| Phi 110 Fall 2015 |
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This is another two-part assignment, but the parts are related in a way different from what we saw with decision and prudence. In the first part of this assignment, we will return to virtues of character to look at one of the vices that Aristotle will contrast with a different sort of moral failing in the second part of the assignment.
• You encountered ‘temperance’ as a translation of sōphrosunē in the Protagoras, and I mentioned the difficulty of translating the term then. The entry for it in Irwin’s glossary is shorter than many of the others but is still worth looking at. While our interest in temperance will lie mainly in Aristotle’s use of it in a comparison, it is worth thinking about in its own right. One way to do that is to reflect on his comparison of it with courage in bk. iii, ch. 12, and another is to ask yourself how important you take it to be relative to other virtues.
• The second term of Aristotle’s comparison is, in Greek, akrasia (as a noun, or akratēs as an adjective). Irwin translates this as ‘incontinence’, which has the advantage that, since its current use is mainly medical, there is little danger of a misleading moral sense. On the other hand, the translation then gives little indication of what Aristotle might have in mind, but Irwin’s concise glossary entry will help with that. Another common translation is ‘weakness of will’, which does suggest roughly the range of phenomena that Aristotle will speak of but can be misleading since it uses an idea, the will, that plays little or no role in Aristotle’s thinking.
Aristotle’s discussion of incontinence is a compact model of his typical organization of any discussion: he begins with common sayings and puzzles about some idea, offers his own account, and then uses that to comment on the things commonly said and the puzzles. In this case, Aristotle’s account appears in ch. 3 of bk. vii. The heart of it (§§9-11, 1147a25-b6) is dense and somewhat technical, so I recommend you read Irwin’s notes on these sections and the rest of the chapter (pp. 259-262). Aristotle introduces this account in the earlier sections of ch. 3 by a contrast with intemperance, and thinking about the difference between the two is a good way to get a sense of what Aristotle is trying to accomplish in his technical discussion. He returns to the comparison later, especially in chs. 8-9, which are also less technical approaches to his view of incontinence.