Phronesis as poetic: Moral creativity in contemporary Aristotelianism

Review of Metaphysics

Volumn 59, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 313-331

  Wall, John ^a  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 29744471188     PISSN: 00346632     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (68)

1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 6.5140b5-6.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 304, 309.
3. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 325-37.
4. See Gaëlle Fiasse, "Aristotle's Phronêsis: A True Grasp of Ends as Well as Means?" The Review of Metaphysics 55 (December 2001): 323-37.
5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 6.5.1140a26-8.
6. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Ibid. 6.12.1144a8.
7. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Ibid. 6.13.1144b31-2.
8. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater,
9. in Introduction to Aristotle, 2d rev. ed., ed. Richard McKeon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 9.1451b28-9.
10. Apart from the authors discussed in this paper, others writing recently on phronesis include Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988);
11. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989);
12. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992);
13. Johannes A. Van der Ven, Formation of the Moral Self (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998);
14. Jana Noel, "On the Varieties of 'Phronesis'," Educational Philosophy and Theory 31, no. 3 (October 1999): 273-89;
15. and Richard Smith, "Paths of Judgment: The Revival of Practical Wisdom," Educational Philosophy and Theory 31, no. 3 (October 1999): 327-40.
16. Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: 'Phronesis' and 'Techne' in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 381.
17. Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: 'Phronesis' and 'Techne' in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle (1993), 381, Ibid, (my emphasis)
18. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 350.
19. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Ibid., 115-16 (my emphasis).
20. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 222.
21. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 362.
22. Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 162.
23. Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Ibid., 154, 164, 183-5.
24. See also Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
25. Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge, 184.
26. See Dennis J. Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001);
27. and Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
28. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, rev. ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5, 138.
29. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, rev. ed. Ibid., 353.
30. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 158-9, 239.
31. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, Ibid., 290. This phrase "narrative unity of life" Ricoeur borrows explicitly from MacIntyre, but he gives it a somewhat different meaning.
32. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, Ibid., 219-21, 225.
33. See also Paul Ricoeur, "Guilt, Ethics, and Religion," trans. Robert Sweeney, in The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974);
34. "Violence and Language," in Political and Social Essays, ed. David Stewart and Joseph Bien (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974);
35. "The Teleological and Deontological Structures of Action: Aristotle and/or Kant?" in Contemporary French Philosophy, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 106;
36. and "The Human Being as the Subject Matter of Philosophy," Philosophy and Social Criticism 14 (1988): 203-215, esp. 213-14. Ricoeur's concept of "otherness" is of course also quite different from that of Levinas, who understands moral poetics as radical disruption; however, we need not enter into this debate here.
37. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 203.
38. Paul Ricoeur, "Ethics and Human Capability: A Response," in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, ed. John Wall, William Schweiker, and David Hall (New York: Routledge, 2002), 287.
39. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 269.
40. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, Ibid., 290.
41. Paul Ricoeur, "À la gloire de la phronèsis (Éthique a nicomaque, livre VI)," in J. Y. Chateau, La verité pratique. Aristote. Éthique a nicomaque, livre VI (Paris: J. Vrin, 1997), 13, 22 (my translation).
42. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 241-9.
43. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 249.
44. See also Paul Ricoeur, "Practical Reason" trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson, in Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991);
45. and Ricoeur, "The Act of Judging," in The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
46. I am aware that Ricoeur is open to legitimate criticism from Irigaray, Butler, and Anderson on this score. He is less cognizant of how Antigone as "the other" is marginalized by the very language and culture available to her for overcoming it. However, this debate takes us beyond our focus here on the connection of moral poetics to phronesis.
47. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), ix.
48. Richard Kearney, "Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutical Imagination," in The Narrative Path: The Later Works of Paul Ricoeur, ed. T. Peter Kemp and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989), 1-31, esp. 2.
49. Similarly "poetic" readings of Ricoeur are made by Mary Schaldenbrand, "Metaphoric Imagination: Kinship through Conflict," in Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Charles Reagan (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979), 57-81;
50. Olivier Mongin, "Face à l'éclipse du récit," Traversées du XXe siècle. Revue esprit (1988): 225-43;
51. T. Peter Kemp, "Toward a Narrative Ethics: A Bridge Between Ethics and the Narrative Reflection of Ricoeur," in The Narrative Path: The Later Works of Paul Ricoeur, ed. T. Peter Kemp and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989);
52. Jean Greisch, "Paul Ricoeur," in Encyclopédie philosophique universelle. Les oeuvres philosophiques 2 (1992): 3669-76;
53. Hans Kellner, "As Real as It Gets: Ricoeur and Narrativity," in Meanings in Texts and Actions: Questioning Paul Ricoeur, ed. David Klemm and William Schweiker (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 55;
54. Jean Grondin, "L'herméneutique positive de Paul Ricoeur: du temps au récit," Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, no. 3 (1993): 413-27;
55. and Robert Sweeney, "Ricoeur on Ethics and Narrative," in Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation, ed. Morny Joy (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1997).
56. Domenico Jervolino has called narrative identity the "poetic ... culmination of [Ricoeur's] philosophical discourse on the will"; Domenico Jervolino, The Cogito and Hermeneutics: The Question of the Subject in Paul Ricoeur, trans. Gordon Poole (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 135.
57. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 248-9.
58. A similar critique of Ricoeur's need for "realism" has been made by William Schweiker in "Hermeneutics, Ethics, and the Theology of Culture: Concluding Reflections," in Meanings in Texts and Actions: Questioning Paul Ricoeur, ed. David Klemm and William Schweiker (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 292-313;
59. and by Don Browning in "Ricoeur and Practical Theology" in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, ed. John Wall, William Schweiker, and David Hall (New York: Routledge, 2002), 251-63.
60. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 219-27,
61. and Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
62. Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 82.
63. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), bk. 11, chap. 20.
64. This parallel with Augustine could be taken further with respect to Nussbaum in that both describe this tension under the aegis of "perception": Augustine's narrative perception of the unfolding "present of the present" and Nussbaum's perception of the presence of others. Ricoeur explicitly takes up Augustine on this point through his three volumes of Time and Narrative.
65. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985).
66. Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2003).
67. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, trans. G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960).
68. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).