Jennifer Whiting

This book comprises essays centered on Aristotle’s objectivist conception of eudaimonia, especially the roles played in it by activities of theoretical and practical intellect and the quality of our relationships with one another. Common objections to grounding this conception in the “proper function” of a human being are answered by appeal to the role played by Aristotle’s teleologically driven essentialism. His struggle to reconcile living in accordance with distinctively human virtues with the ideal of living a “divine” contemplative life is explored, along with puzzles about how to reconcile his conception of eudaimonia as the ultimate end of human action with the parallel requirements that virtuous agents choose to engage in virtuous action “for itself” and that friends love their friends “for themselves.” Readings of Aristotle’s “eudaimonism” as a form of rational egoism are challenged by appeal to an original account of the ideal friend as an “other self,” one that stresses appreciation of the friend’s character “for itself” (apart from any relationships in which it happens to stand to the agent’s own needs and/or tastes) but acknowledges the role played by pleasure in “character friendship.” The friend’s good is not, as on “colonizing ego” readings, part of the agent’s own. Rather, the ideal friend recognizes the value her friend’s activity has for him and she take pleasure in his activity as such. This explains why even the maximally self-sufficient (and so most godlike) agent, who needs nothing from a friend, will nevertheless want to have at least one.

Against the traditional view that Aristotle recognizes only one form--a universal--for each infima species, I argue that Aristotle recognizes a plurality of numerically distinct individual forms for each. Chapter One argues that the Metaphysics' criteria for being a substance show that individual forms are substances. Chapter Three argues that individual forms are the principles of individuation for cospecific individuals. ;My main argument is that Aristotle's defense of the distinction between generation simpliciter and mere alteration requires the existence of intrinsic unities of form and matter, neither of which can survive apart from the other--the form of this matter and the matter of this form. For if matter simply comes to embody universal species forms, these forms will be accidents of that matter and all change, mere alteration. The intrinsic unity requirement leaves Aristotle two tasks--one to show that some forms are essentially enmattered, the other to show that some matter is essentially enformed. ;Chapter Four argues that Metaphysics vii performs the first task by arguing that the forms of natural objects are essentially enmattered; these forms themselves include the matter necessary if there is to be a plurality of cospecific forms and if these are principles of individuation. Chapter Six argues that Aristotle's defense of a pluralistic account of eudaimonia identifies men with essentially embodied practical intellects and so supports this account of essentially enmattered individual forms. ;Chapter Five argues that the De Anima performs the second task by arguing for the existence of functionally defined bodies which are essentially ensouled. These bodies are distinguished from the non-proximate matter which constitutes them at different times and which is only accidentally ensouled . Aristotle's account of abstraction shows how individual forms, proximate matter and compounds taken formally are the very same things considered or described in different ways