Empeiria and Good Habits in Aristotle’s Ethics

My goal in this paper is to draw attention to the importance of empeiria in Aristotle’s account of moral development in his ethical treatises, and concretely in his account of the formation of phronêsis. I argue that empeiria and good habits make different and complementary contributions to our moral development and to the content of our deliberations about how to act. While good habits equip us with a grasp of the proper ends of action, empeiria is in great part responsible for our eventual success in achieving such ends, by providing us with the cognition of particulars required both to properly recognize those ends in our concrete circumstances and to successfully implement the right means towards them—two crucial functions of phronêsis.