A little less than a month back, I delivered a talk,
Aristotle, Anger, and Akrasia, down at
Felician College -- discussing some material, and outlining certain issues, appearing in a book I'm currently writing, reconstructing Aristotle's theory of anger across the corpus of his texts. I'd intended my next entry in this blog to use that as a starting point, continuing my on-again-off-again series on philosophical and theological treatments of anger (the last two, on Plato, are
here and
here). Recently, a student from the University of Edinburgh -- who watched
the video of the talk -- wrote me:
I came across your online lecture, which was very helpful, offering a
very in depth description of the problem but you did not seem to offer a
judgement on the problem itself. Would you say that Aristotle effectively overcomes the problem of Akrasia?
So, that offers an excellent occasion for engaging in a bit of a digression in this post -- what precisely is the "problem of akrasia"? -- that's what has to be asked, examined, and answered, before we can say whether Aristotle does or doesn't effectively formulate it, mainly in
Nicomachean Ethics
book 7, let alone overcome it.
