DESIRING THE GOOD : ancient proposals and contemporary theory

233 Pages·2017·2.41 MB·English

by  Katja Maria Vogt

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Desiring the Good
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Desiring the Good
Ancient Proposals and
Contemporary Theory
Katja Maria Vogt
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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© Katja Maria Vogt 2017
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. A Blueprint for Ethics 13
2. The Good and the Good Human Life 41
3. Disagreement, Value, Measure 68
4. The Long Goodbye from Relativism 92
5. The Guise of the Good 115
6. The Nature of Pursuits 145
7. The Metaphysics of the Sphere of Action 166
Concluding Remarks 190
Bibliography 199
Index 213
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Acknowledgments
Much of this book came together on the road. Most of the writing hap-
pened in remote parts of the Dolomites during the past five years. My
deep thanks go to my fellow traveler, mountaineer, and near co- author
of the book, Jens Haas, for letting me think while hiking, write when
not hiking, for discussing my ideas and contributing his own, and for
combing through countless drafts with an eye for both the forest and the
trees. The book reflects a shared desire for the use of everyday examples,
examining ethical questions without much idealization, and an unclut-
tered style. During the last couple of years Jens and I began to co- author
papers on ignorance and on love and hatred. The ideas we develop in
joint research are related to my argument here, especially with respect
to the role of thought in a well- lived human life and with respect to the
motivation of pursuits. While outdoors, we pursued a long- term photo-
graphic project related to the Alps. It is also this presence of art in my
life that I am grateful for. The two images on the front and back cover
go back to a rainy day on the Lagazuoi, one of my favorite mountains.
I want to thank the hosts and audiences at universities in the United
States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and China where I presented mate-
rial from the book. During its completion in the fall of 2015, I benefited
greatly from a residential fellowship at the Princeton Council of the
Humanities. I am grateful to the Princeton faculty, in particular John
Cooper, Melissa Lane, Hendrik Lorenz, Benjamin Morison, Michael
Smith, and Christian Wildberg for inviting me and for being wonderful
hosts; for the opportunity to teach a graduate seminar on Aristotle’s eth-
ics and to the students in class for stimulating and manifold responses to
much of the material in this book; to Melissa Lane for reading and com-
menting on several chapters; and to Rob Bolton for sitting in on part of
the seminar and discussion of technê in Aristotle’s ethics. In the spring
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viii Acknowledgments
of 2016, faculty from UC Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and
UC Irvine invited me to deliver the BayCAP lecture and for a workshop
on my project. My thanks go to Klaus Corcilius, Marjolein Oele, and
Jan Szaif for organizing this, and to Michael Torre, Sebastian Odzuck,
Emily Perry, and Zachary Stout for engaging with the manuscript. In
the summer of 2016, I was a fellow at the princely estate of the Center
for Advanced Studies at Ludwigs- Maximilians- Universität in Munich,
which gave me the opportunity to wrap up my project. My thanks go
to Christof Rapp and the Center’s team for being welcoming hosts and
providing many opportunities for discussion.
Chapter 1 develops the framework for the rest of the book. It is based
on ideas from an earlier paper, “Why Pleasure Gains Fifth Rank: Against
the Anti- Hedonist Interpretation of the Philebus” (2010), initially pre-
sented at a conference in Dublin in 2007; my forthcoming contribu-
tion to the first volume of the Plato Dialogue Project, “Rethinking the
Contest between Pleasure and Wisdom: Philebus 11a– 14b,” presented
at a workshop in Spetses, Greece, in 2015; a paper entitled “Imagining
Good Future States: Hope and Truth in Plato’s Philebus” that I con-
tributed to a conference and Festschrift in honor of Christopher Gill
(2016); and a paper on “Doxa in the Philebus” for a workshop on Plato
on Knowledge and Belief at Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin in 2015.
I am grateful to Joseph Barnes, Jonathan Beere, Panos Dimas, and John
Wilkins, who organized these conferences, and to the participants for
discussion. In May of 2016, I had the opportunity to present some of
my ideas on perception and value in a Masterclass on Perception and
Perceptual Appearances in Ancient Philosophy, co- taught with Victor
Caston and James Warren at the University of Cambridge. My thanks go
to the organizers, including Cristóbal Zarzar, as well as all presenters,
and David Sedley.
Chapter 2 originates in a talk I gave at a Kant and Aristotle Reading
Party at Burn House, University of St Andrews, in the summer of 2011.
I recall memorable conversations that influenced the development of
the book, some on the front lawn’s putting green, or later over drinks,
with Sarah Broadie, Jens Haas, Christof Horn, and Jens Timmermann.
I am also grateful to the participants of a seminar I taught in 2012,
“Moore’s Principia Ethica: Responses and Ancestors,” at Columbia
University. In its current form, I presented the chapter at a 2016 confer-
ence on Perfectionism organized by David Brink and Don Rutherford
at UC San Diego. I’m indebted to the group of participants for raising
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Acknowledgments ix
considerations that helped me fine- tune the book right before it entered
production, and to Monte Ransome Johnson for providing me with a
draft of his and D. S. Hutchinson’s translation and edition of Aristotle’s
Protrepticus.
Chapter 3 started out as a Colloquium talk at UCLA in 2012. The
year after, I presented it in the Townsend Working Group in Ancient
Philosophy at UC Berkeley. Questions and comments by Tim Clarke,
Alan Code, Klaus Corcilius, Barbara Herman, David Kaplan, Gavin
Lawrence, and Justin Vlasits greatly helped the book along. I am also
indebted to Marco Maiuro for historical background on the lawsuit that
Euthyphro brings against his father.
Chapter 4 develops ideas that I initially formulated with respect to
the value of human beings, in “Do Human Beings Have Non- Relative
Value?” presented as a Colloquium talk at Union College in 2009.
Another ancestor of the chapter was my contribution to the 2014 Kline
Workshop on Value Holism at the University of Missouri. I am grate-
ful to Paul Weirich and Peter Vallentyne for inviting me and for dis-
cussion; and to my commentator Ashton Sperry for helpful feedback.
Nandi Theunissen, whose own work is on the distinction between good
and good- for, and Ian McCready- Flora, who is writing on Protagoras’s
Measure Doctrine, have been highly valued interlocutors and readers of
an earlier draft.
Chapter 5 emerged from a Colloquium talk I gave at the University of
Pennsylvania in 2009. I presented iterations of the talk at the Ancient and
Moral Philosophy Reading Group at Yale University in 2010; as a keynote
lecture at the 2015 Ancient Philosophy Society Conference, Lexington,
Kentucky; as colloquium talks in 2016 at Stony Brook University and
Brown University 2016; at the University of Oxford Workshop in Ancient
Philosophy in 2016; and, via video, at a conference, Aristotle’s Moral
Psychology, in Beijing in the summer of 2016. I am grateful to have
received these invitations and for engaging conversations, especially to
Susanne Bobzien, Justin Broackes, Timothy Clarke, Mary Louise Gill,
Paul Guyer, Verity Harte, Rolf-P eter Horstmann, David Kaufman, Wei
Liu, Hendrik Lorenz, Benjamin Morison, Susan Sauvé Meyer, Charles
Kahn, Anna Marmodoro, Christof Rapp, and Mary Rawlinson. An ances-
tor of chapter 5, with greater attention to Elizabeth Anscombe’s legacy
in action theory and discussion of well-k nown problem cases for the
Guise of the Good, is forthcoming in Analytic Philosophy and Ancient
Philosophy, edited by Catherine Rowett and Alberto Vanzo.