Published Papers
Virtue and Contemplation in Eudemian Ethics 8.3
Forthcoming, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy
Argues that in Eudemian Ethics 8.3, virtue’s mean between excess and deficiency is defined by the standard of promoting the most contemplation. Promotion is indirect and constrained by virtue’s other essential features. The chapter’s apparent restriction of the standard to actions concerning natural goods actually serves a dialectical, not a restrictive, purpose. Unifies the chapter’s argumentative arc.
The Function Argument in the Eudemian Ethics
2022. Ancient Philosophy 42, no. 1: 191–214
Reconstructs the function argument of Eudemian Ethics ii 1 through the method of dichotomous division. Argues that the Eudemian argument defines the highest good without appealing to an antecedent conception of the human function, sidestepping a fallacious inference alleged of the Nicomachean argument.
In Progress
A paper about the best life of the city in the Politics
A paper about Aristotle’s argument about the ruling principle (archê) of practical wisdom in Eudemian Ethics 8.3
A paper about Aristotle and the philosophy of law
Dissertation Abstract
The Ethical Theory of Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics
Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics has often been treated as an inferior, earlier version of the more famous Nicomachean Ethics. My dissertation reads the Eudemian Ethics as a systematic, self-contained, carefully constructed whole that contains distinctive answers to questions fundamental to ethical theory. I find that Aristotle’s answers to questions like “What is virtue?” and “Can virtue be taught?” in the Eudemian Ethics differ significantly from his answers to those questions in the Nicomachean Ethics. I focus as well on questions about moral motivation, Aristotle’s metaethics, and the relation between ethics and politics. Taken together, these interpretive claims complicate the conventional wisdom that Aristotle pushes us away from the dominant ethical theories (consequentialism, deontology) and toward alternative or anti-theoretical paths like virtue ethics or moral particularism. The method of the Eudemian Ethics supports the view that ethical reasoning proceeds from established first principles that the treatise seeks to identify and refine, rather than ethical coherentism. Additionally, these interpretive claims challenge the primacy scholars have given to the Nicomachean Ethics by showing that the Eudemian Ethics—often regarded as earlier, inferior, but otherwise much the same—in fact speaks with a distinct, philosophically sophisticated voice.