Aristotle's Philosophy of Action (review)

Book Reviews David Charles. Aristotle's Philosophy of Action. Ithaca: CorneU University Press, x984. Pp. xi + ~8~. $39.95. This is an ambitious book. To arrive at a comprehensive picture, Charles, drawing material primarily from the Physics, the De Motu Animalium, and the Ethics, explores the meaning of numerous passages and determines their implications for Aristotle's philosophy of action. Moreover, he frames the questions he directs at Aristotle's text to reflect current developments in the theory of action. The first chapter provides the ontological foundation for the analysis developed in subsequent chapters. Just as an ontology of events figures importantly in modern theories, an ontology of processes (kineseis)figures prominently in Charles' reading of Aristotle. Having defined the notion of process, Charles turns in the second chapter to the specification of necessary and sufficient conditions for Z's being a voluntary action and Z's being a basic act token. Then he takes up Aristotle's concept of desire and its role in deliberation. The third and fourth chapters discuss acras/a. On several recent accounts of practical reasoning, acras/a is problematic because the acratic act violates a principle of choice recognized by the theory, namely, the identity, the sufficiency or the uniqueness thesis. Charles' Aristotle does not endorse any of these principles. His notion of practical deliberation is such that a rational agent can conclude that x is best but intentionally do Y instead of X. Charles argues in the final chapter that Aristotle envisages several levels of explanation of human action (viz., a teleological, a rational, a psychophysical causal and a physical causal level). The different levels are consistent with each other but since the lower levels are only "non-causally sufficient" for the higher levels, the latter cannot be eliminated in favor of the former. At the level of physical explanation, Aristotle is a materialist; at the teleological level he is a non-reductionist. Charles is determined to map out Aristotle's views on a grid provided by contemporary philosophy of action, and therein lies the book's greatest strength. No other author has made a similar global effort to articulate and explicate Aristotle's analyses of processes, types of action, practical reasoning and acras/a in terms of modern theory. This approach often yields stimulating comparisons; it leads, for example, to the finding that Aristotelian process theory provides an appealing alternative to Davidson's analysis of events and to the rival account of Goldman. This programmatic approach, however, sometimes obscures the issues and produces troublesome interpretations. The obscurity is largely the result of Charles' [441] 442 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:3 JULY I987 style. He assumes familiarity with both the Aristotelian corpus and modern theory of action and thus he plunges into the discussion of technical questions without providing sufficient background for many readers. Equally troublesome is his expropriation of the diverse formulae employed by modern philosophers, which results in the use of a large number of quite different schemas to express Aristotle's thought. Furthermore , in order to find modern analogues, Charles ascribes certain positions to Aristode which are not likely to bear careful scrutiny. The attribution of equivalence class materialism to Aristotle falls in this category as does the separation of valuational from motivational factors in practical deliberation. At a later stage of the conversation, Charles tends to transform ideas introduced earlier and this too threatens the cogency of some of his conclusions. For instance, the difference between a basic and a non-basic action seems at first to follow from the identification of the former with a process and the latter with an activity, but this line of argument is jettisoned when certain processes are subsequently classified as nonbasic acts. Another case in point is the description of the practical syllogism in the second chapter and the explanation of acras/a in the third and fourth chapters. The initial account makes desire a mode of accepting the conclusion of a practical syllogism which issues in an action. However, in the case of acrasia, even though the acratic agent has drawn the conclusion that doing X is better than Y, she/he employs a second practical syllogism, concludes...