Aristotle's Analysis for Akratic Action
Hendrik Lorenz
In Polansky, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
Cambridge, 2014

"[E]mploying understanding [episteme] so as to contemplate something is not only a matter of attending to it. It is also, and crucially, a matter of grasping its reason. More precisely, it is a matter of grasping the truth of a proposition on the basis of grasping the reason why the proposition is true. This conception is much more specific than the standard conception of what is involved in contemplating a given proposition." (LORENZ, p. 246) [PSA: see KOSMAN-1973 and BURNYEAT-1981 on episteme.]

"People who experience an episode of akrasia do not, strictly speaking, have understanding. They are temporarily unable to engage in the activity of understanding ('to contemplate' [PSA: to be aware]) that they should not do this particular act. In other words, they are temporarily unable to grasp that fact in a certain distinctive way, namely, by grasping the reason why it obtains." (LORENZ, pp. 255-256)

"[W]hat Aristotle means by epistasthai throughout the whole discussion is knowing a fact in a distinctive way, namely, knowing it on the basis of knowing the reason or explanation why that fact obtains.... the distinction between understanding and contemplating is not the distinction between knowing and attending to, but that between dispositional and occurrent cases of grasping the truth of a suitable proposition on the basis of grasping the reason or explanation why the proposition is true." (LORENZ, pp. 259-260)

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