OVERVIEW

My research focuses on Aristotle’s views about the role of education in preparing people to lead happy lives. Aristotle was himself a teacher who sought, in his lectures on ethics, to prepare students to live well, so Aristotle’s activity as a teacher of ethics provides an overlooked source of evidence for his views on this matter. In my dissertation, I examine this evidence in order to reconstruct the theory of education that Aristotle’s ethical teachings presuppose. I show that, for Aristotle, the goal of higher education is to prepare students to live as free citizens, by helping them acquire their principles. And I show that higher education achieves that goal not by persuading students to hold certain values, but by clarifying for them the nature of the values they have internalized through habituation. I am also interested in the role that theoretical understanding plays in practical wisdom. I currently have under review a paper on this topic, which argues that Aristotle views theoretical understanding of the good life as necessary for the possession of phronēsis. Other topics which interest me include: (i) philosophy as a way of life, (ii) the interconnection between the theories of happiness propounded and practiced by the Hellenistic schools of philosophy and the other, non-practical, elements of their philosophies, and (iii) the various stages of education which work together to produce aretē (‘excellence’) and so equip people to live well.

DISSERTATION

“Aristotle’s Ēthikoi Logoi: On the Pedagogical Purpose of the Ethical Treatises” (abstract)
Committee: Sean Kelsey (advisor), Christopher Shields, David O’Connor, Jessica Moss (external member)

OTHER PROJECTS

“On the Pedagogical Purpose of the Ethical Treatises”

This project develops some work that originated in my dissertation and brings it to bear on a debate over whether phronēsis involves a “Grand End”, which is to say, a clear and articulate sketch of the basic components of a happy life and how they fit together. This debate, then, is a debate over the question whether a theoretically articulated grasp of the good life is necessary for the possession of phronēsis. I argue that we can settle this question by settling a related question about the pedagogical purpose of the ethical treatises. The ethical treatises clearly present an outline sketch of the “Grand End”. Hence, if the purpose of the ethical treatises is to teach phronēsis, Aristotle thinks that phronēsis involves a grasp of the “Grand End”. Hence, we can proceed, like Meno, via hypothesis and focus on the antecedent of the previous conditional—the question of whether or not the ethical treatises aim at teaching phronēsis. In the paper, I argue that they do, and I present a number of novel arguments for that conclusion.

“Aristotle and the Archai of Ethics”

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that only the well-habituated in order to engage successfully in ethics, since the well-habituated ‘have or can easily get the starting points’ of ethics. Some interpreters have understood these remarks as an allusion to the so-called endoxic method. I think this is mistaken. In this paper, after presenting my reasons for rejecting that interpretation, I present an alternative interpretation. My interpretation breaks down into three parts. First, I argue that the things that we must use as a starting point is a true but preliminary description of the object sought. Second, I argue that that preliminary description serves as a starting point in inquiry by identifying the topics that must be clarified and made determinate in order to furnish a complete account. Third, I argued that in order to use this preliminary description in the appropriate way, we must trust it in a way that is only possible for those who have themselves that it is true through repeated experience.

“Ethos and Logos: Aristotle’s Two Stages of Education”

This project investigates the distinction Aristotle often makes between education in habits (ethos) and education in reason (logos). Several prominent scholars (e.g., McDowell, Broadie) have argued that this distinction picks out two aspects of a single process, a process that involves both the formation of desire through habituation and the instruction or reason through the advice and exhortation of one’s parents and elders. The idea that lies behind this view is that the process through which one’s reason is formed into phronēsis is not a separate stage of education that occurs after habituation, but just is the process of habituation. One appeal of this view is that it allows Aristotle to maintain that phronēsis is acquired, not through a process of theoretical instruction that is distinct from and subsequent to the process of upbringing and experience which together make up habituation, but through habituation itself. I argue that this view is soundly refuted by a set of overlooked passages from the Politics in which Aristotle clearly maintains that the stage of teaching cannot begins (only has its archē) when the stage habituation is complete (has reached its telos).

“Words and Deeds in Plato’s Laches”

This project examines the “harmony of words and deeds”, which Socrates references at Lac. 193e. Many commentators have thought that the significance of this reference lies in the idea that the two characters who serve as Socrates’ interlocutors in the dialogue, the generals Nicias and Laches, each stand for one of the terms of the harmony—Nicias for words, Laches for deeds. And they think that Plato is inviting his readers to see that, just as each general’s own life is lopsided in one of these two directions, so too the definition of courage which he offers is inadequate in the same way (namely, Nicias’s definition overemphases intelligence to the exclusion of strength of character, while Laches’s makes the opposite mistake) and that a definition which combines (“harmonizes”) both definitions offered by the generals is in fact the unspoken definition of courage that Plato wants us to grasp as correct. I argue such a reading misses the point of the harmony of words and deeds. The problem is that such a reading assumes that the terms of the harmony have a single meaning, words (logoi) being associated with understanding, while deeds (erga) are association with action. But that is an over-simplification, because the different interlocutors do not in fact agree on how they conceive of the role or words (logoi) in human life and so differ in their evaluation of their importance. In this study, I consider in depth the different ways of understanding the importance of words (logoi) in human life that are displayed by the three interlocutors—Socrates, Nicias, and Laches.