Mad, Drunk or Asleep?–Aristotle's Akratic

Abstract

In what follows I propose to discuss a problem about Aristotle's treatment of akratic knowledge in Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, especially 1146b311147b19. Put briefly the question is whether Aristotle's account of off-beat knowledge there allows the akratic to know what they are doing without clouding of intellect. I shall be discussing this question on certain non-obvious assumptions. I shall be assuming i. that in the passage from 1146b31 to 1147b19, Aristotle is treating of just one general type of weak akratic; ii. that Aristotle holds that use of one's knowledge of the universal premiss together with use of the particular premiss of the practical syllogism is sufficient for action (the most usual interpretation of 1146b35-1147a10, 1147a25-31); iii. that in akrasia something goes wrong with the agent's knowledge of the particular premiss, it is here that their knowledge is off-beat; in other words 'teleutaia protasis' refers to the particular premiss throughout. Given these assumptions, it has commonly been felt that Aristotle is committed to allowing of akrasia only by attributing some befuddlement of wits to the akratic, so that they do not really know that what they are doing is wrong. There are two main props to this conclusion: first, there is a natural way of taking the contrast between having and using knowledge, and secondly there is the analogy with those mad, drunk or asleep. I shall take these in turn and argue that given that we reject the first, the second is not enough to produce the required conclusion.