Phrónêsis, Aristotle, and action research

"Table of Contents / Pagination is incorrect: THE WAYS OF ARISTOTLE – ARISTOTELIAN PHRÓNÊSIS, ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF DIALOGUE, AND ACTION RESEARCH Olav Eikeland Preface 1 PART 1 – ARISTOTLE, SOCIAL RESEARCH, AND ACTION RESEARCH 3 1. Introduction – The Challenge of Phrónêsis 3 1.1 Three Kinds of General Theory 10 1.2 Aristotle and Critical Action Research 17 2. Action Research Approaching Phrónêsis 20 2.1 A Philosopher Defending Action Research 21 2.2 Making Social Science Matter 23 2.3 Abandoning Techniques 25 PART 2 – READING ARISTOTLE – LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES FOR PHRÓNÊSIS 27 3. Virtues – Intellectual and Ethical 29 3.1 Particulars of Ethical Virtues 34 4. Phrónêsis and the Other Intellectual Virtues 38 4.1 Theoretical Knowledge, and Knowledge about Things We Influence 40 4.1.1 Overlaps and Intermeshes 45 4.2 Phrónêsis as an Intellectual Virtue 48 4.2.1 Excursus: Knowledge Forms and Ways of Knowing in Aristotle 49 4.2.1.1 Praxis, Poíêsis, Khrêsis, Páthos – And the Various Forms of the Epistêmai 50 4.2.1.2 Theoretical and Practical Truth 61 4.2 (Continued) Phrónêsis as an Intellectual Virtue 64 4.3 Phrónêsis and Rhetoric, Phrónêsis and Practical Syllogisms 70 4.3.1 The relationship to rhetoric 70 4.3.2 The relationship to practical syllogisms 75 5. Phrónêsis on Means and Ends, Phrónêsis and General Knowledge 76 5.1 Means and Ends, and Kinds of Causes 76 5.1.1 Poíêsis Makes Things, Praxis Makes Perfect 81 5.1.2 “Professional” Deliberations and Deductions 89 5.2 Knowledge, General and Particular 94 5.2.1 General Knowledge, Appropriate Knowledge, Knowledge in Action 94 5.2.2 Héxis (Habitus), and Empeiría (Experience) 103 5.2.3 Knowing Particulars 109 5.2.3.1 By What? 110 5.2.3.2 How? 111 5.2.3.3 Preconditions for a Universally Flexible Consideration 115 6. Developing and Defining Virtue 126 6.1 Developing Virtue 127 6.1.1 Epistêmê and Virtue through the Formation of Habit, Once More 130 6.1.2 What “Means” Means 136 6.1.3 Practical Development with a Hinge to It, the Question of Standards Again 138 6.2 Defining Virtue 145 6.2.1 Nóêsis as Dialogue, or, the Reason Why Aristotle Insists on Letting Phrónêsis Deliberate about Means Only 150 6.2.1.1 The Unfolded Know-How of Nous 152 6.2.1.2 The Topica and the Enfolded Habitus of Dialectics 154 6.2.1.3 The Philosopher, the Dialectician, and Experience 160 6.2.1.3.1 Dialogical Peculiarities 165 6.2.1.3.2 Dialogue and Experience 170 6.2.1.3.3 Basic Principle, Beginning, Medium, and End 182 6.2.1.4 Ways of Learning 185 6.2.1.5 Self-Evident First Principles? 191 6.2.1.6 Praxis1, and Praxis2 194 6.2.2 The Ethical Works do not Deliberate about Means, They Develop and Define Ends 198 6.2.3 Epistêmê, Virtue, and Phrónêsis Defined 205 6.3 Who Develops and Defines? The Art and Practice of Architectonics 214 7. Eudaimonía and Wisdom as “The Highest Practical Good”; Aristotelian Phron-Ethics, Theor-Ethics, and the Way of the Intellectual Commons 219 7.1 Kinds of Theory, Kinds of Practice 220 7.2 Ethics and Politics as Methodological Guidelines for Autonomous Practitioners 230 7.2.1 The Laws of Virtue 233 7.2.2 Tékhnê and Phrónêsis – At the Parting of the Ways 239 7.3 The Wisdom of the Commons – Common Wisdom 242 7.3.1 Tà Koiná – The Commons 247 7.3.2 The Common Skholê 252 7.4 Theor-Ethics and Primary Friendship 254 7.4.1 The Noetic “I” and the Psychological “Me” 259 7.4.2 Theorethical Interventions? 268 7.5 The Way of Theor-Ethics 269 7.5.1 Ethical Excellence – Settling with the Best “for Us”, i.e. for the Second Best “Absolutely” 277 7.6 The Ways of Politics – Continuous Learning in Common 288 7.6.1 Community: What Are the Things Common? 289 7.6.2 Oikos, Pólis, and Constitutions 294 7.6.3 Developing Concord – The Ethico-Political Role of Dialogical Gatherings 299 7.6.4 Different Concepts of Politics 310 7.6.5 Unity and Diversity in the Pólis 318 7.6.6 The Koinópolis as Panarchy – Aristocracy Suspended and Transcended 328 7.6.7 Religious Politics? 338 PART 3 – ARISTOTELIAN ACTION RESEARCH – WISDOM AND EUDAIMONÍA TRANSPOSED, SOCIAL RESEARCH TRANSFORMED 344 8. Neo-Epistemic, Dialogical Action Research 344 9. From Oikos to Pólis, and Beyond 349 10. Aristotle, Marx, and Modern Work Life 359 11. Aristotle Suspended 370 12. Epilogue 376 REFERENCES 381 Appendix 394"

Action Research, 2010

Sage Encyclopedia of Action Research, eds. Coghlan, D. and Brydon-Miller, M., 2014

Oxford Review of Education, 2004

The core idea of action research is that there should be an intimate relationship between inquiry and practical or political activities. A challenge to this idea based on an influential ancient Greek hierarchy between theoria and praxis is examined. The contrary, pragmatist, notion that all inquiry arises out of human activity is accepted, but not the instrumentalism sometimes derived from it. Research must be treated as operating on the same plane as any other activity, but the relationship between the two will always be less than isomorphic, and this creates the prospect of severe tensions. These can be managed contextually in two ways: by subordinating inquiry, or by making it primary. Both are legitimate, but any attempt to treat the two components of action research as equal faces contradiction.

AI & society, 2004

Labyrinth http://www.axiapublishers.com/ojs/index.php/labyrinth/issue/view/7

A corrected copy can be downloaded from the journal website: http://www.axiapublishers.com/ojs/index.php/labyrinth/issue/view/7 The article discusses relationships and contexts for "reason", "knowledge", and virtue in Aristotle, based on and elaborating some results from Eikeland (2008). It positions Eikeland (2008) in relation to Moss (2011, 2012, 2014) but with a side view to Cammick (2013), Kristjansson (2014), and Taylor (2016). These all seem to disagree among themselves but still agree partly in different ways with Eikeland. The text focuses on two questions: 1) the role or tasks of "reason", "knowledge", and "vir-tue" respectively in setting the end or goal for ethical deliberation, and more generally, 2) the role of dialogue or dialectics in Aristotle's philosophy, including its role concerning question one. The author argues that phrónêsis needs to be interpreted in the context of the totality of Aristotle's philosophy , and explains how this totality is fundamentally dialectical.

To be published in German in Gestaltungsbasierte Forschung in Innovations- und Entwicklungsprogrammen - Potenzial für Theoriebildung und Praxisgestaltung, Bonn: BIBB, 2017

A different perspective on the "unity of science". Immanent critique and the inner connections between action research, organizational learning, and the inner workings of the philosophy of science. Text written in 2008, published in German in 2017.

Chapter 36 (pp. 381-391) in The SAGE Handbook of Action Research (3. edition), London:Sage, 2015

Knowing the roots of action research, historical, philosophical, and otherwise, is useful for several reasons. First, we learn from earlier conceptualizations, developments, and approaches not to commit similar errors, nor to underestimate counter-forces. Second, we are all carriers of traditions as inheritors and products of our chain of predecessors’ approaches and routines, personally, institutionally and otherwise, defining our points of view and hermeneutical horizons. Making this embeddedness in certain traditions and discourses conscious makes it possible to liberate ourselves from their ingrained ‘basic assumptions’: we may ‘rise above’ and achieve critical distance and discernment, realizing that similar conclusions may be drawn from quite different premises through so-called ‘overlapping consensus’ (Rawls, 1996: 149ff.). Third, roots may extend to places not immediately obvious during project work and day-to-day problem solving, thus widening our horizons when uncovered. Finally, important distinctions, and ways of thinking and knowing, may be revitalized by retrieving roots. Yet surveying our roots is a vast enterprise. Completeness cannot be achieved in a short chapter. Initially, however, a conceptual remark about ‘roots’ and ‘action research’ is needed. ‘Roots’ may mean simply ‘where does what we’re doing come from, in a direct lineage’? But we come from seeds. Like trunks, branches, and leaves, roots grow from seeds. Hence, ‘roots’ should be interpreted broadly to mean from where might current action research ‘reach out’ to extract nourishment? What are the ideas, tensions or mechanisms that may nourish it in strength, scope, and legitimacy? Living roots providing nourishment are normally subterranean. Hence, paraphrasing Hegel (1971:18: 303), action research, like dialectic or dialogue, might gain nourishment and strength not by positing itself positively as a ‘school’ or ideology apart from others but by working more ‘subterraneously’ as a ‘guerilla behind enemy lines’ as Hegel suggests, from within all such ‘positivisms’. Action research may have wellsprings in unsuspected places.

Abstract: This article relates common ways of conceptualising action research as “intervention”, “collaboration”, “interactive research”, “applied research”, and “practitioner research” to a number of different ways of knowing extracted from the works of Aristotle. The purpose is not to disavow any of these practices but to expand the philosophical, methodological, and theoretical horizon to contain the Aristotelian concept of praxis. It is claimed that praxis knowing needs to be comprehended in order to realize the full, radical potential in action research providing real “added value” in relation to more conventional social research approaches. Praxis knowing radically challenges the divisions of labour between knower-researchers and the known-researched. Thereby it also challenges both the epistemologies and institutionalisations dominating both conventional research and conventional ways of conceptualising action research.