1 Harvard University Political Theory Colloquium For 11 March 2010 ...

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Ferrari accepts the standard cognitive reading that akrasia in the Protagoras is ‘a kind of
ignorance’, while advancing his own stimulating understanding of the kind of ignorance
involved as a second-order ‘ignorance of their own ignorance’ (115).
5 Philip Pettit and Michael Smith have argued in their account of failures of practical
reason, among which they classify akrasia, that what matters is that desire and
deliberation are in the right relation to each other. The point is not that reason is
constantly exercising active control over desire (Pettit and Smith 1993), but that right
relation is maintained through the ongoing exercise of what they call the ‘executive
virtues’ which include temperance. These virtues maintain a balance rather than
assuming directive control (1993:76-77). I find this account to resonate with that of Plato
despite the fact that they take their own inspiration for it from Aristotle.
6 Here Aristotle’s opposition between akrasia and enkrateia is helpful, as is his insistence
that the phronimos would not exhibit either, but would rather exercise the self-control of
full virtue. But Aristotle went wrong in his initial account of Plato’s Socrates in NE VII,
misunderstanding the significance of the executive function of knowledge for him (even
though at 1147b he endorses Socrates’ conclusion after all). We may wonder whether
Aristotle goes wrong in his accounts of Socrates and Plato deliberately, for his own
purposes; I have documented such a case in his presentation of purported Socratic
eironeia in Lane 2006, as has Garnsey 2007 in his diagnosis of Aristotle’s presentation of
purported Platonic communism.
7 Two further features of this view commend it to a comparison. The first is that it
identifies rationality with psychic health (136). The other is that it rejects a sharp line
between theoretical and practical reason, a line which Plato, notably, never drew: ‘from