Aristotle’s "Nicomachean Ethics": Laying the Foundations for a Pragmatist Consideration of Human Knowing and Acting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whereas a great many academics have presumed to speak knowledgeably about Aristotle's work, comparatively few have actually studied his texts in sustained detail and very few scholars in the social sciences have examined Aristotle's work mindfully of its relevance for the study of human knowing and acting on a more contemporary or enduring plane. Further, although many people simply do not know Aristotle's works well, even those who are highly familiar with Aristotle's texts (including Nicomachean Ethics) generally have lacked conceptual frames for traversing the corridors of Western social thought in more sustained pragmatist terms. It is here, using symbolic interactionism (a sociological extension of pragmatist philosophy) as an enabling device for developing both transsituational and transhistorical comparisons, that it is possible to establish links of the more enduring and intellectually productive sort between the classical scholarship of the Greeks and the ever emergent contemporary scene. After (1) overviewing the theoretical emphasis of symbolic interactionism, this paper (2) locates Aristotle's works within a broader historical context, (3) situates Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics within the context of his own work and that of his teacher Plato, and (4) takes readers on an intellectual voyage through Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Not only does his text address a great many aspects of human lived experience, but it also has great instructive value for the more enduring study of human group life. Accordingly, attention is given to matters such as (a) human agency, reflectivity, and culpability; (b) definitions of the situation; (c) character, habits, and situated activities; (d) emotionality and its relationship to activity; (e) morality, order, and deviance; (f) people's senses of self regulation and their considerations of the other; (g) rationality and judgment; (h) friendship and associated relationships; (i) human happiness; and (k) intellectual activity. In concluding the paper, one line of inquiry that uses contemporary symbolic interaction as resource for engaging Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is suggested. However, as indicated in the broader statement presented here, so much more could be accomplished by employing symbolic interactionism as a contemporary pragmatist device for engaging Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".