The Aristotelian spoudaios as ethical exemplar in Finnis’s natural law theory

One provocative but frequently overlooked feature of John Finnis’s natural law theory is its appeal to the normative role of the Aristotelian spoudaios (the mature person of practical reasonableness). Finnis’s account of the basic requirements of practical reasonableness and defense of the methodological device of “focal meaning” both have recourse to Aristotle’s claim that, in ethics and politics, things should be judged in terms of how they appear to the mature practically reasonable person. The current paper examines the normative role played by the spoudaios within Finnis’s natural law theory and provides a defense of that role against the objection that it lacks justificatory force because it is dependent upon circular reasoning. Section one contextualizes Finnis’s use of the spoudaios by considering its Aristotelian origins and also sketches some reasons for its demise in subsequent moral theory. This serves as the basis for an assessment in section two of whether Finnis’s employment of the spoudaios as an ethical exemplar conflates explanation and justification, and therefore culminates in decisionism. The conclusion of the paper is that Finnis’s recourse to the spoudaios is not viciously circular, because it is grounded in the reflexive and dialogical mode of justification proper to ethical enquiry.

Judgement, decision, and integrity

Although Aristotle did not mention it, integrity can be understood in an Aristotelian framework. Seeing it in these terms will show that it is an executive virtue which concerns the existential well being of an agent. This analysis is not offered as an exegesis of Aristotle's text, but as an attempt to use an Aristotelian framework to understand a virtue deemed important today. This account will have the benefit of solving some problems relating to motivational internalism and, as such, will contribute to that recent current of thought which has been highlighting the importance of virtue thinking in moral theory. I will distinguish moral judgement from decision and show that moral judgement is dependent upon virtue more strongly than it is upon impartial rationality. I will suggest that integrity is the virtue to which moral judgement gives expression and is the virtue which links judgement to decision so as to overcome akrasia.

As fire burns : functional work and praxis in ontology

The context: the historical and philosophical demise of the Marxist model of praxis as a unity of theory and practice organized by a Party in service of a Cause. The task: to remodel praxis by distinguishing it from functional work. The proving ground: the discourse of ontology. The thesis works through four types of ontology in its attempt to construct different ontological schemas for praxis and functional work. In the first three ontologies, Platonic, Aristotelian and relativist, ontological impasses occur in the accounts of the relation between one and the multiple, and of the existence of order. They prevent the successful construction of a schema for functional work. It is in the set-theory ontology of Alain Badiou that the means arise for the passage through these impasses and the definitive construction of distinct ontological schemas for functional work and praxis. This results in a new concept of praxis and a multiplication of its domains beyond politics to science, art and love

The purpose of the PhD : theorising the skills acquired by students

In the past decade there has been a marked push for the development of employability skills to be part of the PhD process. This push is generally by stakeholders from above and outside the PhD process, i.e. government and industry, who view skills as a summative product of the PhD. In contrast, our study interviewed stakeholders inside the PhD process – twenty final‐year, full‐time Australian PhD students – to provide a bottom‐up perspective into the skills question. Using grounded theory procedures we theorise the skills students develop during the PhD as a formative developmental process of acquiring intellectual virtues. Drawing on Aristotelian theory, we propose that theorising the PhD as a process of acquiring intellectual virtues offers a more robust and conceptually richer framework for understanding students’ development during the PhD than the instrumental focus on skills evident in contemporary debates.

Inventing (a) life: deconstruction and the praxis and poiesis of narrative

Deconstruction often sits awkwardly between the realm of literary studies and criticism, and philosophy proper. This paper explores the contribution that a deconstructive literacy might have for those engaged in writing narrative, as a practice and a product. Taking up Kristeva's reading of Arendt, and the Aristotelian categories of praxis and poiesis, it will be argued that the act of narrating life amounts to both the actual generation of the life it purports to describe, while also being a praxis in itself, one that need not produce anything, since the very act of engaging in/with it, leaves atraceless trace that itself is 'full of meaning'. Narrative, however, will not rest in either pole of Aristotle's binary structure. For Arendt, Kristeva will remind us, narrative is an activity that is very 'human', where we engender not just zoe, mere physiological life, but bios, a living that is not colonised by ends alone, and instead finding in itself a value, a fulfilment in its own process. Applied to the activity of story-making (autobiographical or otherwise), and also to pedagogical practice in the academy, this dual potential of narrative (at once to produce and to be an end unto itself) reframes the Beruf (calling) of creative writing. Deconstruction, in other words, assists us in appreciating the very ethical consequences of the labour of deciding where and when the story begins and ends, and who the protagonist is. Recalling us to the ontological implications of the thought of différance, this paper will attempt to demonstrate how the action of articulating the edges of story can be read as akin to that which turns the
featureless flux of time into bios, or human life that, according to Arendt, is what goes missing under totalitarianism.

Inaccurate autobiography – the ‘true-invention’ of a life

This paper takes the Aristotelian binary of praxis and poiesis and approaches the process of autobiography via its double lens. Drawing on a reading of Hannah Arendt done by Julia Kristeva, it considers the question of whether the activity (that is: praxis) of making-narrative might constitute an activity that is particularly ‘human’. It is framed by the playful and serious challenge offered by Derridean deconstruction to think two things at once, and to practice an inhabiting of binary ultimatums. Given this, it goes on to suggest that making in an autobiographical fashion, rather than involvinganythingprimarily representative or documentary, is more paradoxically akin to the invention of what is most true about that which we are in the habit of calling ‘our life’. Indeed, it can be argued that this praxisinvents that very ‘life’ – the latter being an entity or categorythat logically does not precede thesame writing that purports to describe it, but rather arises with its activity. This self-reflexivity (a manoeuvre that at once describes and invokes the very thing described) coincides with Derrida’s explication of invention’s mechanism.

The western humanist tradition

In this essay, I describe the development of at least three traditions of humanism: the Platonic, the Aristotelian, and the Promethean. These traditions have developed and intermingled so as to produce the complex and multifaceted face of humanism today. The first, Platonic tradition involves a turning away from the world in order to find wisdom and spirituality in a metaphysical realm. The Aristotelian tradition stresses the need to be at home in the world and happy in life even as we contemplate their unchangeable realities. It speaks of the perfectibility of human beings in muted tones and shows a reverence for the changeable world, as well as for the fragile, vulnerable, fallible, and mortal condition of being human. However, it is the Promethean tradition, with its celebration of science, progress, and technology, that has had the greatest effect upon modern civilization and spirituality. The culmination of these various streams of thought was the Enlightenment: a movement that its greatest philosopher, Immanuel Kant, interpreted as giving humanity permission, for the first time, to think for itself. But the Enlightenment leads to a disenchanted world in which spirituality seems to have no place. I argue that my subjectivity is a transcendent reality and that our very subjectivity becomes a real self and a social being insofar as it is drawn towards the Other. Accordingly, a humanist spirituality is possible in the form of reverence, love, and humility in the presence of transcendence. While religions give the names of their gods to this transcendence, humanism gives it other names: Subjectivity, the Other, Beauty, Goodness, and Truth.

Changing Aristotle's mind and world : critical notes on McDowell's Aristotle

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is central to John McDowell’s classic Mind and World. In Lectures IV and V of that work, McDowell makes three claims concerning Aristotle’s ethics: first, that Aristotle did not base his ethics on an externalist, naturalistic basis (including a theory of human nature); second, that attempts to read him as an ethical naturalist are a modern anachronism, generated by the supposed need to ground all viable philosophical claims on claims analogous to the natural sciences; and third, that a suitably construed Aristotelian conception of “second nature” can form the basis of a viable contemporary philosophy of mind, world, and normativity. This paper challenges each of these three claims. Aristotle’s ethics, we will claim alongside Terence Irwin, Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, and many premodern commentators, is based in the kind of physics, metaphysics, and metaphysical biology that McDowell says it cannot be. Historically, we will argue that McDowell’s argument that Aristotle’s ethical reasoning is “autonomous” or “self-standing” is distinctly modern, citing evidence from the leading medieval commentators on the Nicomachean Ethics. The felt need to which McDowell responds, of reading Aristotle’s ethical or political thought as wholly non-metaphysical, arises from out of the successes of the natural sciences in the modern world, which he agrees discredit the Aristotelian, teleological account of nature. In the final part of the paper, we propose that McDowell’s account of normativity, rooted in the non-metaphysical “second nature” he reads into Aristotle, we will contend, is as it stands inescapably relativistic. On a different note, we need also to recognize, as McDowell does not, that this is a new Aristotle, one shaped by our requirements and space of reasons, not the mind and world of the Greek Philosopher himself.

The distinctive common good

This paper defends the traditional distinctive notion of the common good against the claim that it is normatively redundant on the aggregative conception. The first two sections of the paper outline the different candidate conceptions of the common good and the normative role of the common good within natural law theories. The paper then considers some difficulties faced by the instrumental and aggregative conceptions, before developing an Aristotelian account of the distinctive conception of the common good and demonstrating its normative significance for a natural law account of political and legal authority.

Two functions of Aristotle's common advantage

This paper identifies two distinct functions of the common advantage in Aristotle’s political thought and argues that distinguishing these functions allows for a reconciliation of the individualist and holist aspects of the Aristotelian account of the polis. I demonstrate that the Aristotelian common advantage functions both as (i) a motivating reason for individuals to enter the polis and (ii) a normative reason — the political good of justice — that provides a criterion for an assessment of the correctness of constitutions (politeiai). The two functions of the common advantage are, I suggest, reconcilable insofar as the Aristotelian polis is best understood as a unity of order rather than a mere aggregation of individual citizens or an organic whole.