[NOTE: These are passages which I noted early in my research but which I neglected to attribute to a particular author. As I identify them, I will move them to other files.]

"By definition, the brave man is one who has a fixed disposition to stand fast in the face of danger. His mind is trained, by practice, in checking the primary reaction and so checking the spread of painful feelings; his mind does not 'give the command to be afraid'. It will be seen that this 'command' of the mind is still consistent with the account of voluntary action I have given above. In Aristotle's theory the mind gives its commands *according to its disposition*. It is nowhere implied, so far as I have discovered, that its commands are 'spontaneous' and 'free', in the sense of 'uncaused' or 'unpredictable' - or any rate this is true once the mind has acquired fixed dispositions. The actions it commands are voluntary, because dispositions are voluntary, in the sense already explained. [See also EE 1223a23-28, 1224a7]"

"My interpretation of the end of the Eudemian Ethics suggests, on the contrary, a conception of phronesis identical with the phronesis of the Nicomachean Ethics; there are clear indications that it is subotdinate to, rather than identical with, the theoretikon. It is, however, certain that the earlier Ethics recognises a phronesis which is a supreme speculative faculty. In the description of one of the kinds of life that men generally accept as happy, the phrases 'contemplative life', 'philospher's life', and 'life of phronesis' are used indiscriminately; [EE 1214a32; 1215a34, b1; 1216a19, 29, 38] Anaxagoras, who regularly appears as an advocate of this life, portrays the wise man as 'engaged in some divine contemplation' (EE 1215b12), or again as wishing to live 'in order to contemplate the....'." [quotation truncated]

"Finally Aristotle gives us four solutions which he considers correct. The first depends on distinguishing the time when we possess a certain piece of knowledge but are not using it from the time when we both possess and are using it. The latter is also called theorounta, contemplating. Aristotle gives no example of what he has in mind; but no doubt he would have accepted the following. As I begin this sentence, you possess but are not using the knowledge that Greece is an arid land; as I end it, you are using it as well as possessing it, because I have recalled it to your minds. This is part of his great doctrine of potentiality and act, although he uses the word energei only twice in this chapter. To say that a man knows something is not to say that he is always thinking of it, nor that he is thinking of it now. Aristotle appears to mean that the acratic knows that his act is wrong in that he *possesses* this knowledge, but he can do the act because hs is not at the time *using* this knowledge, not contemplating it. I hold that Aristotle accepts this solution and believes it to contain virtually everything necessary for the explanation of akrasia, since it shows how the acratic both knows and does not know that his act is wrong."

[same paper as the preceding] "Let us pass to the third solution. It is again a distinction, a subdivision. Aristotle now subdivides his 'possessing but not using'. A sleeping man and a waking man may both possess the practical principle. But, says Aristotle, the sleeping man possesses it 'in a manner other than those just mentioned' (1147a10); he 'both possesses and does not possess it in a way'. Aristotle adds that such is the condition not merely of the sleeping but also of the mad and the drunk and the acratic. He assimilates akrasia to medical cases. (His ethics has a tendency to turn into medicine.) The acratic can even utter the words which express the knowledge and yet not be using it. For a moment Aristotle almost seems to want to say that during his act the acratic simply does not know; for he uses the expression isasi d' oupo ('they do not yet know')."

[same paper as the preceding] "Perhaps you will agree with what I have just said and still demand some explanation of akrasia. For perhaps you will say that it is not enough to submit to experience and recognise the fact of akrasia; we must also understand this strange and repellant fact; we must see something of its place in the totality of human nature. You are right. We must do so; and it will probably be an endless task. For the present, however, I offer you only one thought, a thought which, if true, must help us a little to understand akrasia. It is the thought that moral principles are not discoveries but resolutions. When we adopt a moral principle, we are not deciding how the world is made, but how we are going to act. The principle that one ought not to kill, for example, does not reveal the composition of the world, not the orders of a god. It takes a stand with regard to the world. The adoption of it constitutes a sort of generalised choice. If this is so, it follows that when a man acts acratically he acts not contrary to a known fact, so to speak, but contrary to a decision he has taken.... These considerations make akrasia more intelligible by putting it into that huge class of contradictions, hesitations, vacillations, incoherences, and absurdities of every kind, which composes a large part of our practical life." [PSA: this is in line with my understanding of prohairesis as commitment and of boulesis as resolution; see also FLANNERY on practical non-contradiction.]

"We have seen (III.A.2) that awareness of human ignorance and weakness, the unpredictability of the future and the great and sudden reversals to which our fortunes are subject was a strong current which ran all through Greek civilization and found expression at all levels, sophisticated and popular alike. From this awareness many positive conclusions were drawn.... pity and forgive others, for you too are human; restrain your ambitions, for you do not know what the morrow will bring; abstain from violence and cruelty against others for they are no less human than you; endure suffering, for you are not alone. What the Greeks called 'knowing oneself' is recognition of one's own limitations, and has little to do with 'examination of conscience' as a means of acquiring a conviction of one's own worthlessness."

"Another role for the highest good, but one less developed than those I have been examining, comes to mind if one thinks about the best and most precious kind of time (for Aristotle, this would be leisure), or about one's best energy or best moments as an agent or active being. If one could identify these independently (and this is surely feasible), then it could make sense to equate the highest good with what one deliberately dedicates this time or this energy to: what one precisely saves it for. (The idea is adumbrated in Aristotle's Politics: leisure is beautiful or fine by comparison with non-leisure time; therefore the activities of leisure should be more beautiful than unleisurely activities. [Politics 1333a27-36] The thought would be: to give one's finest time to such and such an activity is in effect to treat the activity as the highest good. If the idea of *dedication* (or *devotion*) *to* is lived out, as of course it can be, with quasi-religious intensity, then we have returned to something akin to our first take on the highest good."

END