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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2016
In the June issue of the Classical Review Professor Cook Wilson announces his conversion to the view that in ‘a well-defined group’ of passages in the Nicomachean Ethics λόγος means Reason. While I cannot hope to re-convert Professor Cook Wilson, I feel that it is worth while to try to express the reasons for which it seems difficult to follow him.
page 10 note 1 Nothing in Professor Cook Wilson' article is so surprising as the last paragraph : ‘The conclusion then is that in all the passages reviewed λόγος means Reason in one of three senses; either (1) reason as the faculty of reason, or principle of reason in the soul, or (2) reason as reasoning, or (3) reason as what is reasonable, in the sense of the deliverance of reason–reason as ordaining the moral law, reason as inculcating it, or the moral law itself as a from of reason.’ If by translating ‘reason’ the translator commits him self to nothing more than to one of the three senses of the word there given, the word is monstrously ambiguous, and had better vanish from our philosophical vocabulary.
page 10 note 2 τέχνη is ή μετά λόγον (or μετά λόγον άληθοûς) ποιητική ἕξις, while φρόνησις is ή μετά λόγον ἕξις πρακτική or (1140 b 5) ἕξις άληφής μετά λόγον πρακτική.
page 11 note 1 This passage is cited by Professor Cook Wilson in connexion with N.E. II. 1103 b 31, which seems to him to imply that ‘the όρθòς λόγος meant in itself an άρετή.’ He concludes, ‘it cannot therefore be rule or definition, and must be Reason.’ I cannot admit the conclusion, and I do not think the translation ‘Reason’ suits the passages any better than it suits the paraller passage above quoted from De Part. An. Art and øρόνησις are both thought of primarily as forms of knowledge, and what the agent has in mind is in each case a λόγος–what Höffding and other modern writers call ‘the idea of an end.’ Further, ‘Reason’ has never been in English the name of a virtue. Therefore, even if the όρθóς λόγος is an άρετή, the translation ‘Reason’ is not justified.
page 11 note 2 With regard to the difference of reading ὡς and ᾧ in 1107 α 1, the latter (preferred by By-water) is impossible for Professor Cook Wilson and other champions of Vernunft : both are possible for me. I cannot understand, however, much hesitation as to which is preferable. With the reading ᾧ the last clause is a direct answer to the very relevant question, ‘What plan?’ So Aspasius in his Commentary (ed. Heylbut, 48, 20): καί έπεξηγεῖται παίῳ λόγῳ ⋅ τῷ τοû øρονίμον και ᾦ ἂν ό øρόνινος όρíσειεν