Talk:Akrasia

Comments

Oh lord, it hurts my heart again and again to see how stupid philosophers are! The situation is quite clear: You have the choice between a immediate reward that will result in a worse situation in the long term, and a better longterm situation that will however not yield the reward in the immediate future. This is known as the ability to "postpone gratification".

I think you misunderstand what Akrasia is exactly. Maybe the article is unclear, but it's basically when we want to do X but end up actually doing not-X. For instance, really desiring not to eat food (for weight loss, etc.) but ending up eating anyway. This has been traditionally understood as weakness and subordination to fleshly desires.

What you said about postponing gratification (what is also called prudence) definitely plays into akrasia, so you're on the right track. All this is a subject more complicated than it looks. --FranksValli 08:49, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

The question is WHY people sometimes can't postpone gratification. It's no good asserting that the situation is "quite clear" if you can't explain why some people are better at this than others. Of course, you can explain it, but in so doing you'll come right back to "weakness of the will" or "acting against one's better judgement"... Evercat 18:26, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Maybe talking about Moore's Paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_paradox would help address this issue? Mike 04:44, 8 October 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Slxpluvs (talk • contribs)

This idea is inherently flawed; most people simply act logically, without complicating thoughts with "gratification" or other nonsense that has been discussed here. Ergo, the (fictional) Vulcan race would have infinite delay of gratification, and nothing prevents every human from doing so as well. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.230.67.157 (talk) 05:32, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Akrasia since Freud?

I was thinking about this today - did Freud address akrasia at all? It would seem to fit into his idea of the unconscious, and would explain why we are pulled in two different directions (i.e. our conscious self being pulled one way and our unconscious self being pulled another way). --FranksValli 08:49, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Moral Incontinence

Today was the first time I ever heard the word "akratically" mentioned, which led me to look up this article, and what struck me was that this sounds closely parallel to the discussion of moral incontinence in Aristotle. Does anyone know what word is being translated as "incontinence"? Is it possible akrasia? If so, then Aristotle's proposed solution certainly deserves mention here, and it should be noted that akrasia is also discussed as moral incontinence (especially since presently, the mention of moral incontinence on the incontinence disambiguation page only links to the article on morals, which doesn't mention incontinence at all). If I'm wrong about this, incontinence probably still deserves mention on the page as a related issue, but it really seems too closely connected for this not to be a single discourse on the problem of moral failure. --Anthony Mohen 17:05, 21 January 2006 (EST)

Akrasia is often translated as incontinence or weakness of will, but I'm just a philosopher, not an Aristotle scholar. KSchutte 04:58, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I believe that Aristotle treats akrasia and incontinence differently. Akrasia is when someone can act morally but won't - this implies a weakness of will. Will, in this context, is the ability to delay gratification.

In contrast, incontinence is when someone cannot act morally. If I used the word handicap to describe incontinence, it would have to be used very loosely and selectively but it is better than other words I know.Mike Fox 06:53, 15 November 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Slxpluvs (talk • contribs)

Eudamonia

Eudamonia is the crowning moral virtue. Akrasia is vice, along with reason, that balances the "intellectual virtue" of knowledge. Akrasia is like an opinion, but even more episodically based. For example, it is general knowledge that Santa Claus is bogus. If you are telling your 3-year old nephew about Santa and forget Santa is actually false, that is akrasic. Akrasia is the failure to connect long term, rational thoughts (morals) with short term, rational thoughts (intellect) AND the intellect winning out. Someone who has an akratic personality might be rational, but they would seem inconsistent in their conclusions. Mike 04:42, 8 October 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Slxpluvs (talk • contribs)

Wouldnt Akrasia make more sense if it was discussed in relation to the concept of Eudamonia... Its been a while, but im pretty sure that when someone lapsed from living a eudamonic life - this was akrasia... doing something that they know isnt a good decision in the long term, based on the fact that the short term gain is too tempting... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 203.218.32.92 (talk • contribs).

Translation needed

I've requested that the German article be translated to assist this page. 24.126.199.129 21:26, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Pronunciation.

Is it a-KRAY-zee-ah or a-KRAH-see-ah or which? Does anyone have the IPA skills to add a proper pronunciation? [1] says "akrásia", but that doesn't exactly help either. grendel|khan 02:07, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

There are two aspects to this question:

(1) Is it being pronounced as a Greek word?: then, following the example of the similar term abulia, which is pronounced something rather like ah-BOOO-leeer, it would be pronounced something like ah-KRASSS-eeeer.

(2) Is it being pronounced as an English word?

The question here being "Is it a foreign word?" (as in the case, for example, of application of the Latin word index, where the plural is indices (as in mathematical indices), whilst the English word index has the plural indexes (as in the indexes of books)).

And if it is not considered to be a "foreign word", but is now to be treated as if it is an English loan word taken from a Greek source, akrasia would be would be pronounced something rather like a-CRAZIER (using the a-BOOOL-YA model of the "English" word abulia).

Then, having resolved this issue, there would also be the question of whether it is to be pronounced in standard English, or pronounced according to US usage — my own feeling is that, in the senses to which the term is applied in this article, the term remains a Greek word.

However, nothing can be done about the pronunciation issue until the "Wiki position" on this word is determined. Lindsay658 06:57, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

The two pronunciations Grendelkahn gives are both commonly used; the OED gives both. If it were pronounced like the (ancient) Greek - and given English standards of pronouncing Greek - it would be pronounced like the second, a-KRAH-see-ah, since alpha is AH rather than AY (also not '-eeer' as Lindsay suggests, since ia (ee-ah) is not a diphthong). I would plump for the the former, which I think is more common. Dast 10:11, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

The "a"s are all short. The "s" is unvoiced. Esedowns (talk) 20:25, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

Removed "delayed gratification" comment

I removed the following invisible comment because it did not appear to refer to a nearby paragraph — at least, the phrase "delayed gratification" didn't appear elsewhere in the article.

<!--How can the inclusion of such a paragraph -- on the subject of "delayed gratification" (whatever that might be) -- have any bearing on this philosophical article dealing with akrasia? Psychologists are well aware that some people are more able to [[deferred gratification|defer gratification]] than others; that is, some people are more able to refuse a small reward now for the sake of a bigger reward later. The question is why this should be so.-->

If its author still believes that a paragraph needs removing, [gender-neutral pronoun] is free to do so, or to float the idea here first. $\sim$ Lenoxus " * " 20:23, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Richard Holton's view

I just fixed the section that talks about Richard Holton's view (the "Weakness of Will" section). His view is about weakness of will involves revising one's intentions, not judgments about what is best. Read his paper or check Stroud's SEP entry on weakness of will. There were also some other major errors in the "Weakness of Will" section that I went ahead and fixed. -- Jaymay (talk) 01:23, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

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Psychology suggestion/question?

The psychology section of a article so vast as "lack of willpower" is such a stub, ideally someone could expand more topics onto this or define how limited this article ought to be... Averagepcuser (talk) 13:17, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

Connection to ADHD?

Has there been any scholarship on the relationship between this and ADHD? Many of the symptoms overlap. Marc Mywords (talk) 20:54, 16 June 2024 (UTC)