neo-Aristotelian Theory Research Articles

Lessons from a Neo-Aristotelian Theory Based on Evolutionary Science to the Field of Organizational Innovation.

This article's goal is to understand innovation factors (e.g., job autonomy and knowledge sharing) through the lens of a neo-Aristotelian theory based on evolutionary science in order to show that this paradigm of analysis provides a richer understanding of this organizational phenomenon, and consequently better support for the deliberation on what measures to implement when the objective is to make the organization prone to innovate.

The Historicity of Artifacts: Use and Counter-Use

Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s notion of ‘queer use,’ I present and extend a neo-Aristotelian theory of artifacts to capture what I call ‘counter-use.’ The theory of artifacts is based on the idea that what they are, how they come to be, and what their functions are cannot be understood independently from each other. They come to exist when a maker imposes the concept of their substantial kind onto some matter by working on the matter to make an artifact of that kind out of it. The extensions to this core theory that I describe are two. First, I show how using can be a kind of making and how disparate users may form what Benedict Anderson calls an imagined community. Second, I describe what I call an artifact’s historicity and suggest that, like its substantial kind, an artifact’s historicity is essential to it. On this basis, I characterize counter-use as use of an artifact by an imagined community that re-arranges an object’s historicity and hence brings into existence a numerically distinct object. Thus, politically motivated counter-use has genuine ontological implications.

Unique ethical challenges for the 21st century: Online technology and virtue education

ABSTRACT Living well in the 21st century will present human beings with a unique set of demands and ethical challenges, many of which will require a rapid response to developments in the online space. Online activities increasingly permeate our practical lives. Although there is every indication that this activity will intensify, even experts on digital technology recognise that the precise effects of future emergent technology will be uncertain and remain unknown. We argue that education directed at the cultivation of cyber-wisdom and other cyber-virtues provides our best chance of creating a moral vocabulary that can guide us towards living well in the 21st century. The aim of this article is to offer the first outline of an educational model, founded on neo-Aristotelian theory, that illustrates how these qualities could be cultivated through moral education.

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages. Tanya Pollard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+331.

<i>Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages</i>. Tanya Pollard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+331.

Contributive justice: social class and graduate employment in the UK

ABSTRACT This article applies Paul Gomberg’s theory of contributive justice to the problematic of working-class graduates’ access to skilled and meaningful work in the UK. I begin by outlining Gomberg’s argument for the importance of quality work as a key social good. I then draw upon a range of sociologically-informed literature to offer a two-fold argument. Firstly, I contend that the UK suffers from a structural misalignment between graduate demand for high-skilled employment and the supply the labour market can provide; secondly, that working-class graduates are disproportionately likely to encounter problems in gaining quality work, at least in their early-stage careers. To understand these issues as questions of social justice, I apply Gomberg’s thesis throughout the discussion. I conclude by reflecting upon the value of Gomberg’s theory to studies such as this, which take a sociologically-informed approach to the interface between education and work. I argue that Gomberg’s neo-Aristotelian theory, wherein work is central to human flourishing, offers a framework through which we may make explicit our normally implicit evaluations and critiques.

Death, unity, and the brain

The dead donor rule holds that removing organs from living human beings without their consent is wrongful killing. The rule still prevails in most countries, and I assume it without argument in order to pose the question: is it possible to have a metaphysically correct, clinically relevant analysis of human death that makes organ donation ethically permissible? I argue that the two dominant criteria of death—brain death and circulatory death—are both empirically and metaphysically inadequate as definitions of human death and therefore hold no epistemic value in themselves. I first set out a neo-Aristotelian theory of death as separation of soul (understood as organising principle) and body, which is then fleshed out as loss of organismic integrity. The brain and circulatory criteria are shown to have severe weaknesses as physiological manifestations of loss of integrity. Given the mismatch between what death is, metaphysically speaking, and the dominant criteria accepted by clinicians and philosophers, it turns out that only actual bodily decomposition is a sure sign of death. In this I differ from Alan Shewmon, whose important work I discuss in detail.

A Virtue Ethics Critique of Silverstone's Media Hospitality

Roger Silverstone (2007) proposed media hospitality as an important element of media ethics. I agree that media hospitality can make a valuable contribution to media ethics. However, I have doubts about grounding media hospitality in what has been referred to as the “deductive abstractions and absolutist language of much media ethics theorizing” founded on Enlightenment assumptions. Despite his own reservations about Enlightenment theorizing, I propose that Silverstone's account ultimately suffers from these problems of abstraction and absolutism, as seen most clearly from the vantage point of Alasdair MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelian theory of virtue ethics.

Neo-Aristotelian mereology

In her book The Structure of Objects, Kathrin Koslicki develops and defends a neoAristotelian theory of objects, according to which objects are structured wholes that exist only if their parts are adequately unified and exhibit the right kind of structure. In Chaps. 1–3 Koslicki outlines classical extensional mereology and criticises the widely held view that objects are to be understood as mereological sums that obey the unrestricted fusion axiom. She also puts forward a Leibniz’s Law-style argument against the view that composition counts as a form of identity, showing that various ways of restricting the applicability of Leibniz’s Law are suspect. Chapter 4 contains a description and critique of Kit Fine’s theory of rigid and variable embodiments, the most detailed contemporary statement of a neo-Aristotelian view of composition. While Koslicki agrees with Fine’s arguments against standard mereology, she criticises Fine’s positive account on the basis that it leads to a proliferation of different parthood relations and commits us to an overabundance of objects. Chapters 5 and 6 are historical investigations of Plato’s and Aristotle’s views about parts and wholes, which have inspired Koslicki’s own approach. In Chaps. 7–9 Koslicki sets out her positive proposal for a structure-based mereology and provides detailed discussions of natural kinds and of the notion of structure. The key features of Koslicki’s view are that (i) composition is restricted, that (ii) there is a form/matter dichotomy, that (iii) composition fails to be ontologically innocent, and that (iv) wholes are unified. (i) Restricted composition. Koslicki holds that not every collection of objects composes a further object, but only those collections that are adequately unified and exhibit the right kind of structure. Composition only takes place when parts are related in such a way as to satisfy the conditions for composing an object of a particular kind. Which composite objects exist is accordingly fixed by what kinds

From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic. Tobias Gregory . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xii+247.

<i>From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic</i>. Tobias Gregory . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xii+247.

Troubled Foundations for Private Law

In The Foundations of Private Law James Gordley argues that the modern private law in common and civil law jurisdictions is best explained on the basis of a neo-Aristotelian theory first developed by a group of 16th century Spanish thinkers known as the ‘late scholastics’. The concepts of distributive and commutative justice that, according to Gordley, lay at core of the scholastics’ theory and that explain, respectively, modern property law and the law of obligations (contract, tort, unjust enrichment), though ignored and disparaged for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, are today familiar to most private law scholars (thanks in part to Gordley’s earlier work). Yet Gordley’s understanding of these concepts and, in particular, of their relationship both to one another and to the apex idea of ‘living a distinctively human life’ is unique, setting his account apart not just from utilitarian and other ‘modern’ accounts of private law, but also from other neo-Aristotelian theories (e.g., those of Ernest Weinrib or Jules Coleman). In Gordley’s presentation, commutative (or ‘corrective’) justice is derived from distributive justice and distributive justice is derived from the idea of the distinctively human life. Confidently traversing a wide range of historical, comparative and theoretical materials, the book’s argument is at once ambitious, learned, and elegantly presented. But as a theoretical account of the foundations of the modern private law it is unpersuasive. The book’s own account of property law suggests that in practice the idea of distributive justice does little, if any, work in explaining the rules we actually have. Nor is it clear how, if at all, distributive justice flows from the allegedly foundational idea of the ’distinctively human life’. As for commutative justice, it is not clear why, if is derived from distributive justice in the way Gordley believes, the courts should care about it. Finally, but perhaps most significantly, Gordley’s conception of commutative justice is unable to account for central features of the law of obligations.

Teaching and Moral Perception

Moral perception, the capacity to comprehend the unique needs and aspirations of individual persons and the best possibilities of equally unique social contexts, is important to teachers who rely on sympathetic understanding to facilitate their classroom practice. Yet moral perception and teachers’ “intuitions” have been denigrated and ignored by educational theorists and researchers who emphasize rational judgment and rule-governed principles. In our article we develop the Aristotelian theory of practical reasoning and its defense of moral perception as logically necessary to any goo d moral practice. We bolster our defense by calling on the work of John Dewey. We explicate the neo-Aristotelian theory of practical teaching wisdom in terms of the assessments of one fourth grader, Tony Mitchell. We argue that assessing students without providing a role for moral perception is a tragic mistake.