Czy i dlaczego Arystotelejski słaby wolą (ἀκρατής [akratēs]) nie wybiera?
Does Aristotle’s Akratēs Not Choose and If Not, Why Not?

Summary/Abstract: G.E.M. Anscombe put her finger on an inconsistency in Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics: Aristotle seems to claim that whatever results from deliberation is the object of choice, and he admits that the akratēs deliberates at times quite successfully, yet he denies that the akratēs makes a choice. She provides a solution: A choice (she thinks Aristotle should have said) is not just whatever results from deliberation but only if the goal at which the deliberation aims was itself chosen, which she interprets as constituting object of the agent’s will (βούλησις [boulēsis]). I examine this Anscombian solution, point out its diverse shortcomings (infinite regress, the inscrutability of the lineage of choices, the unachievability of the primordial goal) and yet I attempt to improve upon it. To this aim I put up for consideration whether such (post-)primordial choices as Anscombe seems to require are not, after all, sometimes made, viz. in the light of one’s idea of living well, and if they are not at least in principle translatable into goals that we can reasonably hope to achieve.

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