Aristotle on the Truth About Practical Ends

Abstract

AbstractAristotle holds that rational agents can think true thoughts about their practical ends. Specifically, we can think true thoughts about whether our ends are good and able to be brought about in action. But what makes these thoughts true? What sort of thing is a practical end, such that it both is good, and also may be brought about in the future? These questions are difficult to answer. They are metaphysical questions about Aristotle’s practical philosophy: they ask what practical ends are, such that they can make true certain parts of our practical thinking. What is more, key claims in Aristotle’s account of rational agency seem to make it impossible for thoughts about our practical ends to ever, in fact, be true. Given the ways in which we think about our ends, there seems to be nothing in the world to which these thoughts truthfully correspond. In this paper, I identify and solve two puzzles for Aristotle’s claim that we can think true thoughts about our practical ends. These puzzles have not been discussed in recent literature, but they have potentially wide-reaching consequences for Aristotle’s account of rational agency and motivation. My solution offers a novel account of the metaphysics of practical ends, which explains how these ends can be truth-makers for our thoughts about them. I argue that we should understand practical ends on the model of first actualities, which are also second potentialities. The idea that some actualities are also potentialities is a complicated one, but as I hope to show, it yields a straightforward and illuminating conception of practical ends. It also adds a crucial metaphysical component to Aristotle’s account of rational agency, one which shows how this account is internally consistent.