ABSTRACT
The account that I have given in the last chapter is in many ways traditional. It seems to me that Aristotle, in the passage we have been discussing, is clearly facing a difficulty proposed by Socrates. It is true, as Aristotle recognizes, that Socrates starts from a premiss that it is quite generally impossible to choose what one considers the worse course, but his aim is to re-analyse the phenomenon of akrasia and reject the common description of it as knowledge overcome by pleasure. It is this re-analysis that Aristotle thinks leads Socrates to fly in the face of the facts; and so, accepting the supposed facts, he aims to give an account of the way in which we know when we are overcome by pleasure. Throughout Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle constantly repeats that the akratic are in a passionate state which is responsible for the kind of off-beat knowledge they possess (see, e.g.; 1147all-18, 1147b8, 11, 16-17; 1150a25-30; 1150bl9-22; 1151al-3), which is in turn only ever likened to that possessed by people asleep, drunk or mad (see 1147all-18; 1147b6-9, 12; 1152al4-15). He is dealing with the akrates proper, who is someone overcome by the bodily pleasures with which temperance is concerned (1148a). This raised the question of how far Aristotle has moved from Socrates. Some, for instance Robinson (1977), think that he has pretty well capitulated; others, for instance Hardie (1968), seem to think that while something fairly traditional is true of the special case of being overcome by pleasure, in his discussion of akrasia by analogy Aristotle clearly allows for calm deliberate wrong-doing. In what follows I shall first of all discuss how close to Socrates Aristotle is in his account of being overcome by pleasure, and then consider whether his treatment of akrasia by analogy shows that he does not accept even outside those cases that there is any problem about deliberately choosing what is believed to be the worse course. If he does not, then he has rejected Socrates root and branch. In that case, there
would be no need to find allowance for a wider range of examples in 1147al8-24, since they get admitted later in the analogical cases.
