Deliberation
idea · 5 works · 5 mentions · 11 anchored passages
deliberation · deliberate · bouleusis · deliberating · discussing · judgement · method of deliberation · object of deliberation · opinion · take counsel
in the texts
Nicomachean Ethics
Reasoned inquiry into means to an end, restricted to attainable, non-eternal, non-necessary, non-chance matters within our own power.
The term object of deliberation presumably must not be taken to include things about which a fool or a madman might deliberate, but to mean what a sensible person would deliberate about.
As for Deliberation, do people deliberate about everything—are all things possible objects of deliberation—, or are there some things about which deliberation is impossible?
Deliberation must stop at the particular fact, or it will embark on a process ad infinitum.
On the Peace
The process of judging public policy before events make correction difficult.
And the result is that, as long as I can remember, the man who attacks any mistakes you have made gains your applause as an able speaker, but meanwhile the events and the real object of your deliberation wholly escape you.
on public questions my estimates and decisions are disinterested, and no one can show that my policy and my speeches have been in any way bound up with my private gain.
Nevertheless, although this is so, I have come forward in the belief and confidence that, if you will consent to still the noise of faction and listen with the attention that befits men who are debating the most important interests of the state, I shall be able to offer you advice which will ameliorate our present condition and redeem our past losses.
Second Philippic
The civic process by which Athens debates policy, criticized for favoring agreeable speeches over effective action.
But if you have to devise means whereby our present fortunes shall be repaired, and their further decline shall not take us completely by surprise, and we shall not be confronted by a mighty power which we shall be unable even to withstand, then our method of deliberation must be changed, and all who speak and all who listen must choose the best and safest policy instead of the easiest and most agreeable.
Now therefore, while the danger is in the future and is gathering head, while we can still hear one another speak, I want to remind each one of you, however clearly he knows it, who it is that persuaded you to abandon the Phocians and Thermopylae, the command of which gave Philip the command also of the road to Attica and the Peloponnesus, and who it is that has forced you to take counsel, not for …
On your practical measures you will, if you are wise, deliberate hereafter by yourselves;
Orations
The act of reasoning from what is known toward what is not yet known, examined as requiring trained knowledge.
Now there is no need to deliberate about the things that already are—for there both is and can be no benefit in deliberating about the things that have come to be and have substance;
Neither, then, could deliberation about the things that are not exist.
As I sat for a long while listening to you, when you were spending many hours with one of the statesmen deliberating about certain matters, I asked myself and inquired what this thing is which you call deliberating, or what deliberation itself is.
al-Saʻādah fī falsafat al-akhlāq
Practical reasoning, treated as a component of human perfection, as admitting a hierarchy whose terminus is the utmost happiness, and as the mark of the practical and the merely useful arts.
Hence the most excellent deliberation is that which leads to the most excellent object of deliberation, and the most excellent object of deliberation is that which stands in no further need of another deliberation about another object, and which is at no time made a road to something else, but is wanted for its own sake and never for another's.
and as for what is known and not acted upon, it is, for example, fine conduct in dealings and excellence in the arts, and in sum the acts that come about by deliberation and habituation.
As for his near perfection, it is the issuing of acts from him out of deliberation and discrimination, and that he should order them according to what the intellect (ʻaql) requires;