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  • Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle ed. by Michael Pakaluk and Giles Pearson
  • Peter Lautner
Michael Pakaluk and Giles Pearson (eds.). Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. x, 342. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-19-954654-1.With contributions by the editors and R. Heinaman, J. Dow, D. Charles, M. Schofield, A. Price, H. Segvic, G. Lawrence, and P. Destrée.

This volume is a collection of papers dealing with central issues of Aristotle’s practical philosophy, written with the overall aim of establishing connections between his own account and modern theories of action. There are two essays on pleasure (Heinaman and Dow), two on desire (Charles and Pearson), two on deliberation (Price and Segvic), one on phantasia (Schofield), one on akrasia (Charles), one on mixed actions (Pakaluk), and finally two on character (Lawrence and Destrée).

Aristotle’s account of pleasure has two major difficulties: how pleasure can be an activity (ἐνέργεια) rather than a change (κίνησις), and how to discover its differences in species. In Heinaman’s view, both accounts remain puzzling, the first because the examples mentioned by Aristotle are not in accord with the distinction, and the second because of the lack of coherent interpretation. To mention one query, Aristotle does not seem to believe that vicious and virtuous men differ so drastically that their pleasures are associated with different senses and faculties; the difference might rather be in intensity, but this contradicts the way in which Aristotle determines distinctions between kinds. Dow argues that Aristotle has a coherent theory of emotions with the basic theses that emotions play a role in verdict formations and are experiences of pleasure or pain or both. It also implies that the pleasure and pain involved in emotions are both propositional and representational. Emotions are connected to desires, sometimes by definition, which are said to move the body (De anima III 10). Charles argues that the way desires move the body is inextricably psychophysical, so that there is no room for an explanation stressing the causal influence of a non-corporeal entity (desire) on a corporeal one (limbs), a suggestion that goes against many modern assumptions.

In the same vein, Pearson points out that Aristotle’s account allows for nonrational desires by emphasizing the role of phantasia in setting the goal of desire. It can be contrasted favorably with the contemporary view according to which the source of motivation is to be identified with perceived reasons. Hence, Aristotle’s account can explain desiderative impulses in animals as well. As for the causal function of phantasia in animal movements, Schofield claims that not all desire is prepared by phantasia. Rather, Aristotle concentrates on a disjunction: sense-perception or phantasia and thinking can serve as cognitive input into desire. By thinking, we must mean deliberative reasoning, which is discussed in two papers. [End Page 128]

The common target of these analyses is the Humean thesis according to which reason is the slave of the passions. Price shows that deliberation has a specific role in setting down the goal of action, whereas Segvic demonstrates that deliberation is not an instrumental reasoning; it is not simply a reasoning that serves a practical purpose, but an effective direction of one’s will by means of reasoning. But what happens when it seems that we act in a way contrary to the voice of reason? In his second paper Charles examines the passages (NE 7.4–10) that fall outside the main concern of those who study the notion of akrasia. The upshot is that in Aristotle’s account the weak acratic does not fully understand that x is the best thing to do, although he does not suffer a pure intellectual fault in his understanding that x is the best, and that the states which are essentially involved in practical reasoning are the ways of responding to what is of value, which must be understood in terms of being attracted to act in a certain way and so is not merely a belief.

Discussing responsibility for actions, Pakaluk claims that mixed actions (actions which we choose, although we would not choose them in normal circumstances) and actions...

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