Recollection, Inquiry, and Telic Sensitivity: Aristotle on Human Rationality
Under review - draft available upon request
In On Memory and Recollection, Aristotle makes the curious remark that recollection is “a sort of reasoning” (sullogismos tis) (453a10). The remark is especially puzzling in light of the automatic and associative character of what he takes to be typical recollective processes, since these features can create the impression that recollection is due merely to a triggering mechanism. In this paper, I propose a reading that resolves this apparent tension. On the proposed reading, the remark points to a basic form of rationality that I call 'telic sensitivity', one that familiar pictures of reasoning, such as the syllogistic model or the weighing of reasons, simply presuppose rather than articulate. Highlighting this philosophical implication is a further aim of the paper.
Becoming Virtuous and Becoming Wise
In progress - draft available upon request
Aristotle’s remark that excellence of character and intellectual excellence result from habituation and from teaching respectively and the unity of virtues thesis cause an apparent tension: the unity thesis seems to require that correct habituation lead not only to excellence of character but also to practical wisdom; but the latter, qua a species of intellectual excellence, is supposed to come about through teaching, not habituation. One natural strategy to address the tension is to interpret Aristotelian habituation as necessarily going hand in hand with teaching. In this paper, I develop such an interpretation.
The Unforgettable Excellence: Aristotle on Practical Reason
In progress
There are two curious remarks about (non-)forgetting in Nicomachean Ethics. By the end of 6.5, Aristotle notes that practical wisdom is not subject to forgetting (1140b28-30). In 1.10, he suggests that there is no forgetting about excellent activities, or the most valuable among them (hai timiōtatai) (1100b12-17). This paper offers a unified reading of these passages, according to which both practical wisdom and excellent activities are immune to forgetting by virtue of the distinctive form of self-relation in which a practically wise person is with herself. Read in this way, I suggest, the passages shed light on two broader issues: the apparent need for intellectual character traits even in more theoretical intellectual pursuits, and the theoretical–practical distinction.
Reasoning to Values
In progress
We are valuing creatures: we respond to persons and things around us with love, respect, admiration, awe, and the like. While such attitudes have a rational dimension insofar as an agent can often cite her reasons for them, it is less clear whether one can come to value something through reasoning. Indeed, it is a familiar fact that we typically do not—and perhaps cannot—come to value something merely by rehearsing an argument for it. Despite this phenomenology of value-learning, I argue that there is a robust sense in which we reason to values. What inclines us to think otherwise, I diagnose, is not the affective dimension of valuing, as one might initially suppose, but the kind of understanding it requires.