Advice for Arisotle Paper #3

Patrick Frierson

In our last class, we saw how it is possible to go from a claim that seems counter-intuitive to a deep exploration of the assumption that we bring to Aristotle’s text and to important differences in the fundamental nature of ethics between our own conception of ethics and Aristotle’s, and between our own sense of what Aristotle might be doing and what he is really doing. For this paper, I’d like to encourage you to do that sort of exploration of initially counter-intuitive claims in Aristotle’s discussion of justice, but with a specific focus on correcting misunderstandings of Aristotle’s own text. Here are some ideas for how to go about preparing for and writing this paper.

First, as you read, pay close attention to what you are reading and actually think about it. When you get to a claim that makes you stop and think, ask questions like:

· Does Aristotle’s claim make sense? If not, why not? What in particular about the claim is confusing or hard to interpret? Why is that so hard to interpret? If there’s a word that Aristotle seems to be using in the wrong way, does he define that word elsewhere? If he’s combining concepts in a way that seems contradictory or just odd, why does it seem contradictory or wrong? What are you assuming that makes this claim seem so confusing? And is there evidence that Aristotle shares those assumptions?

· Does the claim seem correct? If not, why not? And whether or not it seems right, does Aristotle give an argument for it? What’s the argument? What is assumed in the argument (either explicitly stated as an assumption or simply lying in the background as an unspoken assumption)? Similarly, if it seems incorrect, what’s assumed in your reasons/argument against it? (As in the case of Aristotle’s hidden assumptions, these assumptions might not be immediately obvious to you.)

· Once you’ve thought about those sorts of questions, you might just realize that your issues with the claim were superficial, and you now see that it makes sense in the context of Aristotle’s work as a whole, and is even well justified as a whole. But you might also find that the claim conflicts with assumptions, either those that you bring to the study of ethics or those that Aristotle himself seems to endorse elsewhere in his work. In the first case (where it conflicts with your own assumptions), you should go back and think about how these assumptions have influenced the way you have interpreted other claims that Aristotle makes in his work. Now that you see that he doesn’t share your assumptions, are there more fundamental aspects of his ethics that you need to think about in a new way? How does your understanding of his work as a whole change in the light of revisiting these aspects of Aristotle’s theory? In the second case (where the particular claim seems to conflict with Aristotle’s own assumptions), go back to where you think Aristotle articulates those assumptions. Why did you think that he was assuming what you thought he was assuming? What else might he have meant? (For example, when Aristotle says that we should give with pleasure, this might seem to conflict with his warnings against pleasure. Go back and try to figure out why you thought he was so opposed to pleasure. Now that you look at the passages again, is that really what’s going on there?) Try, in other words, to make Aristotle’s particular claims about justice consistent with his theory as a whole, and see what revisions to his theory as a whole emerge from this. Does it lead you to see his theory in a new light? How?

Second, don’t force this paper. As you go through these questions, you might find that the particular claim fits well with what you thought Aristotle had said before, or that your previous misunderstanding of Aristotle was just a simple misunderstanding due to reading him too late at night, or something of the sort. In that case, don’t try to build a paper around a fake insight into a new way of reading Aristotle. Just keep reading (and rereading) his discussion of justice, probing deeper and letting yourself engage more critically. And if you never do come upon a truly interesting realization about the nature of his ethical theory, don’t worry about it. Just write the other paper option for this week.

Finally, don’t write autobiography. If you do come to realize, based on an initially odd-sounding aspect of Aristotle’s account of justice, that you had misunderstood Aristotle’s approach to ethics in an important way, defend your realization in a “scholarly” way. That is, your paper should not start with “at first I thought such-and-such, but then I realized . . .” Instead, you should argue that given the way he writes about in Books I-IV, Aristotle’s ethics can easily be understood to be (or imply, or say, or depend on) such-and-such, but that his claims about justice show that what he’s really after is such-and-such-else. Here you want to give evidence for the view about Aristotle’s ethics that you now find to be mistaken, and then show how the specific claims on justice don’t fit with that understanding of the ethics as a whole, and then re-evaluate your previous evidence, showing how it can be read differently in a way that fits with A’s claims on justice. (If you have space, you might even add either a diagnosis of what modern assumptions make it easy for us to misinterpret Aristotle or an assessment of whether the new understanding of A’s ethics makes that ethics stronger/more convincing/more important or weaker/less convincing/less important.)