Erin Stackle
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Biography
Education
Boston College
Ph.D.
Philosophy
Dissertation: Rectangular Cows or Another Bad Tragedy? An Aristotelian Solution to the Incommensurability of Mathematics and Material Things
Committee: Arthur Madigan, S.J. (Director), Richard Cobb-Stevens, and Patrick Byrne
I contend that Aristotle’s discussion of potency can provide the necessary metaphysical justification for the application of mathematics to material things. Without this justification, required to resolve the crisis of the European sciences Husserl describes, we cannot responsibly claim to know the things mathematical physics so successfully manipulates.
Boston College
M.A.
Philosophy
Gonzaga University
B.A.
Chemistry
Gonzaga University
B.A.
English Literature
Areas of Expertise
Articles
What Does St. Thomas Say is the Matter with Aristotle’s Health? A Case Study of the Commentary Tradition
Philosophy and TheologyErin Stackle
2018-09-15
Two tasks are pursued here. One is to display the difference (and its significance) between hermeneutic commitments in commenting on Aristotle's difficult metaphysical texts. The other is to begin rethinking an Aristotelian account of medical healing by considering in detail the connection between matter and the form of health in Metaphysics VII. This is carried out through the examination of two puzzles: one about the relation of parts to causes, the other about the relation of matter to articulation (logos).
Theodor Ziehen: Selections from 'Epistemology on the Basis of Psychophysiological and Physical Grounds'
The Sources of Husserl’s ‘Ideas I’Ed., Andrea Staiti and Evan Clarke
2018-05-15
Despite an ever-growing scholarly interest in the work of Edmund Husserl and in the history of the phenomenological movement, much of the contemporaneous scholarly context surrounding Husserl's work remains shrouded in darkness. While much has been written about the critiques of Husserl's work associated with Heidegger, Levinas, and Sartre, comparatively little is known of the debates that Husserl was directly involved in. The present volume addresses this gap in scholarship by presenting a comprehensive selection of contemporaneous responses to Husserl's work. Ranging in date from 1906 to 1917, these texts bookend Husserl's landmark Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1913). The selection encompasses essays that Husserl responded to directly in the Ideas I, as well as a number of the critical and sympathetic essays that appeared in the wake of its publication. Significantly, the present volume also includes Husserl's subsequent responses to his critics. All of the texts included have been translated into English for the first time, introducing the reader to a wide range of long-neglected material that is highly relevant to contemporary debates regarding the meaning and possibility of phenomenology.
Theodor Elsenhans: Selections from 'Textbook of Psychology'
The Sources of Husserl’s ‘Ideas I’Ed., Andrea Staiti and Evan Clarke
2018-05-15
Despite an ever-growing scholarly interest in the work of Edmund Husserl and in the history of the phenomenological movement, much of the contemporaneous scholarly context surrounding Husserl's work remains shrouded in darkness. While much has been written about the critiques of Husserl's work associated with Heidegger, Levinas, and Sartre, comparatively little is known of the debates that Husserl was directly involved in. The present volume addresses this gap in scholarship by presenting a comprehensive selection of contemporaneous responses to Husserl's work. Ranging in date from 1906 to 1917, these texts bookend Husserl's landmark Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1913). The selection encompasses essays that Husserl responded to directly in the Ideas I, as well as a number of the critical and sympathetic essays that appeared in the wake of its publication. Significantly, the present volume also includes Husserl's subsequent responses to his critics. All of the texts included have been translated into English for the first time, introducing the reader to a wide range of long-neglected material that is highly relevant to contemporary debates regarding the meaning and possibility of phenomenology.
Jane Austen's Aristotelian Proposal: Sometimes Falling in Love is Better than a Beating
Philosophy and Literature (Special Issue: Tragedy, Shakespeare, Austen, Proust, Borges)Erin Stackle
2017-07-01
Aristotle suggests that we improve by beating those immune to argument, thus connecting doing wrong with feeling pain, and, as Plato suggests in his Gorgias, justly correcting the injustice in their souls. Since, however, the beaten offender lacks choice in the punishment, and is not thereby shown better options, beating cannot make him virtuous. Only virtuous friendship could do that, but vice prevents both recognizing and attracting virtuous friends. Falling in love, though, as suggested by Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice, provides our perception a flexibility that facilitates character improvement, and the rarity of an appropriate spouse can motivate its accomplishment.
Aristotle’s Phronimos Should Also Turn the Other Cheek
Philosophy and TheologyErin Stackle
2017-01-15
Preliminary assessment of Aristotle’s treatment of justice suggests that he would consider unjust Jesus’s injunction to turn your other cheek to one who has unjustly struck you. Further consideration, however, shows that obeying such an injunction would qualify, even by Aristotle’s criteria, as a more just response than reciprocating the blow. Turning one’s cheek provides the assailant an opportunity to make a choice that could improve his character, which improvement is crucial to the political good that is the primary concern of justice in the full sense. Remaining concerns about rectification are obviated by considering how the megalopsukhos navigates honor.
Aristotle the Virtue Doctor
The Heythrop JournalErin Stackle
2016-07-15
It is difficult for us to effectively diagnose our current character state such that we can follow Aristotle’s advice to aim for the opposite extreme. The law can provide us a general standard, and the household strives to fill in the particular gaps inevitable to laws that must be universal. Neither, however, can ensure a proper diagnosis. Careful attention to Aristotle’s discussion (in both his Metaphysics and his Nicomachean Ethics) of how the medical doctor generates health gives us a model we can apply to Aristotle’s discussions of character virtues and vices in Book IV of Nicomachean Ethics. The medical doctor must identify the form of health and its various lacks, must have a sufficiently varied set of images by which to properly grasp these in the varied context of human beings, must attend carefully to the patient’s impeded form of health, and must trace this impediment back to some cause on the basis of which she can act to correct the problem. By applying this model, we can more profitably employ Aristotle’s discussions of individual virtues in our responsible attempts to diagnose and heal the characters of those who belong to us.
‘Fifthly, or rather first’: Why Aristotle takes Public Religious Worship to be Crucial to the Activity of Science
Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophy AssociationErin Stackle
2011-06-15
In his Politics, Aristotle identifies the public worship of the gods as the most important element of the city, but then immediately follows this claim with the claim that justice is the most important element of the city. I first consider the various possible ways of interpreting this claim on the basis of Aristotle’s metaphysical commitments. I then consider what Aristotle actually says about religious worship. The things Aristotle says when elaborating public worship in the city indicate that the importance of this public worship to the city is in establishing the leisure necessary for, and which turns the citizens toward, contemplation. This contemplation, the activity of science, is, as Aristotle elaborates in the Nicomachean Ethics, the most divine activity in which we can engage. Public religious worship, then, is essential to the activity of science in a city.
