Karen Margrethe Nielsen

Vice in the Nicomachean Ethics

This paper aims to articulate Aristotle’s general account of vice, an account that applies to all special vices, regardless of their spheres of action and emotion, and whether they are states of excess or deficiency. Vice is ignorance in the decision (ἡ ἐν τῇ προαιρέσeι ἄγνοια): the paper explains what this means.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE SOUL: ARISTOTLE ON LACK OF DELIBERATIVE AUTHORITY

My aim in this paper is to examine Aristotles puzzling and contentious claim in Politics 1.13 that the deliberative faculty in women is ‘without authority’ (ἄκυρον): The freeman rules over the slave after another manner from that in which the male rules over the female, or the man over the child; although the parts of the soul are present in all of them, they are present in different ways. For the slave lacks the deliberative faculty (τὸ βουλeυτικόν) altogether; the woman has it, but it is without authority (ἄκυρον), and the child has it, but it is immature (ἀτeλές). ( Pol . 1.13, 1160a10-15)