion to examine Aristotle’s views about some fundamentals in the metaphysics of motion, while also raising questions about the unity of the text which has come down to us as the Physics. (shrink)

In Dimensions of Private Law, Professor Stephen Waddams describes the obstacles that an adequate classification of private law must overcome. The purpose of this essay is to offer a theoretical account of legal classification that explains how these obstacles can be overcome and what the resulting classification of private law might look like. I begin with the catalogue of obstacles that Waddams presents and argue that, because they are rooted in misconceptions about the classificatory project, they pose no threat to (...) an adequate conception of legal classification. In search of such a conception, I consider how three great legal theorists – Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel – answer three fundamental classificatory questions about private law. First, what is the unitythat underlies the seemingly chaotic array of legal instances? Second, what is the principle of differentiationthat applies to this unity? Third, how are legalinstancessubsumed under this differentiated unity? The focus of this essay is the enduring significance of Kant’s conception of legal classification, which provides an alternative to Waddams’ conception and offers a set of coherent answers to the fundamental classificatory questions. In contrast, both Aristotle and Hegel respond to the fundamental classificatory questions by providing a conception of the unity of private law that fails to cohere with their ensuing accounts of its differentiation. (shrink)

Aristotle's thesis concerning the primacy of the ontological question did not, however, remain uncontested. For the concept of being becomes meaningless if only the being of the particular is admitted. The nominalistic repudiation of ontology, whereby the concept of being is reduced to a mere flatus vocis, runs through the history of philosophy since the medieval controversies around the problem of universals. But Aristotle's thesis could be questioned without adhering to the nominalistic definition of reality as a mere (...) summation of particulars. Thus transcendental idealism did not oppose Aristotle's ontological starting point on nominalistic grounds but for its inherent dogmatism, and it put the "critical question" in the place of the "ontological question." This shift was particularly important in the development of German Philosophy in the twentieth century. The critical question plays the role of the first philosophy and yields two major disciplines: methodology and epistemology. Critical philosophy did not mean one dedicated to the criticism of existing philosophical doctrines but was envisaged instead as the foundation for a possible system of philosophy. The preparatory function of the critical question was explicitly recognized by Kant, who identified the systematic part of philosophy with the traditional contents of metaphysics, purified, however, of all dogmatic assertions. The critical question did not embrace the entire scope of his philosophical work, and Kant labored to build the system to the end of his life, as the fragments of his Opus Postumum testify. (shrink)

The Mishnah - the second-century law code that lays the foundation, after Scripture, of normative Judaism - encompasses all subjects that pertain to the life of the Jewish nation and as such provides a systematic basis for Israel's social order and world view. Any social program has its own politics, economics, and philosophy which together define a given social entity rather than any other. And any system defining the structure of a society strives to establish a set of harmonised and (...) coherent fundamental principles, viewpoints and attitudes in treating the components of its theory of the community. It has been long shown that the Mishnah is such a well-composed theory of world-construction. It is demonstrated here how its specific message concerning the politics and economics that define the social order recapitulate those of Aristotle. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details. (shrink)

It's time to pick up your fedora and embark on a philosophical journey through Discworld! Terry Pratchett is world-famous for the narrative verve and surreal humour of his novels. But now meet another Terry Pratchett – a man of serious metaphysical ideas and sophisticated philosophical insights. In Philosophy and Terry Pratchett thirteen professional philosophers survey such key philosophical issues as personal identity, the nature of destiny, the value of individuality, the meaning of existentialism, the reality of universals and the existence (...) of alternative realities. In considering these and many other equally fascinating themes, close reference is made to more than 35 Discworld novels as well as to the ideas of some of history's greatest philosophers including Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Rawls. During your journey, you will be surprised by numerous provocative conclusions including the startling claim that the existence of Discworld is logically possible! (shrink)

A single document, the Talmud of Babylonia – that is to say, the Misha, a philosophical law code that reached closure at ca 100 C.E., as read by the Gemara, a commentary to thirty-seven of the sixty-three tractates of that code, compiled in Babylonia, reaching closure by ca 600 C.E. – from ancient times to the present day has served as the medium of instruction for all literate Jews, teaching, by example alone, the craft of clear thinking, compelling argument, correct (...) rhetoric. That craft originated in Athens with Plato’s Socrates for the medium of thought, and with Aristotle for the method of thought, and predominated in the intellectual life of Western civilization thereafter. When we correlate the modes of thought and analysis of the Talmud with the ones of classical philosophy that pertain, we see how the Talmud works, by which I mean, how its framers made connections and drew conclusions, for the Mishnah and Gemara respectively. And when we can explain how the Talmud works, I claim, we may also understand why it exercised the remarkable power that it did for the entire history of Judaism from its closure in the 7th century into our own time. These two questions – how it works, why it won – define the task of this presentation. (shrink)

In this paper, we will critically examine the notion of rationality and the disabling instinct of self-preservation that play out in human relationships. That “man is a rational animal,” as Aristotle declared is usually taken for granted in social studies. But whether humans act rationally all the time, and in all circumstances remains questionable. Here, we shall investigate this concern from a decolonial perspective by engaging some contradictions thrown up in the context of coloniality within which a section of (...) humanity dehumanizes the rest. The question then is, how rational is the intellectual program of coloniality? Taking a cue from conversational thinking that places the notion of relationship at the center of decolonial analysis, we argue that coloniality fractures the inter and intra-racial relationships due mainly to the instinct of self-preservation that overwhelms human rationality. What has emerged today as the superior/inferior divide, racialism, classism, internal colonialism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, xenophobia, and genocide are some of the consequences of warped and uncritical thinking driven by an extreme form of the instinct of self-preservation. We argue that the promotion of critical (higher-order) thinking in addition to ordinary (lower-order) thinking could be crucial in a decolonial program. (shrink)

Malink’s interpretation is designed to validate Aristotle’s claims of validity and invalidity of syllogistic-style arguments, as well as his conversion claims. The remaining sorts of claims in Aristotle's text are allowed to fall out as they may. Thus, not all of Aristotle’s examples turn out correct: on some occasions, Aristotle claims that a given pair of terms yields a true (false) sentence of a given type although, under Malink’s interpretation, the sentence in question is false (true). (...) Similarly, some of Aristotle’s claims of invalidity of nonsyllogistic-style arguments come out false. For example, under Malink’s interpretation, ‘A applies to all B’ and ‘B necessarily applies to all C’ entail ‘A necessarily applies to some B’, contrary to what Aristotle says. (shrink)

In Prior Analytics 1.15 Aristotle undertakes to establish certain modal syllogisms of the form XQM. Although these syllogisms are central to his modal system, the proofs he offers for them are problematic. The precise structure of these proofs is disputed, and it is often thought that they are invalid. We propose an interpretation which resolves the main difficulties with them: the proofs are valid given a small number of intrinsically plausible assumptions, although they are in tension with some claims (...) found elsewhere in Aristotle’s modal syllogistic. The proofs make use of a rule of propositional modal logic which we call the possibility rule. We investigate how this rule interacts and coheres with the core elements of the modal syllogistic. (shrink)

Maimonides uses Aristotelian philosophical idiom to articulate his moral philosophy, but there are fundamental differences between his and Aristotle’s conceptions of moral psychology and the nature of the moral agent. The Maimonidean conception of volition and its role in repentance and ethical self-correction are quite un-Aristotelian. The relation between this capacity to alter one’s character and the accessibility of ethical requirements given in the Law is explored. This relation helps explain why for Maimonides practical wisdom is not recognized as (...) a virtue, and why ethical perfection (a requirement for human perfection) is achievable even by those long-established in ethically unsound dispositions. The power of will to “restore the soul” (by following the prescriptions of the Law) when character is disordered is a significant departure from Aristotelian philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Cheryl Abbate’s article in this journal makes the case that many nonhuman animals are “political” in the Aristotelian sense. Moreover, Abbate rejects the claim that anthrôpos is the most political of animals. While the aim to deflate often overexaggerated distinctions between us and other animals is laudable, in the following I suggest that Abbate’s evidence from cognitive ethology, and her application of evolutionary principles, fall short of demonstrating other animals to be as political as anthrôpos.

It is commonly taken for granted that Thomas Aquinas employed Aristotelian principles in his philosophical system to promote a “program” of Christianizing the Stagyrite. However, the question of why Thomas used Aristotle on a particular point can help uncover the goals of his scholastic project. The case of divine illumination theory is especially enlightening in this regard. From the zenith of Augustinian illumination epistemology as expressed in Bonaventure to its disappearance in Scotus, the influence of Aristotle’s notion of (...) active intellect can be clearly traced throughout the thirteenth century. Thomas is especially important in this chronology, because he “internalizes” Bonaventure’s illumination theory and encapsulates it in man’s innate power of abstraction. In determining his motivation for doing so, this study explores the connection between epistemology and volition in both Bonaventure and Thomas, and postulates that Thomas adopted Aristotelian principles to safeguard a doctrine of free will in his volition theory. (shrink)

This paper is a reading of Aristotle's book on justice (Book V of the Ethics) as what he says it is, a study of the disposition or inclination towards doing just (or unjust) acts. In that light, the content of Aristotle's famous treatments of distributive and corrective justice are only incidental, for their true role is as clues to a meaningful picture of the Just and the Unjust person. Aristotle's treatment of Being Just as a specific virtue (...) is the most detailed treatment he offers of any moral virtue. Being Just as distributive justice emerges as a commitment to the equal treatment of all citizens, but to an equality tempered by always contentious considerations of merited reward. Being Just as corrective justice is a commitment to protecting and repairing the sphere of each person's dignity and opportunity from damaging and sometimes malicious interactions. But more is required. For Being Just means overcoming the disordered and misdirected desire that both Aristotle and Plato call "pleonexia", wanting - tyrant-like - more-of-and-more-than. If that is overcome by re-directed libido, the virtuous will then have to integrate more subtle elements if they are to achieve an inclination to this tempered, but real equality. These elements are two. One is present only implicitly, the passion Aristotle calls nemesis, a demand that the world - and justice within the world - must never permit an evil person to go unpunished or a good one, to suffer harm. That passion cannot be admitted, but at best can only be temporarily stilled. The second impediment arises from the dynamic of human communities that are made up of diverse and actively striving individuals: such citizens, haunted by suspicion grounded in their own pleonexia, demand that the community be one of laws. That creates a true dilemma, for in Aristotle's estimation, no set of rules can cabin any virtue. The Rule of Law is in tension with the particularity of justice in real life, and that tension is ultimately only bearable through the invention of equity, the trusted deviation from the law to preserve the law. In making this abstract I have had to leave untouched the subject matter of the first and two last chapters, but in my paper I do treat these. More importantly, I also show how all political community and the inclination to seek to be a Just Person rests on a gracious act of reciprocal commitment. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Aristotle’s idea of epikeia, or equity, in relation to the contemporary abortion debate. Equity is the rule of justice that insists we gobeyond the letter of the law in those cases in which following it would be harmful. One consequence of this is that we do not need to create exceptionless laws,since laws can admit exceptions for the sake of a higher good. I argue that this arrangement appears to be a reasonable way to (...) move the abortion debate forward, since the common good would mandate the prohibition of most abortions, but applications of equity would protect access to abortion for those considered most in need. In the end, though, despite this reasonableness, its usefulness for reforming abortion law is limited due to the current hostility of the American legislature to natural law as a higher form of justice. (shrink)

This dissertation studies how Aristotle understands and justifies his Rhetorical Art. It proceeds by explicating the Art in its intellectual context. Rhetoric emerges as a dynamic investigation of human affairs working through the "given" in speech and thought to a plausible account, while giving consideration to the opinions and characters of both speaker and audience within the horizon of a particular occasion. The basic dynamic determines a structure which is comparable to Socrates' requirements in the Phaedrus. That this is (...) the structure and dynamic is supported by considering the fundamentally contingent nature of human experience, understanding the inference types , common sense principles and starting points by which such experience is explicated, and placing such experience in three mutually exclusive genres. Aristotle's art is essentially the resulting plausible account while actual composition is supplementary. ;Aristotle limits the art by reference to dialectic and ethical life. When it is seen that Aristotle's Organon is not a science of logic and the Posterior Analytics is a rarely applicable mode of presentation, the point of dialectic becomes accessible. It too involves strenuous grappling with speech and thought, but its highest purpose lies in peirastic. Peirastic and sophistry are uses of dialectic which have a contrasting moral color. Peirastic aims at the discovery of ignorance and, at the same time, the difference between accident and essence and knowledge and opinion: Being educated is essentially knowing what one does not know. ;What Socrates only alludes to as political art, Aristotle attempts to expound as praxis perfected into phronesis. Even Aristotle does no more than suggest the nature of phronesis negatively as simultaneously a seeking, a finding and an act which is both self-determination and self-knowledge, and none of these separately; it is profoundly disruptive of existing opinion and most clearly to be seen in the rejection of the laws and rules upon which, as deliberation, it is dependent. The Art differs from Gorgias' rhetoric in its emphasis on the plausible and in its subordination to an ethical self-determination that gains the weight of experience appropriated by intelligence and virtue. (shrink)

Many of the basic elements of Maimonides' moral psychology are Aristotelian, but there are some important respects in which Maimonides departs from Aristotle. One of those respect concerns the possibility of changing one's character. There is, according to Maimonides, redemptive possibility that Aristotle does not recognize. There is, according to Maimonides, a redemptive possibility that Aristotle does not recognize. This is based on the fact of revealed law. That is, if there is revealed law, then there is (...) guidance for the ordering of one's dispositions to what is good, even though the individual lacks practical wisdom. There is, in the Maimonidean account, both allowance for more plasticity of character, and at the same time a heightened responsibility for acknowledging what is ethically required. (shrink)

In the Categories Aristotle defined substance as that which is neither predicable of nor in another. In saying that a substance is not predicable of another, Aristotle meant to exclude genera and species from the category substance. Aman is a substance but not man. In saying that a substance is not in another, Aristotle meant to exclude property particulars from the category. A man is a substance, not his color. The Categories treats substances as simples. Though a (...) particular substance, Bucephalus the horse, has parts, it is nevertheless a single entity in the category substance and, hence, incomplex in the way a black thing or a running man are not. Black things and runners are complex because they are aggregates of substances and property particulars. Even if a horse is one substance and, thus, an entity, a horse is made of parts and one may wonder how it is related to its parts, as well as how its being made of parts coheres with the definition of substance given in the Categories. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 64.2 (2003) 149-157 [Access article in PDF] Introduction:The Uses of Historical Evidence in Early Modern Europe Jacob Soll A leading figure at Cambridge University after World War II, Herbert Butterfield seems an unlikely forerunner of the kind of cultural history that is practiced today. Yet Butterfield was a pioneer. He saw the origins of modern historical consciousness in the scholarly practices of (...) the Renaissance. These practices, he maintained, were a significant part of the slow shift to rationalist thinking that occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. In his remarkable work, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (1940), Butterfield sought to show that Machiavelli's inductive use of historical examples was part of a larger empirical movement that slowly replaced religious and classical authority with the new authority of observation and deduction. Like Ernst Cassirer, he saw Machiavelli as an historical counterpart to Bacon, Descartes, Vesalius, and even Copernicus: The significance of the "experimental method" itself was not fully realized or clearly established until after the emergence in the seventeenth century of new scientific apparatus—the telescope, the microscope, and more accurate measuring-instruments for example; and even Bacon and Descartes, whose names have closely been associated with the scientific revolution, can hardly be said to have realized the implications of the new method. There is a transition then, but it is slower than many people have imagined and someone has rightly said that the middle ages do not come to an end until the seventeenth century. Machiavelli, as we shall see, has a place in the transition, for in the political and human sciences as well as the natural sciences a change did occur. Machiavelli is interesting not because he is a modern man [End Page 149] born out of due time, but because he illustrates one of the mediations by which the transition was accomplished. 1Butterfield turned to Emile Durkheim's sociological study of Renaissance education to understand the relationship between traditions of learning and the cosmological shift of the seventeenth century. 2 Durkheim had used Rabelais's portrait of Pantagruel's education to illustrate how the study of ancient language and the rise of historical erudition were not only instruments of aesthetic culture, but also constituted "a mine of positivist knowledge." Citing Erasmus, Durkheim himself maintained that linguistic philology was a preparation for higher disciplines—graviores disciplinæ. 3 The English historian agreed with the French sociologist: traditions of humanist learning were essential elements of a larger ethos of natural and practical studies that differentiated post-humanist Europe from the Middle Ages.Although his later work concentrated on questions of historiography, Butterfield never studied the full effect of historical practices on the learned culture of early modern Europe. 4 These papers seek to pick up where Butterfield left off, to understand the effect that humanist historical consciousness had on educated Europe at large. They will show that questions of historical accuracy and verification were the common link among diverse disciplines between 1400 and 1800. Rather than looking for theories of history and historical method solely in the works of historians, they will examine how non-historians discussed history in terms of their own fields of study. They will show how thinkers in the domains of architecture, art, astrology, education, law, medicine, natural philosophy, politics, and theology saw the importance of historical understanding and how they used it to shape their own particular forms of knowledge. By sketching an overview of the different applications of historical knowledge, we will begin to have a clearer view of the process by which humanism historicized the world of knowledge.Learned culture at the beginning of the seventeenth century is commonly associated with the rise of scientific authority. Church dogma and the Aristotelian logical tradition no longer sufficed to explain natural phenomena and to [End Page 150] quell the curiosity of the learned. 5 As Galileo so recklessly exclaimed, look into the telescope and witness with your own eyes that Aristotle was wrong about the moon. 6 For Galileo's colleague, the great Paduan Aristotelian... (shrink)

This book begins with a critique of moral relativism and proceeds to develop a realist account of practical wisdom. The central claims are that there are objective moral facts and that knowledge of these facts can be action-guiding. The justification for these claims involves explaining the role of imagination in moral judgment and action and also showing how a realist approach to morality enables us to better account for immorality, revealing it to involve ignorance, error or falsification. The book concludes (...) with an analysis of how the character of social relations is crucial to the formation of self-conceptions and the development of moral knowledge and moral imagination. (shrink)

Nobilitas is a study of the history of aristocratic philosophy from ancient Greece to the early twentieth century that aims at providing an alternative to the liberal democratic norms, which are propagated today as the only viable socio-political system for the world community. Jacob reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the social and cultural development of European civilization has, for twenty-five centuries, been based not on democratic or communist notions but, rather on aristocratic and nationalist notions. Beginning with the (...) political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and continuing through Renaissance and Baroque aristocratic philosophers, the German Idealists, and English and Italian nationalists, the study ends with the transformation of aristocratic philosophy in nineteenth century Germany into racist elitism. As such, the study includes a survey of the philosophical bases of racism and anti-Semitism. These topics have been systematically excluded from academic and political debate since the end of the last Great War. This study is a pioneering work in understanding and changing political ideologies. (shrink)

A great deal is compressed into this passage; pleasure is associated in important ways with our nature; it has a crucial role in moral education; we can be pleased and displeased correctly or incorrectly, and this has a place in making character; and pleasure is something that matters all through a human life. Some of the themes are introduced and discussed at earlier places in the Ethics; some receive fuller treatment in book 10. The idea that some things are naturally (...) pleasant and that the virtuous find pleasure in the correct things first occurrs in book 1. The centrality of pleasure to Aristotle's ethical inquiry is perhaps not obvious right away, but it is unmistakable when the Ethics is considered as a whole. Its relation to good is fundamental. (shrink)

A study of the ways Maimonides and Aquinas both borrow from Aristotle and depart from him, in regard to the issue of forgiveness. The paper explicates moral-psychological issues and normative issues, connecting them to the perfectionism of the philosophical anthropology shared by the three thinkers. The theistic commitments of Maimonides and Aquinas ground important departures from Aristotle regarding the possibility of moral change and regarding moral relations between persons.

Aristotle's ethical theorizing contains resources for explaining what I call ‘ethical disability’. In theories such as Kant's and Mill's it is important that criteria of right action be accessible to anyone. Aristotle's moral psychology yields a plausible account of how they are not available to everyone. Unless a correct appreciation of good is part of the agent's second nature, the agent will not recognize ethical requirements, and will not have the resources to alter his judgments. Often, bad action (...) is not a matter of agents' flouting or violating criteria of right action that they recognize, but is a matter of agents' regarding as choiceworthy things that are in fact no good, and the agents are unable to appreciate this because of their vices. However, on the Aristotelian view, this is not a condition that diminishes responsibility, because of how voluntariness is interpreted. Some of the views of Susan Wolf and Bernard Williams are discussed in the development of this view of the moral landscape. (shrink)

Recent developments in philosophy and in criminology indicate that there are significant respects in which the two disciplines can be mutually informing. Many philosophers are increasingly interested in exploring empirical aspects of philosophical claims, and criminologists are finding their way past the alleged fact/value distinction and are rediscovering the moral significance of facts, especially regarding punishment and desistance. In some recent criminological studies there are implicit links to the British moralists such as David Hume and Adam Smith, and to (...) class='Hi'>Aristotle as well. This paper explicates those links and some of the possibilities for philosophy and criminology to be mutually informing. (shrink)

Blame and also punishment do not reach many agents in the sense that many agents are not motivated to ethically self‐correct, and in fact, may be worsened by these practices. The main reasons agents may not be reached by them are that the agent's second nature may make inaccessible to him a sound appreciation of ethical considerations, and the fixity of mature character may make ethical self‐correction practically impossible. Still, when they are ethically rationalized, blame and punishment seem to be (...) requirements. Even the most plausible secular or naturalistic ethics involves an important kind of incompleteness and unclarity concerning this issue. The Jewish and Christian traditions involve conceptions of the accessibility of ethical considerations and also the possibility of character change in ways that enable us to overcome the perplexity about blame and punishment. They are not ‘good for nothing’ even when they fail to improve agents. The religious traditions' conceptions of moral agency and the possibility of perfection enable us to see why there are reasons not to ethically ‘write off’ even persistently vicious agents. Moreover, we can see that the fulfilling of ethical requirements is an enabling condition for perfection that is not merely ethical. To highlight the contrast between the naturalistic view and the theistic view, Aristotle's moral psychology and moral epistemology are contrasted with those of Maimonides and Aquinas, both of whom borrow heavily from Aristotle, but fundamentally transform what they borrow. (shrink)