Aristotle on the Unity of Ethical Knowledge

Abstract

Abstract How theoretical is political science, i.e. the discipline of ethics? And how theoretical is phronēsis, i.e. a virtuous agent’s ethical knowledge of how to live? Readers of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics have given widely divergent answers to these questions. Contrary to the tendency of recent scholarship, we argue that both questions must be addressed together, and that this is possible because Aristotle understands there to be a unified form of virtuous practical knowledge that nevertheless admits of different levels of expertise and theoretical articulation. We arrive at this view by carefully attending to various analogies that Aristotle draws with the craft of medicine, a productive form of knowledge which likewise admits of different levels of expertise and theoretical articulation. To clarify how the ethical knowledge of the legislator and that of the political philosopher are the same, we distinguish different ways in which knowledge can be ‘practical’ or ‘theoretical.’