ABSTRACT
To attack Aristotle’s famous proposition ‘Deliberation is of means’ may perhaps amount to flogging a dead horse, but the horse in question may after all not be quite dead and may deserve another course of flogging in order to be securely put out of harm’s way or possibly to be proved immortal in some sense. The position ‘Deliberation is of means purely and simply and not of ends’, as exemplified above, might however be dismissed as an extravaganza to which Aristotle is not committed by his general doctrine of practice. It reveals the dominant rationalistic trend of his thought rather than his outlook as a whole. The author argues in support of this concept of non-instrumental connections, and that will issue directly in a criticism of Aristotle’s mediatization of particular ends. The frequent and indeed predominant multivalence of means is alone sufficient to confer upon them a character of relative or partial ends.
