This book presents a novel interpretation of Aristotle's account of how shame instils virtue, and defends its philosophical import. Shame is shown to provide motivational continuity between the actions of the learners and the virtuous dispositions that they will eventually acquire.

I argue that a study of the Nicomachean Ethics and of the Parva Naturalia shows that Aristotle had a notion of attention. This notion captures the common aspects of apparently different phenomena like perceiving something vividly, being distracted by a loud sound or by a musical piece, focusing on a geometrical problem. For Aristotle, these phenomena involve a specific selectivity that is the outcome of the competition between different cognitive stimuli. This selectivity is attention. I argue that Aristotle studied the (...) common aspects of the physiological processes at the basis of attention and its connection with pleasure. His notion can explain perceptual attention and intellectual attention as voluntary or involuntary phenomena. In addition, it sheds light on how attention and enjoyment can enhance our cognitive activities. (shrink)

Two crucial questions, if unanswered, impede our understanding of Aristotle’s account of pleasure inenx.4-5: (1) What are the activities that pleasure is said to complete? (2) In virtue of what does pleasurealwaysaccompany these activities? The answers fall in place if we read Aristotle as responding to the Delian challenge that the finest, best and most pleasant are not united in one and the same thing (eni.8). I propose an ‘ethical’ reading ofenx.4 according to which the best activities in question are (...) those integral to the exercise of virtue. (shrink)

This article offers a new interpretation of Aristotle’s ambiguous and much-discussed claim that pleasure perfects activity. This interpretation provides an alternative to the two main competing readings of this claim in the scholarship: the addition-view, which envisages the perfection conferred by pleasure as an extra perfection beyond the perfection of activity itself; and the identity-view, according to which pleasure just is the perfect activity itself. The proposed interpretation departs from both these views in rejecting their assumption that pleasure cannot perfect (...) the activity itself, and argues that pleasure makes activity perfect by optimising the exercise of one’s capacities for that activity. Those who build or play music with pleasure do so better than those who do not delight in these activities. The basis of this interpretation is Aristotle’s little-read remarks from the following chapter, i. e. NE x.5, about how pleasure “increases” the activity. (shrink)

En el pasaje 1147b6-9 de la Ética Nicomáquea, Aristóteles subraya que el akratḗs es capaz de arrepentimiento sin indicar cómo, pues ello debe ser escuchado de los fisiólogos. Este trabajo, no obstante, sostiene que Aristóteles no deja este problema sin respuesta: dado que la educación es el marco en el que el hombre se ejercita, a lo largo de su vida, en el buen vivir, la construcción de la acción trágica en la Poética puede verse como una herramienta pedagógica que (...) permite una profundización en el conflicto entre la razón y las pasiones del akratḗs, y cuyo genuino aporte estriba en su capacidad de explotar sus páthē para él y encauzarlas hacia una reflexión, a través de un ejercicio deductivo, sobre su propia condición. (shrink)