Gregory Salmieri

The Nicomachean Ethics is generally thought to be a “dialectical” work, aimed at resolving aporia in a set of endoxa, which it takes as its starting-point. I argue that Aristotle’s aim in the treatise is, rather, to produce definitions of key ethical terms, and that his starting-points are limited to evaluative and discriminative judgments of a certain sort, which are demanded by the nature of the discipline and are not endoxa. I discuss also how the definitions are reached (focusing on the cases of the virtues of character) and the roles that aporiai do play in the process.

Recent years have seen increasing attacks on the "deontological" conception (or as we call it, the guidance conception) of epistemic justification, the view that epistemology offers advice to knowers in forming beliefs responsibly. Critics challenge an important presupposition of the guidance conception: doxastic voluntarism, the view that we choose our beliefs. We assume that epistemic guidance is indispensable, and seek to answer objections to doxastic voluntarism, most prominently William Alston's. We contend that Alston falsely assumes that choice of belief requires the assent to a specific propositional content. We argue that beliefs can be chosen under descriptions which do not specify their propositional content, but instead specify the mental actions by which they are formed and maintained. We argue that these actions partially constitute the beliefs and that is it in virtue of resulting from and being partially constituted by such actions that the beliefs are subject to epistemic appraisal,

This makes three main interpretative points about the progression from perception to universals described in 'Posterior Analytics' II.19: (1) The noun "'aisthesis'" as used in the chapter may refer not to the act of perceiving but to perceptual contents retained in memory. (2) An 'empeiria' (experience) should be understood as a capacity to generate expectations about new members of an unconceptualized kind based on memories of other members of the kind. (3) The famous rout analogy is a metaphor for the perfection of such a capacity into a concept that can underwrite demonstrative knowledge (rather than mere expectation).