Skip to content
University of Maryland LibrariesDigital Repository at the University of Maryland
    • Login
    View Item 
    •   DRUM
    • Theses and Dissertations from UMD
    • UMD Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    •   DRUM
    • Theses and Dissertations from UMD
    • UMD Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Action, Perception, and the Living Body: Aristotle on the Physiological Foundations of Moral Psychology

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    Russo_umd_0117E_10920.pdf (581.9Kb)
    No. of downloads: 1931

    Date
    2009
    Author
    Russo, Michael P.
    Advisor
    Singpurwalla, Rachel G. K.
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    In this dissertation I show that Aristotle's moral psychology is grounded in his natural philosophy of the living body. Moral psychology studies the ways in which agency and moral responsibility are rooted in the functional structure of the psyche. For Aristotle, the psyche - that is, the soul (<italic>psychê</italic>) - is unified with the living body, and its functional structure is integrated with the dispositional propensities of the body's material constituents. On account of this, "the soul neither does anything nor has anything done to it without the body..." (<italic>DA</italic> I.1, 403a 5) Accordingly, Aristotle considers it an "absurdity" of the accounts of his predecessors that "they attach the soul to the body and set it into it, determining no further what the cause of this is or what the condition of the body is..." (<italic>DA</italic> I.3, 407b 14) However, most contemporary interpretations of Aristotle's moral psychology suffer from essentially this same problem: they interpret Aristotle's explanation of, say, voluntary action or lack of self-restraint (<italic>akrasia</italic>) in entirely psychological terms, and say nothing about the physiological processes that Aristotle takes to partially constitute, and to critically influence, these phenomena. Here I address this imbalance by exploring Aristotle's view of the somatic dimension of moral psychology. More specifically, I examine Aristotle's so-called "hylomorphism" - the view that a living thing's body and soul are its material and its form (respectively) - and his account of the physiological functions underlying "incidental perception" (roughly, "seeing as" or perceiving particulars under a description), voluntary action, practical reasoning and its role in moving us to act, lack of self-restraint, and moral development.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1903/9956
    Collections
    • Philosophy Theses and Dissertations
    • UMD Theses and Dissertations

    DRUM is brought to you by the University of Maryland Libraries
    University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7011 (301)314-1328.
    Please send us your comments.
    Web Accessibility
     

     

    Browse

    All of DRUMCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister
    Pages
    About DRUMAbout Download Statistics

    DRUM is brought to you by the University of Maryland Libraries
    University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7011 (301)314-1328.
    Please send us your comments.
    Web Accessibility