Table Of ContentTechnˉe in Aristotle’s Ethics
Continuum Studies in Ancient Philosophy
Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA
Continuum Studies in Ancient Philosophy is a major monograph series from
Continuum. The series features fi rst-class scholarly research monographs
across the fi eld of Ancient Philosophy. Each work makes a major contribu-
tion to the fi eld of philosophical research.
Aristotle and Rational Discovery, Russell Winslow
Aristotle’s Ethics, Hope May
Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Jeremy Kirby
Aristotle’s Theory of Knowledge, Thomas Kiefer
Becoming God, Patrick Lee Miller
The Enduring Signifi cance of Parmenides, Raymond Tallis
Happiness and Greek Ethical Thought, M. Andrew Holowchak
The Ideas of Socrates, Matthew S Linck
Parmenides and To Eon, Lisa Atwood Wilkinson
Plato, Metaphysics and the Forms, Francis A. Grabowski III
Plato’s Stepping Stones, Michael Cormack
Pleasure in Aristotle’s Ethics, Michael Weinman
Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration, James Luchte
The Socratic Method, Rebecca Bensen Cain
Stoic Ethics, William O. Stephens
Stoic Virtues, Christoph Jedan
Technˉe in Aristotle’s Ethics
Crafting the Moral Life
Tom Angier
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© Tom Angier, 2010
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-0-8264-6271-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Angier, Tom P. S.
Techné in Aristotle’s Ethics : crafting the moral life / Tom Angier.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN: 978-0-8264-6271-8
1. Aristotle. Nicomachean ethics. 2. Techne (Philosophy) 3. Ethics, Ancient.
I. Title.
B430.A927 2010
171'.3–dc22
2010018301
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations x
Introduction: Techn¯e in pre-Platonic Greek Thought 1
Chapter 1 Techn¯e in the Platonic Dialogues 13
Chapter 2 Aristotle Reacts to His Inheritance 36
Chapter 3 Ergon: Aristotle’s Function Argument 59
Chapter 4 Mesotˉes: Aristotle’s Ethical Mean 79
Chapter 5 Ethismos: Aristotle’s Theory of Habituation 105
Conclusion 126
Appendix 131
Notes 135
Bibliography 164
Index 175
"The way human beings understand the world tends to be
at all times . . . shaped by the know-how of the day, by what
people can do and how they usually go about doing it"
(Zygmunt Bauman)
Preface
‘Every technˉe and every enquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is
thought to aim at some good; and for this reason, the good has rightly been
declared that at which all things aim’ (NE 1094a1–3). In this way, Aristotle
invokes the notion of technˉe – viz. ‘skill’, ‘art’, ‘expertise’ or ‘craft’ – at the
beginning of the fi rst sentence of the fi rst chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics.
This is a telling opening: for, as I shall argue, Aristotle’s core concepts and
arguments in ethics are crucially informed by models and structures derived
from the technai. By ‘informed’ here, I do not mean to indicate a merely
contingent relation, according to which the crafts serve Aristotle simply as
a convenient source of analogies, ones intended (perhaps) to make his
argument more immediately intelligible. Rather, it will be my contention
that Aristotle’s key moral philosophical claims are, to a signifi cant degree,
indebted to how things work specifi cally in the technai. Subtract this essen-
tial relation to the crafts, and the question of whether Aristotle can fully
uphold these claims – through independent, close scrutiny of the moral
phenomena themselves – becomes a real and pressing one.
In at least two respects, I take my critique of Aristotle’s ethics to be a
departure from the approaches usually taken in the secondary literature.
First, while a considerable amount of attention has been paid to the philo-
sophical signifi cance of technˉe within ancient Greek philosophy as a whole,
most of this work has appeared in languages other than English, and – if we
confi ne ourselves to studies on the pre-Hellenistic material – most of it is on
Plato.1 Indeed, no less a commentator than Terence Irwin devotes a good
part of Plato’s Moral Theory to investigating the force of what he calls the
‘craft analogy’ in Plato’s early dialogues. But when it comes to Aristotle’s
ethics, the vast majority of interpreters fail to explore the possibility of
there being systematic and illuminating relations between Aristotle’s argu-
ments on the one hand, and paradigms that fi nd their proper home in the
crafts on the other. In what follows, I want to rectify this imbalance – and,
in a sense, I want to reverse it. For I will argue that although the idea that
virtue is a technˉe is mooted in the Platonic dialogues, it is never defi nitively
viii Preface
affi rmed therein. By contrast, it is in Aristotle’s work that – despite his
explicit rejection of a virtue-technˉe – ethical refl ection becomes shaped in
a determinate and systematic way by notions derived from the crafts.
Secondly, the one Anglophone study2 of technˉe and its relation to
Aristotle’s ethics of which I am aware – viz. Joseph Dunne’s magisterial Back
to the Rough Ground: ‘Phronesis’ and ‘Techne’ in Modern Philosophy and in
Aristotle (1993) – mounts an argument that is essentially antithetical to
mine. Dunne acknowledges that in ‘the earlier books of the Ethics we must
face the . . . fact . . . that Aristotle turns quite unselfconsciously to techne in
order to clarify or illustrate points about the virtues’ (245). But having
acknowledged this, and having listed exactly the same technˉe -infl uenced dis-
cussions that will concern me,3 Dunne goes on to exclude the possibility
that Aristotle’s ethics is just as, if not more directly shaped by technˉe -models
than are his biology, physics or metaphysics. Dunne writes: ‘in relation to
[ethical] matters [Aristotle] ultimately resisted [techne as a reference point]
. . . [indeed,] in E.N. 6 he outlines his notion of phronesis as specifi cally
ethical knowledge in a direct contrast with techne’ (252).
Dunne’s view here is justifi ed, I take it, insofar as Aristotle does rule out
phronˉesis as a species of technˉe – something I will explore in Chapter 2. But
on a wider front, Dunne seems to me misguided, for he fails to take full
account of the evidence: evidence that points to Aristotle’s ethics being in
no way an exception to the dominance of technˉe-models within his thought
as a whole. Indeed, if my argument is well-founded, it will turn out that in
some ways Aristotle’s ethics is more indebted to those models than is sub-
ject-matter dealt with elsewhere in his writings. For whereas his non-ethical
writings rarely make use of craft-models in more than a merely illustrative
or analogising fashion, it is precisely in his ethics that Aristotle oversteps
the limits of this approach, allowing those models to do more of the argu-
mentative work than he acknowledges (or, for that matter, others acknowl-
edge). So despite the immensity and unparalleled nature of Aristotle’s
philosophical achievement, it will be my argument that there are clear
problems to be resolved in his moral philosophical project, and that there
is a more systematic and determinate basis to these than has hitherto been
recognized.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Prof. Rachel Barney (University of Toronto) for all her
advice and encouragement during the preparation of this book. It has been
invaluable. In addition, I would like to express deep thanks to Profs Brad
Inwood, Tom Hurka and Jennifer Whiting, also at the University of Toronto.
During my year at Oxford as Visiting Scholar (2006–7), conversation with
Prof. David Charles proved particularly helpful, and while in Cambridge
(2008–9), John Rist’s trenchant comments were always welcome. Finally,
I would like to acknowledge the many useful comments and criticisms
offered during graduate seminar presentations of my work over the past
few years.
Description:A new account of Aristotle's Ethics, this book argues for the central importance of the concept of 'techne' or 'craft' in Aristotle's moral theory. Exploring the importance of 'techne' in the Platonic and pre-Platonic intellectual context in which Aristotle was writing, Tom Angier here shows that th
