Aristotelian Dialectic

This paper focuses on one of the major criticisms made to Aristotle's virtue ethics, namely that it lacks explicit moral action guidance. The same criticism has been addressed to later developments of virtue ethics. There have been several attempts to overcome this objection and to demonstrate that modern theories of virtue ethics do provide principles of right action. In this paper, I discuss mainly two such major attempts: the exemplarist approach and the virtue rules approach. My aim is to examine whether, if applied to Aristotle’s virtue ethics, these two approaches can provide a convincing answer to the criticism that Aristotle’s ethics does not offer explicit moral action guidance .

"Table of Contents / Pagination is incorrect:
THE WAYS OF ARISTOTLE – ARISTOTELIAN PHRÓNÊSIS, ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF DIALOGUE, AND ACTION RESEARCH
Olav Eikeland
Preface 1
PART 1 – ARISTOTLE, SOCIAL RESEARCH, AND ACTION RESEARCH 3
1. Introduction – The Challenge of Phrónêsis 3
1.1 Three Kinds of General Theory 10
1.2 Aristotle and Critical Action Research 17
2. Action Research Approaching Phrónêsis 20
2.1 A Philosopher Defending Action Research 21
2.2 Making Social Science Matter 23
2.3 Abandoning Techniques 25
PART 2 – READING ARISTOTLE – LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES FOR PHRÓNÊSIS 27
3. Virtues – Intellectual and Ethical 29
3.1 Particulars of Ethical Virtues 34
4. Phrónêsis and the Other Intellectual Virtues 38
4.1 Theoretical Knowledge, and Knowledge about Things We Influence 40
4.1.1 Overlaps and Intermeshes 45
4.2 Phrónêsis as an Intellectual Virtue 48
4.2.1 Excursus: Knowledge Forms and Ways of Knowing in Aristotle 49
4.2.1.1 Praxis, Poíêsis, Khrêsis, Páthos – And the Various Forms of the Epistêmai 50
4.2.1.2 Theoretical and Practical Truth 61
4.2 (Continued) Phrónêsis as an Intellectual Virtue 64
4.3 Phrónêsis and Rhetoric, Phrónêsis and Practical Syllogisms 70
4.3.1 The relationship to rhetoric 70
4.3.2 The relationship to practical syllogisms 75
5. Phrónêsis on Means and Ends, Phrónêsis and General Knowledge 76
5.1 Means and Ends, and Kinds of Causes 76
5.1.1 Poíêsis Makes Things, Praxis Makes Perfect 81
5.1.2 “Professional” Deliberations and Deductions 89
5.2 Knowledge, General and Particular 94
5.2.1 General Knowledge, Appropriate Knowledge, Knowledge in Action 94
5.2.2 Héxis (Habitus), and Empeiría (Experience) 103
5.2.3 Knowing Particulars 109
5.2.3.1 By What? 110
5.2.3.2 How? 111
5.2.3.3 Preconditions for a Universally Flexible Consideration 115
6. Developing and Defining Virtue 126
6.1 Developing Virtue 127
6.1.1 Epistêmê and Virtue through the Formation of Habit, Once More 130
6.1.2 What “Means” Means 136
6.1.3 Practical Development with a Hinge to It, the Question of Standards Again 138
6.2 Defining Virtue 145
6.2.1 Nóêsis as Dialogue, or, the Reason Why Aristotle Insists on Letting Phrónêsis Deliberate about Means Only 150
6.2.1.1 The Unfolded Know-How of Nous 152
6.2.1.2 The Topica and the Enfolded Habitus of Dialectics 154
6.2.1.3 The Philosopher, the Dialectician, and Experience 160
6.2.1.3.1 Dialogical Peculiarities 165
6.2.1.3.2 Dialogue and Experience 170
6.2.1.3.3 Basic Principle, Beginning, Medium, and End 182
6.2.1.4 Ways of Learning 185
6.2.1.5 Self-Evident First Principles? 191
6.2.1.6 Praxis1, and Praxis2 194
6.2.2 The Ethical Works do not Deliberate about Means, They Develop and Define Ends 198
6.2.3 Epistêmê, Virtue, and Phrónêsis Defined 205
6.3 Who Develops and Defines? The Art and Practice of Architectonics 214
7. Eudaimonía and Wisdom as “The Highest Practical Good”; Aristotelian Phron-Ethics, Theor-Ethics, and the Way of the Intellectual Commons 219
7.1 Kinds of Theory, Kinds of Practice 220
7.2 Ethics and Politics as Methodological Guidelines for Autonomous Practitioners 230
7.2.1 The Laws of Virtue 233
7.2.2 Tékhnê and Phrónêsis – At the Parting of the Ways 239
7.3 The Wisdom of the Commons – Common Wisdom 242
7.3.1 Tà Koiná – The Commons 247
7.3.2 The Common Skholê 252
7.4 Theor-Ethics and Primary Friendship 254
7.4.1 The Noetic “I” and the Psychological “Me” 259
7.4.2 Theorethical Interventions? 268
7.5 The Way of Theor-Ethics 269
7.5.1 Ethical Excellence – Settling with the Best “for Us”, i.e. for the Second Best “Absolutely” 277
7.6 The Ways of Politics – Continuous Learning in Common 288
7.6.1 Community: What Are the Things Common? 289
7.6.2 Oikos, Pólis, and Constitutions 294
7.6.3 Developing Concord – The Ethico-Political Role of Dialogical Gatherings 299
7.6.4 Different Concepts of Politics 310
7.6.5 Unity and Diversity in the Pólis 318
7.6.6 The Koinópolis as Panarchy – Aristocracy Suspended and Transcended 328
7.6.7 Religious Politics? 338
PART 3 – ARISTOTELIAN ACTION RESEARCH – WISDOM AND EUDAIMONÍA TRANSPOSED, SOCIAL RESEARCH TRANSFORMED 344
8. Neo-Epistemic, Dialogical Action Research 344
9. From Oikos to Pólis, and Beyond 349
10. Aristotle, Marx, and Modern Work Life 359
11. Aristotle Suspended 370
12. Epilogue 376
REFERENCES 381
Appendix 394"

Aristotle has been continuously at the frontier of philosophical reflection for almost 2400 years. Throughout the 20th century the influence of his practical philosophy has been growing. His «non-modernist» concept of phrónêsis or practical wisdom is attracting increasing interest as an alternative to both «modernism» and «post-modernism». This book is a meticulous study of Aristotle's phrónêsis and its applications to the fields of personal development or character formation and of ethical virtues. It also relates phrónêsis to the wider context of Aristotle's theoretical philosophy and of his different ways of knowing, and to both theoretical and practical concerns within modern social and action research. The whole of Aristotle's thinking is radically practice-based and directed. However, it never loses its theoretical focus. His theoretical philosophy is fundamentally dialogical. Hence, the relevance of Aristotelian thinking is striking for the current reconfigurations in the social organisation of learning and knowledge production.

The Dialectical Forge identifies dialectical disputation (jadal) as a primary formative dynamic in the evolution of pre-modern Islamic legal systems, promoting dialectic from relative obscurity to a more appropriate position at the forefront of Islamic legal studies. The author introduces and develops a dialectics-based analytical method for the study of pre-modern Islamic legal argumentation, examines parallels and divergences between Aristotelian dialectic and early juridical jadal-theory, and proposes a multi-component paradigm—the Dialectical Forge Model—to account for the power of jadal in shaping Islamic law and legal theory. In addition to overviews of current evolutionary narratives for Islamic legal theory and dialectic, and expositions on key texts, this work shines an analytical light upon the considerably sophisticated “proto-system” of juridical dialectical teaching and practice evident in Islam’s second century, several generations before the first “full-system” treatises of legal and dialectical theory were composed. This proto-system is revealed from analyses of dialectical sequences in the 2nd/8th century Kitāb Ikhtilāf al-'Irāqiyyīn / 'Irāqiyyayn (the “subject-text”) through a lens molded from 5th/11th century jadal-theory treatises (the “lens-texts”). Specific features thus uncovered inform the elaboration of a Dialectical Forge Model, whose more general components and functions are explored in closing chapters.

Sharples famously used Alexander’s commentary on the de sensu to establish his anatomical views. Further consideration of this commentary explains its apparent disregard for Galen’s research. The discussion of the eye confirms that concern for dialectical argument trumps any interest in anatomical detail.

Paper presented in the 2009 IVR Beijing Congress, Beijing, China, 2009. Co-authored with GONTIJO, Lucas de Alvarenga.
The purpose of the present text is to analyze the juridical phenomenon through the perspective of its rhetorical practice and to discuss whether such posture is by itself censorable from the ethical point of view. In order to achieve our purpose in this text, we have chosen to study, within the broad oeuvre of Aristotle, parts of the Organon collection, namely: Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations, and also Rhetoric and Poetics, with an emphasis on the Art of Rhetoric. The aim that governs this entire demarche is to understand the Aristotelian proposals to a theory of rationality, which is to be investigated through the discursive practices applied to the juridical phenomenon. The utility of rhetoric is thus emphasized to what concerns it as a technique of discourse analysis, not its power to dominate minds. The function of rhetoric is not only to persuade, but also to find the persuasion means that fit better each case, to recognize what seems to convince and what convinces indeed. Even though it may be dishonestly used, that does not diminish its value. Aristotle has freed rhetoric from the burden of moral. It is necessary to be capable of defending the pro as well as the contra, not to make them equivalent, but in order to understand the adversary mechanism of argumentation and, thus, refute it. Aristotle believes that the true and the just are by nature stronger than their contraries. This is also how juridical praxis works.

For the last decades, the thesis according to which dialectic provides the core methodological standard for Aristotle’s practical philosophy has had wide acceptance. This thesis has been associated to the much-discussed methodological passage of Nicomachean Ethics VII 1, 1145b2-7. As a matter of fact, the traditional reading of that passage finds in it a procedure that is based on the survey of aporiai that have been drawn from a set of endoxa or “reputable opinions”. As the procedure so understood is thoroughly focused on endoxa and in virtue of its diaporematic approach, it can be related to dialectic as it is discussed in the Topics. In this paper, I intend to address the limitations of the traditional interpretation and put forward an alternative reading for the methodological passage of Nicomachean Ethics VII 1. In the proposed reading, the passage does not have a tight connection with dialectic. From this it does not follow that dialectical procedures play no role in the method of Aristotle’s practical philosophy. However, in the proposed reading the passage of NE VII 1 no longer provides the basis for the thesis that such method is to be understood as being fundamentally dialectical in its nature.

Unfortunately, this book (my PhD thesis defended in 1993) was written in Norwegian, which gives it a much smaller audience than it deserves. The book follows the inner connections between the Greek concepts of experience (empeiría), dialogue or dialectics, and politics (in its original, Aristotelian meaning). The book explores these connections logically and historically from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle throough Stoic, Skeptical, and other ancient philosophical schools, to where they transform into religious philosophy (in Philo Judaues / from Alexandria). The whole endeavour was started as an attempt at a critical "Ausainandersetzung" with modern social research methodology as "empirical". The discussions are based on a thorough reading of primary sources. Cf. the uploaded index locorum.

Aristotle seems to have set up his logic of the idiom with reference to linguistic habit, i.e. the superficial impression that idiom-predications are defined in the Topics with reference to their logical form is false. It can be shown that Aristotle had become aware of this in the Prior Analytics and that he adjusted his definition of the idiom accordingly. The article ends with some tentative remarks on how these insights could shed new light on the system of predicables as a whole.

A summary of this research was presented for the 2013 Lecture Series, Islamic Legal Studies Program, Harvard Law School.

Summary:

The primary objectives of this lecture were as follows: 1) to introduce “dialectical forge theory”—a paradigm for the formative dynamic of jadal with regard to fiqh, uṣūl al-fiqh, and jadal-theory itself; 2) to quickly outline the organizing principles and categories of classical Sunnī juridical dialectical theory; 3) to provide a glimpse of what juridical dialectic actually looked like, by enacting my translation of a purportedly historical disputation between two master dialecticians—Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī and Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī—on a mas’ala of ṣalāt; 4) to quickly analyze this disputation by way of the concepts and categories of jadal-theory and formal/informal argumentation; 5) to explain how elements of this disputation illustrate the primary components of “dialectical forge theory;” 6) to promote the study of jadal/munāẓara as a critical branch of Islamic Legal Studies, and as the means to a better understanding of the nature and evolution of variant projects within Islamic Intellectual history at large; and 7) to elicit participation in the formation of an organization for the study and practice of Islamic Dialectical theories.

examen crítico de la teoría de las Ideas, Editorial de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, 2012, 284 pp., ISBN : 978---987---1785---59---9. Por Ignacio Pérez Constanzó Universidad de la República, Uruguay

The Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia invites applications for a fellowship in: Aristotle and Women in Renaissance in Renaissance Italy (M-FIL/06).

To serve as a research fellow on the ERC-funded Starting Investigator Grant ‘Aristotle in the Italian Vernacular: Rethinking Renaissance and Early-Modern Intellectual History (c. 1400-c. 1650)’ led by Marco Sgarbi, University of Ca’ Foscari (Venice). The project, which consists of a collaboration between academic staff at Ca’ Foscari (Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali) and Warwick (Italian Studies) runs for 5 years from May 2014.

Deadline 28/03/2017, 12:00 Rome Time.