•  18
    Colloquium 3 Aristotle on the Voluntariness of Vice
    Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 36 (1): 65-88. 2021.
    In Nicomachean Ethics III.5, Aristotle argues that virtue and vice are “up to us and voluntary.” Readers have long struggled to make sense of Aristotle’s arguments in this chapter and to explain how they cohere with the rest of his ethical project. Among the most influential lines of complaint is that the argument of III.5 appears to contradict his emphasis elsewhere on the power of upbringing to shape character, beginning in childhood. Scholars have developed two main interpretive approaches to…Read more
  •  56
    Arete in Plato and Aristotle (edited book)
    Parnassos Press. 2022.
    For Plato and Aristotle, arete (traditionally translated as "virtue") was the essential object of human admiration and striving, and even the key to happiness. Their work continues to inspire reflection on fundamental questions of ethics and politics today, as the fourteen new essays collected here demonstrate. Contributors: Lidia Palumbo, Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides, Ryan M. Brown, Jay R. Elliott, Guilherme Domingues da Motta, Federico Casella, Jonathan A. Buttaci, George Harvey, Mark Ralkowski, G…Read more
  •  17
  •  5
    The Last Word on Pottersville
    Film and Philosophy 17 58-59. 2013.
  •  62
    Aristotle on the Archai of Practical Thought
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 56 (4): 448-468. 2018.
    Scholars have long debated how exactly Aristotle thinks that agents acquire the distinctive archai (“principles” or “starting‐points”) that govern their practical reasoning. The debate has traditionally been dominated by anti‐intellectualists, who hold that for Aristotle all agents acquire their archai solely through a process of habituation in the nonrational soul. Their traditional opponents, the intellectualists, focus their argument on the case of the virtuous person, arguing that in Aristot…Read more
  •  72
    Virtue Ethics and Literary Imagination
    Philosophy and Literature 42 (1): 244-256. 2018.
    Did Plato see something that Aristotle missed? According to a familiar narrative, Plato regarded literature as dangerous to the aims of philosophy, and he accordingly exiled the poets from his ideal republic. By contrast, Aristotle is supposed to have reconciled literature and philosophy, not only through his appreciative account of epic and tragedy in the Poetics but also through his invocations of literary examples at crucial junctures elsewhere in his corpus, for example his use of the Trojan…Read more
  •  130
    Aristotle on Virtue, Happiness and External Goods
    Ancient Philosophy 37 (2): 347-359. 2017.
  •  26
    Plato’s Gods. By Gerd Van Riel (review)
    Augustinian Studies 45 (1): 176-178. 2014.
  •  61
    Reply to Müller: Aristotle on vicious choice
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (6): 1193-1203. 2016.
  •  111
    Stag Hunts and Committee Work: Cooperation and the Mutualistic Paradigm
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (2): 245-260. 2011.
    Contemporary philosophers and psychologists seek the roots of ethically sound forms of behavior, including altruism and a sense of fairness, in the basic structure of cooperative action. I argue that recent work on cooperation in both philosophy and psychology has been hampered by what I call “the mutualistic paradigm.” The mutualistic paradigm treats one kind of cooperative situation—what I call a “mutualistic situation”—as paradigmatic of cooperation in general. In mutualistic situations, such…Read more