This paper is about the interplay between intuition and reason in Aristotle’s moral psychology. After discussing briefly some other uses of ‘intuition’ in Aristotle’s texts, I look closely at A...

This paper is about the interplay between intuition and reason in Aristotle’s moral psychology. After discussing briefly some other uses of ‘intuition’ in Aristotle’s texts, I look closely at A...

An adequate moral theory must – or so many philosophers have argued – be compatible with the attitudes and practical requirements of deep friendship. Bernard Williams suggested that the decision procedure required by both deontology and consequentialism inserts a fetishising filter between the natural moral motivation of any normal person to prioritise friends and the decision to act on it. But this injects ‘one thought too many’ into the moral reaction mechanism. It is standardly assumed that virtue ethics is somehow (...) immune to this objection. The present article explores this assumption and finds it wanting in various respects. Virtue ethics filters friendship throughphronesisand thus inserts an extra thought into the mechanism in question. To escape Williams's curse, the only way is to argue that the extra thought required by virtue ethics is not ‘one thought too many’. The article closes with an attempt to show that, contra deontology, the friendship motivation in virtue ethics is derived from the moral virtue, not the intellectual filter, and, contra consequentialism,phronesisdoes not require the maximisation of value. The presumed advantage of virtue ethics must lie in the content of its filter rather than the filter's non-existence. (shrink)

In anticipation of updating annotated bibliographies on Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics for Oxford Bibliography Online, I have sought to keep a running tabulation of all books, edited collections, translations, and journal articles which are primarily devoted to Aristotle’s ethical and political writings (including their historical reception but excluding neo–Aristotelian virtue ethics). In general, criteria for inclusion in this bibliography are that the work be: (1) publication in a peer–reviewed or academic/university press between 2011–2020; (2) “substantially” devoted to one of Aristotle’s (...) ethical or political works (e.g., Pol, EN, EE, MM, Athenian Constitution, Protrepticus); and/or (3) devoted to ethical or political concepts examined elsewhere in Aristotle’s corpus (e.g., Rhetoric, Poetics, zoological treatises, etc.). I encourage scholars to alert me about published works that I have omitted or listed incorrectly. (shrink)