Perception in Aristotle's Ethics

Product Description

Perception in Aristotle's Ethics seeks to demonstrate that living an ethical life requires a mode of perception that is best called ethical perception. Specifically, drawing primarily on Aristotle’s accounts of perception and ethics in De anima and Nicomachean Ethics, Eve Rabinoff argues that the faculty of perception (aisthesis), which is often thought to be an entirely physical phenomenon, is informed by intellect and has an ethical dimension insofar as it involves the perception of particulars in their ethical significance, as things that are good or bad in themselves and as occasions to act. Further, she contends, virtuous action requires this ethical perception, according to Aristotle, and ethical development consists in the achievement of the harmony of the intellectual and perceptual, rational and nonrational, parts of the soul.

Rabinoff's project is philosophically motivated both by the details of Aristotle’s thought and more generally by an increasing philosophical awareness that the ethical agent is an embodied, situated individual, rather than primarily a disembodied, abstract rational will.

Review

“Stimulating and insightful, this is a very important book on Aristotle’s claims about ethical life and its relation to embodiment, and issues of ethical life more generally. The book stands on its own as a major contribution to this literature.” --Drew A. Hyland, author of Questioning Platonism: Continental Interpreters of Plato and Plato and the Question of Beauty


About the Author

EVE RABINOFF is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Perception in Aristotle's Ethics
By Eve Rabinoff Northwestern University PressCopyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3643-4


Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Chapter 1. The Perceptual Part of the Soul,
Chapter 2. Human Perception,
Chapter 3. The Duality of the Human Soul,
Chapter 4. Phronesis,
Conclusion,
Notes,
Bibliography,
General Index,
Index Locorum,

CHAPTER 1
The Perceptual Part of the Soul

My project is to show that perception plays an essential role in ethical life, for Aristotle: that perceiving well is a condition that makes possible the reasoning necessary to produce good choices that make an act virtuous. The aim in this chapter is to lay the groundwork for such an argument by discussing Aristotle's account of the perceptual part of the soul given De anima and other psychological works. Ultimately, I will argue that the virtuous person, the phronimos, is she who is able to act virtuously because she perceives the present situation in which she must act correctly as bearing possibilities for virtuous acts. Insofar as perception is of the present, it conditions the thinking and acting through which one's character is manifest. This chapter begins to establish that perception is a capacity that is robust enough to suit the task of apprehending the present, concrete reality in a way that is ethically relevant. Specifically, it will establish, first, that the power of perception is a part of the soul, in the sense that it is a first principle of animal life (section 1), and is fundamentally a power of awareness (section 3). Second, it will establish that incidental perceptibles are genuinely perceived, and therefore belong among the basic powers of perception (section 2). Third, it will establish that the secondary power of the perceptual part of the soul, the power of phantasia, expands the temporal horizons of current perceptions (section 4).

1. The Parts of the Soul
Before addressing the faculty of perception and its powers, it is necessary to address the parts of the soul. The soul, according to Aristotle, has two essential features that require that its configuration be a complex unity: on the one hand, the soul is responsible for the unity of the body (De anima 411a24–b14, 416a6–9), and, on the oth