Jennifer Whiting – författare

Body and Soul: Essays on Aristotle's Hylomorphism is one of three volumes collecting previously published essays by Jennifer Whiting. This volume contains two sets of essays, one centered on Aristotle's account of an animal's body as standing to its soul as matter (hulê) to form (morphê), the other exploring Aristotle's conception of practical reason as the proper form of human desire. In the first set Whiting presents Aristotle's conception of the soul as the form and essence of an organic (and so living) body as part of his solution to Presocratic puzzles about whether there is a real (and not simply conventional) distinction between the coming-to-be (or passing-away) of an individual substance and what is merely the alteration or rearrangement of pre-existing stuffs. The solution also involves taking each individual animal within a species to have its own numerically distinct “individual” form, which (unlike species forms traditionally conceived) exists when and only when it does. The remaining essays account for various deficiencies in the lives of rational animals by appeal to the explanatory asymmetries afforded by Aristotle's teleology, where formal and final causes dominate when things go as they should (teleologically speaking) go, and material-efficient causes dominate when things go wrong. Just as Aristotle traces the birth of females to the failure of menstrual fluid to be fully “mastered” by the formal movements in the father's semen, so too he traces akratic and other defective forms of action to the failure of desires to be fully “mastered” by the activities of reason. Whiting argues that phronêsis is on this account the proper form of the desiring part of the soul, which (when things go well) is one with the practically reasoning part.

In her essay collection First, Second, and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity, well-known scholar of ancient philosophy Jennifer Whiting gathers her previously published essays taking Aristotle's theories on friendship as a springboard to engage with contemporary philosophical work on personal identity and moral psychology. Whiting examines three themes throughout the collection, the first being psychic contingency, or the belief that the psychological structures characteristic of human beings may in fact vary, not just from one cultural (or socio-historical) context to another, but also from one individual to another. The second theme is the belief that friendship informs an understanding of the nature of the self, an idea that springs from Whiting's uncommon reading of Aristotle's writings on friendship. Specifically, Whiting explains a scenario in which a "virtuous agent" adopts a kind of impersonal attitude both towards herself and towards her "character" friends, loving both because they are virtuous; this scenario ties in with an examination of the Aristotelian concept of the ideal friend as an "other self," or a friendship that evolves from character rather than ego, as well as Whiting's meditation on whether or not a virtuous individual should have a "special" sort of concern for her own future self, distinct in kind from the concern that she has for others. The third theme is that of rational egoism, a concept that Whiting critiques, especially in the context of Aristotle's eudaimonism. The central tenet of the collection is the message that taking "ethocentric" (or character-based) attitudes both towards ourselves and towards our friends sheds light on the nature of personal identity and helps to combat ethnocentric and other objectionable forms of bias, a message that is becoming increasingly urgent in light of the recent deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.

Living Together: Essays on Aristotle's Ethics is one of three volumes collecting previously published essays by Jennifer Whiting. This volume explores Aristotle's conception of eudaimonia, especially the roles played in it by the theoretical and practical activities central to human lives and by the quality of our relationships with one another. Whiting explores Aristotle's struggle to reconcile the desirability of living in accordance with justice and other distinctively human virtues with the ideal of pursuing the “divine” life of contemplation. She focuses on Aristotle's attempts to reconcile his conception of eudaimonia as the ultimate end of human action with the parallel requirements that virtuous agents choose to engage in virtuous action “for itself” and that friends love their friends “for themselves”. Drawing on her original reading of Aristotle's conception of the ideal friend as an “other self”, Whiting challenges common readings of Aristotle's eudaimonism as a form of rational egoism. She stresses appreciation of the friend's character “for itself”, and apart from any relationships in which it happens to stand to the agent's own needs and/or tastes, but calls attention to the important and often neglected role that Aristotle assigns to pleasure in this relationship. The ideal friend recognizes the value her friend's activity has for her friend and so takes pleasure in the friend's activity as such. This explains why the maximally self-sufficient (and so most godlike) agent, who needs nothing from a friend, will nevertheless choose to have at least one or two: she enjoys their company.