Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the revised edition
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Luck and ethics
- Part I Tragedy: fragility and ambition
- Part II Plato: goodness without fragility?
- Part III Aristotle: the fragility of the good human life
- Introduction
- Chapter 8 Saving Aristotle's appearances
- Chapter 9 Rational animals and the explanation of action
- Chapter 10 Non-scientific deliberation
- Chapter 11 The vulnerability of the good human life: activity and disaster
- Chapter 12 The vulnerability of the good human life: relational goods
- Appendix to Part III Human and divine
- Interlude 2 Luck and the tragic emotions
- Epilogue: Tragedy
- Chapter 13 The betrayal of convention: a reading of Euripides' Hecuba
- Notes
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of passages
Chapter 10 - Non-scientific deliberation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the revised edition
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Luck and ethics
- Part I Tragedy: fragility and ambition
- Part II Plato: goodness without fragility?
- Part III Aristotle: the fragility of the good human life
- Introduction
- Chapter 8 Saving Aristotle's appearances
- Chapter 9 Rational animals and the explanation of action
- Chapter 10 Non-scientific deliberation
- Chapter 11 The vulnerability of the good human life: activity and disaster
- Chapter 12 The vulnerability of the good human life: relational goods
- Appendix to Part III Human and divine
- Interlude 2 Luck and the tragic emotions
- Epilogue: Tragedy
- Chapter 13 The betrayal of convention: a reading of Euripides' Hecuba
- Notes
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of passages
Summary
I was just conscious, vaguely, of being on the track of a law, a law that would fit, that would strike me as governing the delicate phenomena – delicate though so marked – that my imagination found itself playing with. A part of the amusement they yielded came, I daresay, from my exaggerating them – grouping them into a larger mystery (and thereby a larger ‘law’) than the facts, as observed, yet warranted; but that is the common fault of minds for which the vision of life is an obsession.
I should certainly never again, on the spot, quite hang together, even though it wasn't really that I hadn't three times her method. What I too fatally lacked was her tone.
Henry James, The Sacred Fount, Chapters 1, 14Aristotle says two anti-Platonic things about practical deliberation. First, that it is not and cannot be scientific: ‘That practical wisdom is not scientific understanding (epistēmē) is obvious’ (EN 1142a23–4). Second, that the appropriate criterion of correct choice is a thoroughly human being, the person of practical wisdom. This person does not attempt to take up a stand outside of the conditions of human life, but bases his or her judgment on long and broad experience of these conditions. These two features of Aristotle's view are connected, clearly: for the reason why good deliberation is not scientific is that this is not the way this model good judge goes about deliberating; and the reason why this judge is normative for correct choice is that his procedures and methods, rather than those of a more ‘scientific’ judge, appear the most adequate to the subject matter.
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- Information
- The Fragility of GoodnessLuck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, pp. 290 - 317Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001