Psuche versus the Mind
K.V. Wilkes
In Nussbaum and Rorty, eds., Essays on Aristotle's De Anima. Clarendon, 1992.

"A second striking advantage of the psuche over the mind (for contemporary psychology) is its insistence upon capacities or functions rather than upon individual mental events, and upon *types* rather than occasions of behaviour.... the 'particulars,' the individual events and occasions, are not the phenomena with which the systematic study of organisms is concerned." (WILKES, p. 118) [PSA: also in the study of character, the focus is not on acts but on traits, i.e. hexeis; this is true for the study of arete, episteme, nous, and techne.]

"If, with Aristotle, you emphasize capacities, traits, states of character, rather than individual items or events, then the contemporary distinction between 'moral' - roughly: 'other-regarding' - and 'prudential' - roughly: 'self-regarding' - becomes boring and secondary." (WILKES, p. 119)

"The primary interest, for the writer of ethics... lies in the states of character, *however* they find their realization.... Whatever the judgement, it stems directly from Aristotle's focus on the capacities and competences of the individual, rather than on the agent's occurrent mental acts and occasions of behavior." (WILKES, p. 120)

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