Aristotle on the Apparent Good: Perception, Phantasia, Thought, and Desire

In this important book, Moss develops a comprehensive account of Aristotle's moral psychology and deploys it to elucidate several important topics in Aristotle's ethics and moral psychology, including two of the most controversial: akrasia and the nature of our grasp of moral principles. Moss lays the foundation for her account in the first of the book's three parts by developing the central notion of an “evaluative cognition” (chap. 1). For Aristotle, among the things we (fallibly) cognize or discern in the world is the value of things (in particular, their value for us). This discernment of things as valuable or good is a bona fide act of cognition, which however has, in addition, both an affective and a conative dimension: it is inevitably accompanied by both a feeling of pleasure and a desire for the thing so cognized. Moss works out in more detail the relations between the cognitive,...