Amelie Rorty

(1932 - 2020)

CONTEMPORARY discussions of the passions are often puzzlingly pulled in what appear to be opposing directions. We sometimes hold people responsible for their emotions and the actions they perform from them. Yet abnormal behavior is often explained and excused by the person "suffering" an emotional condition. We treat emotions as interruptions or deflections of normal behavior, and yet also consider a person pathological if he fails to act or react from a standard range of emotions. Sometimes emotions are classified as a species of evaluative judgments whose analysis will be given in an adequate theory of cognition. But sometimes the cognitive or intentional character of an emotion is treated as dependent on, and ultimately explained by, a physical condition. These conflicting intuitions about the emotions are not easily reconciled: we cannot, for example, construct a tidy taxonomy of emotions, sorting out varieties that are cognitively from those that are primarily physically identifiable, or distinguish those that are strongly associated with "normal" motivational processes from those that are invasive interruptions.

Plato's dialogues can be read as a carefully staged exhibition and investigation of paideia, education in the broadest sense, including all that affects the formation of character and mind. The twentieth century textbook Plato — the Plato of the Myth of the Cave and the Divided Line, the ascent to the Good through Forms and Ideas — is but one of his elusive multiple authorial personae, each taking a different perspective on his investigations. As its focused problems differ, each Platonic dialogue exhibits a somewhat different model for learning; each adds a distinctive dimension to Plato's fully considered counsel for education. Setting aside the important difficult questions about the chronological sequence in which the dialogues were written and revised, we can trace the argumentative rationale of Plato's fully considered views on paideia, on who should be educated by whom for what, on the stages and presuppositions of different kinds of learning. Those views are inextricably connected with his views about the structure of the soul, about the virtues and the politeia that can sustain a good life; and about cosmology and metaphysics.

This paper gives an account of the picture of the self that saves the phenomena of self-deception. On one theory of the self, the phenomena of selfdeception are incoherent: the self as a unified critically reflective rational inquirer cannot deceive itself. On another theory of the self, the phenomena evaporate: the self as a loosely organized system composed of relatively independent subsystems can be conflicted, mistaken, ignorant, compartmentalized. But it does not deceive itself. Our practices as moral agents and rational inquirers are explained by the first theory; our capacities as adaptive survivors are explained by the second. Neither picture can be reduced to the other; neither can be abandoned. The phenomena of selfdeception appear - and are saved by the superimposition of the two theories.

Annette Baier sets the title, the genre, and the task of her book from Hume’s essay "Of Moral Prejudices." Rather than arguing from or towards general principles, these essays call upon a wide range of reading, observation, and experience: we are not only meant to be enlightened, but also invited to adopt the reflective habits of mind they exemplify. Like Hume, Baier analyzes and evaluates our attitudes and customs; like him, she finds that our foibles and our strengths are closely linked; and like him, she is both a proponent and a model of good sense. When she is unfairly prejudiced— as she is against what she sees as the harsh and narrow rigors of Kant—she is, with all the bonnehommie of Hume, more ready to tease than to demolish.

IN PREPARING A HANDBOOK ON RHETORIC, Aristotle proceeds as he does for a discussion of any craft or practice. After distinguishing it from other closely related arts, he defines its proper aim: that of finding the means that can be used to persuade an audience of any subject whatever. Since the most effective exercise of any craft or faculty is conceptually connected to its fulfilling its norm-defined aims, his counsel is directed to guiding the master craftsman who is responsive to the larger issues that surround the exercise of his skill--a rhetorician speaking about important matters to those authorized to affect them. Aristotle's advice to the rhetorician imports the results of his philosophic investigations: the Rhetoric presupposes and is implicitly informed by Aristotle's logical works, by his philosophy of mind, and his theory of action; it is also strongly conjoined with his political and ethical theory. But while the rhetorician relies on these theories, he is not himself a philosopher, logician, statesman, or moralist.

Courage is dangerous. If it is defined in traditional ways, as a set of dispositions to overcome fear, to oppose obstacles, to perform difficult or dangerous actions, its claim to be a virtue is questionable. Unlike the virtue of justice, or a sense of proportion, traditional courage does not itself determine what is to be done, let alone assure that it is worth doing. If we retain the traditional conception of courage and its military connotations–overcoming and combat–we should be suspicious of it. Instead of automatically classifying it as a virtue, attempting to develop and exercise it, we should become alert to its dangers. And yet and yet. There is an aspect of traditional courage that serves us: we require the capacities and traits that enable us to persist in acting well under stress, to endure hardships when following our judgments about what is best is difficult or dangerous. If courage is checked, redefined as the virtue that enables virtue–the various sets of dispositions, whatever they may be, that make us resolute in worthy, difficult action–then we need not fear the dangers of courage. We need rather to reform it by diversifying it, as a heterogeneous variety of traits that enable us to act well under stress, against the natural movements of self-protection.

Philosophic writing appears in a variety of genres, addressed to a variety of audiences; it appears nestled within distinctive 'enterprises' : Plato, Berkeley and Hume wrote dialogues; Augustine and Rousseau wrote autobiographical confessions; Mill and Bernard Williams wrote reports to Parliament; Boethius and Descartes wrote meditations; Bacon, Montaign and Hume wrote essays; Aquinas and our contemporaries contribte articles;Leibniz and Hume wrote histories' they all wrote letters and discourses.

"NOTHING," SAYS SPINOZA "can be destroyed except by an external cause." And he adds, "An idea that excludes the existence of our body cannot be in our mind.... The mind endeavors to think of those things that increase or assist the body's power of activity... and to think only of those things that affirm its power of activity". These upbeat passages are mystifying, and sometimes downright disturbing to us dark, obsessive minds, who are prone to think of things that diminish our powers, prone to diminish our powers precisely by thinking about what diminishes us, who are easily capable of thinking of a world that would, could and does exclude us. I want to try to make sense of the motifs expressed in these passages, reading them in such a way that they are not offensive to our sensibility--automatic grounds for distrusting the Spinozistic enterprise. Difficulties remain; but they are the ironies of all Stoics who speak with forked tongue. The optimism of the Stoic-enlightenment program of self-improvement is joined, Janus-faced, with an equally familiar Stoic resignation in the face of necessity. The dynamic energy of conatus as the essence of individuals is revealed as mere partiality: conatus and the individual mind, the contrast between activity and passivity, the contrast between external and internal causes--all these are temporary and temporizing notions which the fully enlightened mind will recognize to be inadequate ideas. Necessary as they are, they are nevertheless merely perspectival. Individuals bent on self-improvement, perceiving themselves bounded by and opposed to the forces of similar individuals, mistake the ontological importance of their individuality and their activities. The Hobbesian strand that is woven through Spinozistic doctrine is visible only within middle-range opinion: it is not ontologically or epistemologically fundamental. Yet, though it is partial and misleading, it remains among the phenomena to be explained. The enlightened will not eliminate but rather explain and understand the middle range talk of conatus, activity and passivity, external and internal, individuals and relations. Indeed, having questioned and even undermined the starting point of individuation, Spinoza returns the repressed: in book 5, particular finite individuals are represented within eternity.

Bringing together a group of outstanding new essays on Aristotle's De Anima, this book covers topics such as the relation between soul and body, sense-perception, imagination, memory, desire, and thought, which present the philosophical substance of Aristotle's views to the modern reader. The contributors write with philosophical subtlety and wide-ranging scholarship, locating their interpretations firmly within the context of Aristotle's thought as a whole. The paperback edition includes an additional essay by M. F. Burnyeat.

While we primarily love individual persons, we also love our work, our homes, our activities and causes. To love is to be engaged in an active concern for the objective well-being—the thriving—of whom and what we love. True love mandates discovering in what that well-being consists and to be engaged in the details of promoting it. Since our loves are diverse, we are often conflicted about the priorities among the obligations they bring. Loving requires constant contextual improvisatory adjustment of priorities among our commitments. Besides delighting in—and being enhanced by—the presence and existence of another person, love requires extended reflection and work.

During the period from Descartes to Rousseau, the mind changed. Its domain was redefined; its activities were redescribed; and its various powers were redistributed. Once a part of cosmic Nous, its various functions delimited by its embodied condition, the individual mind now becomes a field of forces with desires impinging on one another, their forces resolved according to their strengths and directions. Of course since there is no such thing as The Mind Itself, it was not the mind that changed. Conceptions of the mind changed. Yet even to say this is misleading, because it suggests that somewhere out there in nowhere there is Nous, Psyche, Soul or Mind, the true but opaque object of all these conceptions. But of course there is no Mind in the realm of things in themselves, waiting for us to see it truly, like a China of the noumenal world, amused that our various conceptions reveal as much about ourselves as about it.

As Elster suggests in his chapter 'Contradictions of the Mind', in Logic and Society, akrasia and self-deception represent the most common psychological functions for a person in conflict and contradiction. This article develops the theme of akrasia and conflict. Section I says what akrasia is not. Section II describes the character of the akrates, analyzing the sorts of conflicts to which he is subject and describing the sources of his debilities. A brief account is then given of the attractions of the akratic alternative: its power to focus or dominate the agent's attention; its being strongly habitual; its having the pull of social streaming: following the charismatic leader, the mechanisms of sympathetic or antipathetic infection, the models of role casting. Following these strategies is by no means pathological: these are relatively automatic (though still voluntary) psychological functions. That is precisely their power and attraction: they provide the conflicted akrates with an action solution, though not one that accords with his preferred judgment.