ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we argue that the Aristotelian account of personal and epistemic transformation is one of cultivation and completion and that it significantly differs from contemporary models such as L.A. Paul's, where transformative experiences produce a radical break in the agent's epistemic and psychological trajectories. Focusing on Aristotle's treatment of how we acquire a disposition (hexis), we show that Aristotle provides a complex model of transformation, in which experience is part of a broader, continuous process—akin to growth or learning—and in which the agents' development depends on the confluence of a number of factors such as their nature, their cultivated capacities, their practices, and the influence of their environment and of others. While Aristotle considers first-hand experience crucial to personal and epistemic transformation, in his view experience does not produce a momentous, radical, and discontinuous break in our epistemic and psychological outlooks. A central feature of Aristotle's account is that there is no radical psychological or epistemic discontinuity throughout the process of transformation, since the seeds for one's future self are already in one's current self—it is thus not a process of becoming someone radically new but a process of becoming one's own developed self.
