Aristotle's Psychology
Daniel N. Robinson
Columbia University Press, 1989

Citing 460b3-5, Robinson writes: "Emotions, therefore, do not act uniformly, but relatively. Their effects are chiefly those of amplification; they intensity or energize dispositions that are already in place." (ROBINSON, p. 85) [PSA: see also Topics 115a26-31.]

"[Aristotle] is soberly and well aware of the incomplete rationality of children and of the consequences of this: They cannot find moral imperatives in rational arguments. [PSA: logoi] What they possess by nature is the potentiality for this discovery, but the principle itself arises cognitively out of the habitual behaviors installed by the community of adults.... Where early life has been given over entirely to the passions of the moment and to noncontingent pleasures, the person may come to be beyond rehabilitation. It is, after all, the history of activity itself that supplies the possibilities for rationality, including the possibility of ordering one's actions rationally." (ROBINSON, pp. 98-99)

Citing Wiggins 1980, Robinson writes: "Eudaimonia is, then, not some mysterious condition of being that one somehow falls into as a result of good genes or sound instruction; it is an actually *conceived* state of being, toward which a person strives. A life becomes a work of art evolving, the artist altering the methods, the materials, and even the conception of the intended work as he goes along." (ROBINSON, p. 99) [PSA: here "conception" is another term for the account or logos of how the person is committed to living.]

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