A Contribution to One's Mikrokosmos

In today's Wall Street Journal, Walter Mossberg reports on two web-based personal organizers. This is an ideal solution for keeping a calendar if, like me, you have easy access to the internet and almost always work when connected to the web, and if you need to work from a variety of machines (for me: a desktop in my office; a desktop at home; my own laptop; my wife's Mac), so that synchronizing them all to a single calendar is impractical. As Mossberg writes:

It's a pain to keep updating calendar programs that live on multiple computers, even if you only use one type of computer, and even with the help of a PDA or smart phone, like my Palm Treo. And it gets far worse if you use both Windows PCs and Macs, or if you'd like to occasionally rely on public computers or borrowed computers on the road.

The two programs seem to be fairly equivalent in features, however Trumba OneCalendar costs $39.95 to subscribe for the year, whereas AirSet is free. (Yet amortize the cost of a good PDA, and even that fee turns out to be a good deal.)

One nice feature:

Reminder emails for appointments can be set up on both programs...AirSet emailed us daily reminders of the next day's schedule every evening at the same time. Currently, AirSet and Trumba offer to send free reminders to your cellphone using text messaging, and AirSet can also send free daily schedule summaries using the same method.

I've started using AirSet already.

Aristotelian Particularism

On another note , I finally was able to study Anthony Price's BACAP contribution from last year, "Was Aristotle a Particularist?" I may eventually post something on his arguments, but for the moment I wanted simply to show how he defines the question, which I found very useful (I cite with his permission):

A recent line of thinking which may further our understanding of Aristotle is particularism. This label, being applicable to somewhat different claims, rather identifies a tendency than a dogma. We may oppose particularism to generalism, trying to identify where he stands, through a variety of issues. The questions that I shall try to answer, each within a section of this paper, are the following:

(1) Does Aristotle suppose that an agent’s practical decisions apply to a particular situation an articulate general specification of eudaimonia?

(2) Does he suppose that there are any principles to guide decisions that apply without exception?

(3) Does he suppose that there are factors to be taken into account whose valence is invariable between different contexts?

(4) Does he suppose that, as Jonathan Dancy has put it (1993: 50), ‘there is nothing that one brings to the new situation other than a contentless ability to discern what matters where it matters’?

An extreme particularist reading of Aristotle would answer ‘no’ to the first three questions, and ‘yes’ to the last. I shall argue for positive answers to (2) and (3), and negative ones to (1) and (4).

Ergon Taken

My piglet has additionally given me a better appreciation of the force of the ergon argument. The truth is, my pig is very good at enjoying himself. He eats his fill, pushes some dirt around, mixes up some comfortable mud, and then lies down in it with complete contentment. A pig satisfied.

It's easy to look at him and think: He does that very well indeed. There' s no way that I could possibly achieve anything like that contentment. That role is, so to speak, taken already. I'd better look for something else--something I can do, which a pig can't.

The Sun is New Each Day

Well, I've been bad and plan to return today, now, to my practice of daily posts on Dissoi Blogoi.

In part I've been distracted by a new arrival. Yes, I have some very good news to share: we have a piglet. Yorkshire breed, very cute. In the last week I've built a small pen for him and a servicable pig ark. We don't yet have a name (suggestions welcome). Since we're not vegetarians, people advise 'Pork Chop' or the equivalent.

I'm thinking of arranging a philosophy field trip for my students in ancient philosophy. They'll find ample corroboration of "Pigs wash themselves in mud, birds in dust or ash" and "Pigs rejoice in mud more than pure water." Indeed.

Correction to Review of Roochnik

Michael Kochin has published in BMCR a correction to his review of David Roochnik's Retrieving the Ancients. You may see the review here and the correction here. Here's the text of the correction:

In footnote 4 to my review of David Roochnik's Retrieving the Ancients (BMCR
2005.07.44) I wrote that "Roochnik nowhere in Retrieving the Ancients explains
who Diels is or the distinction between A and B fragments." As Michael Pakaluk
pointed out (on Dissoi Blogoi), my claim is false: Roochnik explains both what
Diels is and the distinction between A and B fragments on pp. 11-12, in the
initial paragraphs of his chapter on the Presocratics. I should not have
ventured such a comment relying only on memory and the absence of an entry for
Diels in Roochnik's index.

We'll leave it at that.

Teaching Ancient Philosophy

As the new academic year approaches, perhaps some of you, like me, are thinking about new ways to teach ancient philosophy in the fall.

Here is a question I'd very much like to pose to readers of DB--timely, too, given our discussions of the relationship between doing history of philosophy and doing philosophy.

I've always taught history of ancient chronologically. But has anyone had success teaching it by topic (or 'problem', even)? E.g. logic, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of nature, theory of knowledge, psychology ('philosophical anthropology'), etc. I've thought of changing to teaching it in this way, and I'd be very interested to hear about others' experiences. Can this work in a semester? How?

Forgot to Say

I forgot to say that we (my daughter, Maria, and I) arrived in Austria via Munich, where I was able to meet briefly with Richard King, an ancient philosopher who teaches at the University of Munich. A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of reviewing his book, Aristotle on Life and Death, for Bryn Mawr Classical Review (here). Richard is a wonderful scholar and fine man. We visited some churches in the Marienplatz together and sampled a pastry together--this at the request of my daughter, who aspires to be a pastry chef.

Really Wish I Could Post, But....

Greetings from Mayrhofen, in the Zillertal Alps of Austria, where I'm hiking these next few days. I've found one internet terminal in a cafe and another in a bar (where I am now!). I've had to take care of some business in the occasion I've had to use these machines. I do have some items to post, and will aim to get at them soon?

Have any D.B. readers been here? It's an amazing place.

A Silent Spring

A question directed at those who think that there is, or might be, a 'perennial philosophy', pagan or Christian, expressed in the writings of Plato and Aristotle:

If there is such, why is no one writing books that are new contributions to this philosophy?

Why do we have only historical studies, which are half-hearted, almost cowardly ways of affirming a Platonic or Aristotelian philosophical viewpoint? It's much too easy, isn't it, to profess belief in something like eros (f0r instance) through an exposition of the Symposium, rather than through writing something like the Symposium (however imperfect it might turn out in comparison).

Why do we find works such as After Virtue, which point and say that philosophy should be done in a certain way, but which fail actually to do philosophy in that way?

Presumably, if Aristotle's Physics (for instance) is correct, it is still basically correct. Where are the works in philosophy of science that don't use the name 'Aristotle' even once but which make sense of contemporary science in the fashion and spirit of the Physics?--so that any intelligent person might read it and become convinced that that is the most sensible way of looking at the natural world.

An exception: Fred Sommers' work on term logic. Perhaps another: Philippa Foot on ethics.

A Single, Perennial Pagan Philosophy

"... one of the most important contributions to the study of ancient Greek philosophy in our time."

That's how Lloyd Gerson describes Richard Sorabji's project of translating the Greek commentators on Aristotle into English, in Gerson's review in BMCR (read it here) of a three-volume sourcebook derived from that project.

Yes, that is undoubtedly true. And yet, I cannot make sense of Gerson's two arguments for that claim.

First, he says, now that the commentators are translated into English, "the study of the entire canon of ancient Greek philosophy will be reinvigorated". This will correct for the "overfishing in the waters of the 4th century B.C.E. and a consequent marginalization of ancient Greek philosophy within the larger enterprise of professional philosophy."

This strikes me as bizarre. Ancient Greek philosophy is currently marginalized (is it, more than any other specialization?) because of attention to Aristotle and Plato primarily? And then because they can now read in English lots of ancient commentaries on Aristotle, scholars (students? philosophers generally?) will be motivated to study (say) Xenophanes and Epicurus? I don't get it.

Second, Gerson says, the Greek commentators show us a different way of reading Aristotle. They believed that Aristotle's thought was a unified system which did not develop; that it was in harmony with Plato's thought; and that the study of Aristotle was a good way to become initiated in the higher mysteries of Plato's thought.

Yet one might suppose that this different way of reading Aristotle will prove significant, in English translation, only if it is correct. Is it true that Aristotle's philosophy did not develop? Is it true that his thought constitutes with Plato a single, harmonious philosophical outlook? In what seems a relativistic passage, Gerson stops short of endorsing this:

([T]he commentators assumed that Aristotle's philosophy was a whole... and [that] that philosophy was a version of Platonism, albeit a version coming from a dissident within the Platonic school. Accordingly, they read all of the works in the corpus as based on identical (Platonic) principles. But of course their assumption was no less of an assumption than was Jaeger's.

But Jaeger's view was a conclusion, not an 'assumption'. And can't we judge whether the commentators were right in what they 'assumed'?

My suspicion is that Gerson gives such poor reasons, because he does not quite state his real reasons. The review looks to me as if written by someone who wants to say--but does not quite find the nerve to affirm it outright--that there is indeed "a single perennial pagan philosophy" (as Gerson puts it), which is a vigorous alternative to philosophy as practiced since Descartes; that the study of this philosophy could in principle replace, almost without loss, philosophy as now practiced; and that we can see that this is so--and perhaps even become converted to it--by entering into a community in which this sort of philosophy is practiced, which is precisely what is constituted by the ancient Greek commentators. The Greek commentators, on this view, are meant to play a role relative to this 'single perennial pagan philosophy' analogous to Aquinas' Summa and an ostensible 'single perennial Christian philosophy'.

I don't know; this is speculation. But it's how I would make sense of the strange mixture of noble enthusiasm and poor argument that I find in that review.

The Troubling Mix of Scholarship and Politics

"I became thoroughly disgusted when one day he came into class, sat down, and asked, 'Now what would Plato have said about the train strike?' How fatuous! And Vlastos was his student, but he put an end to that sort of thing. He changed the field, and, with Gwil Owen, brought in English and European standards, so that it became completely unacceptable even to say that sort of thing."

Thus remarked once my teacher, Burton Dreben, about Raphael Demos. (I think I remember it correctly.) Which raises the question: Is it ever appropriate, and if so when, to consider 'What would Socrates (or Plato, or Aristotle) say?'

Dreben apparently thought never. But I wonder: was he consistent? (Did he equally disapprove of Martha Nussbaum's applications of ancient philosophy to contemporary politics? I don't know.)

And Vlastos certainly did not engage in ancient philosophy without serious ethical aims, at least. (I don't know his politics.) But if you allow ethical applications, why not political ones?

Moreover, don't all of us--perhaps especially when we are caught up in some philological or logical technicality--think that ancient philosophy should lead to something good, some good change (in ourselves, in society), besides being inherently worth thinking about, as it surely is? But if we allow in some general way that it should lead to some good, why not try to figure out how, more particularly, it might do so?

And Dreben had no difficulty with Rawls' political idealizations. Now suppose Rawls were to confess: "My theory of justice is entirely the result of thinking about how Kant would respond to contemporary questions of justice." (He did not say that: but he might have.) What's the difference between speculating in this way about Kant (or Mill, or Hume) and about Plato?

Your thoughts appreciated.

Did I Miss Something?

We discussed at some length in this blog the theory of G.R. Lear that ethical reasoning, for Aristotle in Nic. Eth., is an 'approximation' to philosophical contemplation, and yet, unless I missed something, we never succeeded in clarifying that relationship.

Here's an attempt by Henry Dyson in his review, in BMCR, of John Cooper's second volume of collected papers, in which, recall, Cooper declares himself persuaded by the 'approximation' view:

The first thing to note is that moral action is not subordinated to contemplation as a means to an end. Rather, Cooper notes that moral virtue and contemplation are both excellences of the reasoning part of the soul. The proper selection of independent goods is undertaken with an eye to the perfection of this expression of our rationality. Contemplation, however, is the highest and most perfect expression of our rationality and moral virtue merely aims at the same good as contemplation via lower instantiation. Thus Cooper concludes: "One would, as a result, be fairly described as pursuing even in one's moral actions the ultimate end of excellent theoretical thinking" (305)

Okay, I understand that it is not supposed to be a means to an end (and I acknowledge relations of ordering that are not instrumental orderings). Also, I understand what it would be to want practical rationality to be a 'lower' version of philosophical contemplation. But I still don't understand how it is supposed to be that--and, if that isn't explained, isn't this wishful thinking rather than an interpretation?

In reply to the old difficulty that, if practical rationality is a 'lower' version of philosophical contemplation, then presumably one must always prefer and choose philosophical contemplation over practical expressions of rationality, when these are exclusive, Dyson represents Cooper as holding:

... excellent contemplation is sufficient in and of itself to insure the choice-worthiness of a life. Carrying on such an activity over a greater period does not make the life thereby more choiceworthy than it would have been otherwise. On the contrary, to disregard one's moral duty for the sake of a greater extension of contemplation "would entail the loss of the value not only of the omitted moral action, but of all the 'moral' actions one had done while harboring the misunderstanding of morality that allowing such 'exceptions' would imply." (308). Thus, what is required is first to satisfy all the demands of morality including those that might take one away from contemplative activity, and then to give oneself over to such contemplation as the circumstances permit. In this way the appreciation of moral virtue as a fundamental human value is not undermined by the recognition that contemplation is the highest human good and the final end of human life.

So once someone actualizes the virtue of sophia even once, then nothing more is to be gained by further actualizations? That idea hardly jibes with Aristotle's e)f’ o(/son e)nde/xetai a)qanati/zein kai\ pa/nta poiei=n pro\j to\ zh=n kata\ to\ kra/tiston tw=n e)n au(tw|= | (1177b33-4).

And what Dyson takes to be, or represents as, a consequence ('Thus, ...') looks to me like a distinct, unsupported idea.

Shouldn't we expect more from a critical review?

A Philosophical Docudrama?

What Roochnik gives us in Retrieving the Ancients is a kind of television miniseries presentation of [Stanley] Rosen's ideas in the form of a historical introduction to Plato and Aristotle. The book before us is indeed derived from a set of recorded lectures "produced for the Teaching Company" (10 n1). Roochnik's book is plot-driven, rather than technique-driven, and it gives us a lecture-style digest of ideas, without much attempt to tell where his debts lie. Nor does he introduce the reader to the scholarly tools required to wrench these ideas out of the Greek texts.[[4]]

Ouch!!! A fairly harsh judgment by Michael S. Kochin in his review in BMCR of David Roochnik's attempt to give an accessible if schematic overview of the history of ancient philosophy. You may see the review with its other unflattering comments here, or order Roochnik's book and judge for yourself here.

Since Roochnik is a colleague of mine in BACAP, I read the book when it came out last year. I'm puzzled because the book that Kochin describes, and the book that I remember, are quite different.

Here's something that troubles me about Kochin's review. It's a small concern but the sort of thing that, in my mind, casts doubt on his judgment. If one looks to footnote 4, appended to the end of the passage quoted above, one finds:

4. See e.g. p. 17, where Roochnik, discussing Thales, cites a "statement of Aristotle, listed by Diels as an A fragment," though Roochnik nowhere in Retrieving the Ancients explains who Diels is or the distinction between A and B fragments. For a model account of these tools and the philosophical commitments embodied in them, see the beginning of Heidegger's essay on Anaximander, translated in Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. and tr. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Heidegger's account would not, I think, require much reworking to be presented to an American popular audience.

But this is not true. Roochnik introduces Diels, albeit briefly, and explains the distinction between 'A' and 'B' fragments, on p. 11.

Oops.

We know that Kochin had the book open to that page, since he refers to Roochnik's footnote on facing page 10. So why the mistake? For my part, I cannot have confidence in a reviewer who, it seems, reads a book so sloppily, while criticizing its author so harshly.

Oh, and we'll be waiting for Kochin's efforts to rework Heidegger's scholarship for American popular audiences.

This Blog to Resume

Did you ever notice how students writing dissertations have the cleanest apartments? Even sweeping the floor, in comparison, looks good as a diversion. I half wonder whether I've had little inclination to blog because I'm between major writing projects: resume that translation of Nic Eth (for instance), and the blog will take on once again an aspect of inevitability.

But probably the reason is that I'm a man of extremes. I either work with intensity at something, or do not work at all, and my travels this summer has made the former impossible, as regards this blog at least.

You know about my trip to Vancouver, and immediately after that was the May Week Seminar in Cambridge. A couple of weeks after that, I participated in a colloquium at Princeton, at the James Madison center, and read a paper on "Lincoln's Intellectual Virtue". The colloquium was devoted to how one teaches the American Founders and Abraham Lincoln's thought in undergraduate classes. Lincoln is a side interest of mine. Lincoln is of course often taken to be a paradigm of phronesis, correctly so. In my paper, using (roughly) Aristotle's framework, I broadened the focus slightly and asked whether and how he exemplified intellectual virtue generally.

In the first two weeks of July I was teaching in an institute in Mexico City, called the North American Leadership Institute. The course brought together exemplary students from Canada, Mexico, and the United States with the aim of fostering pan-American solidarity in an era of NAFTA and globalization. Students took courses in philosophy, the history of indigenous peoples in Mexico, and in the language and culture of Mazahua. They went on various cultural excursions in the city and on weekends visited health clinics in Mazahua villages. I designed the philosophical curriculum for the institute, the theme of which was how the understanding of human rights developed through the encounter of Old World civilization with the indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The centerpiece of this was of course the famous debate between Bartolome de Las Casas and Sepulveda.

While in Mexico City I gave two seminars in the philosophy department of the Universidad Panamericana, on the Doctrine of the Mean and on the two discussions of pleasure in Nic Eth. The Universidad Panamerica is distinctive in centering its undergraduate philosophy curriculum on ancient philosophy and (even) medieval commentators. In theory, their best students finish well-prepared for graduate work. (For instance, all undergraduate majors take two years of Greek and a full sequence of logic courses.) I particularly enjoyed my discussions with Hector Zagal, a prolific Aristotle scholar; Luis Xavier Lopez, an accomplished scholar of medieval Arabic philosophy; and Rodrigo Guerra, a phenomenologist and 'personalist' who is a friendly critic of Aristotelian ethics. I also had the opportunity to meet Ricardo Salles of UNAM, an accomplished ancient philosopher, who attended the seminars.

I'm at home for this week and next, and then I travel to Vienna, via Munich and the Salzburg Music Festival, to teach in another institute. I'll try to blog in the midst of all this, but I cannot promise much success until late August, when I'll return to my old regimen.

But there will be a development. I've been collaborating with IT students at Clark to design a BACAP website, which will have many attractive features: a forum for discussing BACAP lectures; a place for scholars to post 'working papers' in ancient philosophy; a place for syllabi and teaching materials in ancient philosophy to be made widely available; etc. The website should be extremely useful in assisting BACAP's mission to promote both scholarship and pedagogy in ancient philosophy. I expect it will come online by mid-August.

Gone Fishin'

Folks, I probably should've hung a shingle for these last couple of weeks:

GONE FISHIN'

I've been on vacation. My work, when I've worked, has been that of cultivating my own garden-- weeding, clearing, pruning, chopping and planting.

I've avoided the near occasion of the sin of blogging by generally living away from a computer screen.

But, no fear, 'As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool returns to his folly.'

The Unreasonability of Skepticism

It's fair to say that Dissoi Blogoi has so far been concerned largely with ethics and psychology. For this reason I especially wish to comment briefly on a review published today in NDPR, which raises questions of epistemology.

The review--you've probably seen it (if not, you may see it here)--is of a collection of essays edited by Walter Sinnott-A(a Festschrift? I don't know) of Robert Fogelin's work. The collection is divided into half a dozen historical essays and roughly the same number of non-historical essays --although, as I've argued, I'm doubtful that that distinction is coherent (and just look at the title of the anthology!).

If I were asked to summarize that main point of the lively and vigorous review by Jose Comesaña, I would say it's that skepticism, although appearing to take reason seriously--to be clever, steeped in argument, sophisticated in argument, savvy of all the dialectical moves, etc.--at some point simply has to walk away from reasoning. Skepticism is in this sense, by the nature of the case, unreasonable.

Comesaña's ostensible position, in a nutshell, is that one either argues for skepticism or not. If not, it's unreasonable. If so, then one must affirm the conclusion of the argument and therefore not suspend judgment. If the conclusion is that no arguments are justified (not even this one), then, still, one affirms that no arguments are justified. If one says (as does Fogelin) that a true pyrrhonian skeptic merely wishes to affirm the conditional claim, that if the premises are true, then the conclusion follows (leaving it to dogmatists to affirm that the premises are true), still, as Roy Sorensen points out in his contribution, a conditional claim is still a claim (or judgment).

Given that this is his position, I wish that Comesaña had given more attention to Gisela Striker's contribution to the volume, which he describes in one sentence only:

In "Historical Reflections on Classical Pyrrhonism and Neo-Pyrrhonism," Gisela Striker argues that, unlike the Neo-Pyrrhonism of Fogelin, ancient Pyrrhonists did not suspend judgment on epistemological grounds, but rather, they welcomed suspension of judgment as a side-effect of their inability to resolve the epistemological disputes: the relation between that inability and the suspension of judgment was for them, so to speak, merely causal, not rational.

But this seems exactly the right strategy for a skeptic, in the face of Comesaña's critique: admit outright that one's skepticism isn't the conclusion of an argument but rather something accidental, which one came to value, not as an inference from reasons. (Whether this in turn is 'reasonable' then becomes a concern without any force: "It's something I want. Don't you want it as well?")

Emotions and Subjectivity

Anything that David Konstan writes, I read with great interest. He has a review now in BMCR of Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, 2004): see it here. Konstan's general judgment is that, for classical and medieval thought, Knuuttila's book is now the most thorough and comprehensive handbook on the emotions. But Konstan finds the book weak on analysis and, especially, he thinks that Knuuttila is insufficiently sensitive to deep discontinuities of thought which might underlie superficial or verbal agreement. For instance:

There is no doubt that mediaeval Christian thinkers were deeply indebted to classical discussions of the soul and its faculties, and K. sets out the lines of descent clearly, including the role of Avicenna and other Arab scholars in transmitting ancient views. Perhaps the greatest question concerning the continuity of the ancient and mediaeval traditions, however, derives from the Christian focus on sin. From this perspective, appetites are like any other impulse, whether pleasures and pains or love for our fellow creatures, that distract a person from the love of God. Thus, K. writes of Augustine: "Augustine's description of the different philosophical theories of the emotions is not very satisfactory... Augustine's own view is compatible with the Platonic distinction between an emotional and a rational part of the soul, but he is more interested in conceptualizing emotional matters by means of the concept of will, which was also central in his theology of sin" (160). K. observes that the role of the will is new in Augustine, although he adds: "The tasks of the will are not, however, very different from that given to the dominant part of the soul by later Platonists" (168). But the connection with sin invites a radically new approach to the whole question of the emotions, which may not lend itself so easily to a chronological survey.

Augustine introduces specifically Christian affects, such as love of God, that pertain to the highest part of the soul. K. explains that "The feelings which are immediately associated with these attitudes differ from the movements which Augustine calls passions," and he adds that, besides these religious emotions, "Christians can have non-standard mystical experiences and feelings" (161). Here again, I found myself wondering whether, despite some terminological overlap, we are really in the same world as classical theories of the emotions, even if there are reminiscences here and there of Plotinus.

But here is a difficulty for Konstan's concern. Either sin exists, or it does not. Either human nature exists, or it does not. Suppose human nature exists, but sin does not exist. Then whether Augustine or others believed that there was such a thing as sin, would make no difference to what the emotions in fact are, or to what emotions were for Augustine (how they arose within him, how they affected him). The best approach to interpreting Augustine, then, would be to take him to be describing and talking about the same emotions that everyone else has and which those who don't believe in sin were trying to describe.

The Legacy of Parmenides

A review of a reissuing of Patricia Curd's The Legacy of Parmenides in BMCR (see it here) concludes with this assessment:

Surely some of her claims cannot be accepted as they stand, partly because they highly complicate our perception of the early philosophical tradition.

Is this really the best one can say? I want to know what the reviewer's reasons are (the crucial or decisive ones) for rejecting Curd's view.

What do readers of Dissoi Blogoi think of Curd's reinterpretation of Parmenides?

The Real Issue

Since this comment 'cuts through all the nonsense', it seems good to give it greater prominence. Who'd like to take a shot at answering it?

----
(1) Does NE X.vii , even if we grant its claims, strike anyone as even beginning to carry the thesis that theoria is (self)sufficient for a desirable life lacking nothing? The obvious objection is that theoria is the perhaps the least autarchic activity, dependent on phronesis and many of the practical excellences ( and goods ) to give it a viable real-world existence in which theoria is an affordable leisure activity. A life of theoria is radically un-self-sufficient and non-viable for human beings ( as NE X vii-viii go on to concede ). Perhaps Aristotle came to appreciate this criticism, and so
(2) EE plumps for a happy life of arete teleia, which EE VIII.3 identifies with kalokagathia, many virtues( including theoria) practiced for their sake because they are kala. Now autarcheia has disappeared as a formal criterion of eudaemonia in EE, but isn’t a life aimed at kalokagathia self-sufficient in just the way that theoria by itself cannot be?

Destrée's Digression on Eudaimonia

I noted that Destrée's review devotes much time to criticizing Cooper's rejection of an inclusivist account of eudaimonia in Aristotle. (By the way, he describes Cooper as adopting the view that "the reason a moral action is worth choosing is not that it is a means to contemplation (according to some intellectualistic interpretations), but that it is a way of approximating contemplation or understanding oneself, 'practical truth' being interpreted as an approximation or imitation of the attainment of the truth which itself determines the 'theoretical life'"!)

I also said that his Destrée's arguments couldn't stand on their own, outside the context of a review. Here are a couple of examples. Destrée argues:

---
[T]here are two details Aristotle gives in that chapter I, 7, which is the focus of JC's analysis, which, I think, are very difficult to interpret in the framework of such a reduction. The first runs as follows: "We do always choose happiness because of itself and never because of something else, while as for honour, and pleasure, and intelligence (noûs), and every excellence, we do choose them because of themselves . . . , but we also chose them for the sake of happiness" (1097b1-4). Whatever the exact status may be of those subordinate goods, the evidence of the text doesn't suggest that the activity of the noûs, which cannot but be contemplation, is what Aristotle means by happiness.
---

But nous can easily be something other than contemplation: as for instance a good in the category of substance (just as the virtues, also mentioned in that passage, are goods in the category of quality), see 1096a25.

Destrée next argues:
---

The second detail is that the good which constitutes happiness must be self-sufficient, i.e. absolutely or unqualifiedly choiceworthy, "not for oneself alone, for the person living a life of isolation, but also for one's parents, children, wife, and generally those one loves, and one's fellow citizens, since man is by nature a civic being" (1097b8-11). If Aristotle had meant to say that the highest good constituting happiness is contemplation as the final end chosen for itself, this is, to say the least, a very strange remark, since contemplation doesn't constitute the good that fulfills the political nature, as such, of human beings; and a little further, in chapter 10, Aristotle clearly says, by way of summarizing all his research thus far, that political science, whose "end is the best", is "dedicated above all to making citizens of a certain quality, that is good and doers of fine things" (1099b30-32). Of course, contemplation may be (and eventually can, as I think) be part (and perhaps the best part) of such "fine things". But if Aristotle had wanted to present a very intellectualistic or 'dominant' version of happiness, would he not have been better off not insisting so much on our political nature and the moral actions it requires?

----

This puts much weight on Aristotle's use of polites at 1097b11. (I apologize for this and will correct it later. I'm writing now from someone else's computer, without SPIonic.) Yet it's far from clear that every time Aristotle uses that word in NE he's bringing in our 'political nature' (is that its import at 1165a31?), and Cooper could easily handle the remark from chapter 10.