Rachana Kamtekar

Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character

Situationist social psychologists tell us that information about people’s distinctive character traits, opinions, attitudes, values, or past behavior is not as useful for determining what they will do as is information about the details of their situations. One would expect, they say, that the possessor of a given character trait (such as helpfulness) would behave consistently (helpfully) across situations that are similar in calling for the relevant (helping) behavior, but under experimental conditions, people’s behavior is not found to be cross-situationally consistent (the likelihood that a person who has behaved helpfully on one occasion will behave helpfully on the next is hardly above chance). Instead, across a range of situations, the person’s behavior tends to converge on the behavioral norm for those situations. So situationists reason that people’s situations, rather than their characters, are the explanatorily powerful factors in determining why different people behave differently. They add that if behavior does not covary with character traits, then ordinary people, “folk psychologists” who try to explain and predict

A Companion to Socrates

A companion to Socrates , A companion to Socrates , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)

Knowing by likeness in empedocles

Contrary to the Aristotelian interpretation of Empedocles views about cognition, according to which all cognition, like perception, is due to the compositional likeness between subject and object of cognition, this paper argues that when Empedocles says that we know one thing by another (e.g. earth by earth or love by love), he is characterizing analogical reasoning, an intellectual activity quite different from perception (which is explained by the fit between effluences and pores). The paper also explores the idea that strife and love describe, in addition to physical separation and composition, the mental activities of analyzing and composing.

Speaking with the same voice as reason

uf6e0uf76fuf76euf774uf765uf76duf770uf76fuf772uf761uf772uf779 readers of Greek ethics tend to favour those accounts of the virtuous ideal according to which virtue involves the development of our non-rational—appetitive and emotional— motivations aswell as of our rationalmotivations. So our contemporaries find much of interest and sympathy in Aristotle’s conception of virtue as a condition inwhich reasondoes not simply override our appetites and emotions, but these non-rational motivations themselves ‘speak with the same voice as reason’.2 By contrast, the Stoicuf6e0uf76fuf76euf774uf765uf76duf770uf76fuf772uf761uf772uf779 readers of Greek ethics tend to favour those accounts of the virtuous ideal according to which virtue involves the development of our non-rational—appetitive and emotional— motivations aswell as of our rationalmotivations. So our contemporaries find much of interest and sympathy in Aristotle’s conception of virtue as a condition inwhich reasondoes not simply override our appetites and emotions, but these non-rational motivations themselves ‘speak with the same voice as reason’.2 By contrast, the Stoic

Plato on the attribution of conative attitudes

Abstract Platos Socrates famously claims that we want (βούλɛσθαı) rather than what we think good (Gorgias 468bd); he also claims that we desire (ἐπıθυμɛĩν) things that we think are good, which are sometimes in fact bad (Meno 77de). Drawing on similarities between Platos treatment of conative and cognitive attitudes, this paper shows how Platos various accounts of the relationship between our conative attitudes and the good account for the norm-responsiveness of our conative attitudes.

Speaking with the same voice as reason Personification in Plato’s psychology

uf6e0uf76fuf76euf774uf765uf76duf770uf76fuf772uf761uf772uf779 readers of Greek ethics tend to favour those accounts of the virtuous ideal according to which virtue involves the development of our non-rational—appetitive and emotional— motivations aswell as of our rationalmotivations. So our contemporaries find much of interest and sympathy in Aristotle’s conception of virtue as a condition inwhich reasondoes not simply override our appetites and emotions, but these non-rational motivations themselves ‘speak with the same voice as reason’.2 By contrast, the Stoicuf6e0uf76fuf76euf774uf765uf76duf770uf76fuf772uf761uf772uf779 readers of Greek ethics tend to favour those accounts of the virtuous ideal according to which virtue involves the development of our non-rational—appetitive and emotional— motivations aswell as of our rationalmotivations. So our contemporaries find much of interest and sympathy in Aristotle’s conception of virtue as a condition inwhich reasondoes not simply override our appetites and emotions, but these non-rational motivations themselves ‘speak with the same voice as reason’.2 By contrast, the Stoic

Studying Ancient Political Thought Through Ancient Philosophers: The Case of Aristotle and Natural Slavery

This paper examines Aristotle’s view that there are natural slaves, able-bodied people who lack the capacity to deliberate about the good and bad in life, who are ideally suited to be ‘tools of action’ for practically intelligent masters. After reconstructing Aristotle’s reasoning for the view that there are natural slaves in Politics I, and proposing a philosophical motivation for his interest in natural slavery, the paper reflects on what this case suggests about scholarly engagement with the political views of ancient philosophers when these are so contrary to our own.

Comments on Nancy Snow, ‘Generativity and Flourishing’

AME Pasadena November 2014 In her rich and wide-ranging paper, Nancy Snow argues that there is a virtue of generativity—an other-regarding desire to invest one’s substance in forms of life and work that will outlive the self (p. 10). By ‘virtue’ Snow means not just a desirable or praiseworthy quality of a person, but more precisely, as Aristotle defined it, a disposition to respond to certain facts in the world as reasons for acting, guided by a practical wisdom that ensures the appropriateness of these actions to the circumstances (p. 13). Among Snow’s reasons for classing generativity as a virtue are the fact that it is necessary (although not sufficient) for flourishing, that it is other-regarding, that it could become dispositional, that it fits into forms of life Aristotle counts as flourishing (p. 14) and that it is a mean between a deficiency (rejectivity, self-absorption and stagnation) and an excess (intense ego-driven desire to leave a legacy) (pp. 15–16). There seems to me an ambiguity in Snow’s thesis, between the claims that generativity itself is a virtue (p. 12) and that certain expressions of generativity are virtuous (p. 9). If her thesis is the former, I do not think Aristotle could accept it; if it is the latter, then she has a closer ally and antecedent in Plato, and in any case some reasons to distance herself from Aristotle.