This chapter tracks Socrates’ placement of the just man among the wise – an idea that is anathema to Thrasymachus for whom the just man is a fool – and extracts the important lesson that underlies Socrates’ ironic claim that injustice that is unmixed with justice makes a city, group, or individual less able to accomplish its unjust ends. It also assesses the final argument of Rep. 1, in which justice makes its way at last into the human soul. It contends that, although this concluding argument is fallacious, flagrantly equivocating on the expression “living well,” it nevertheless leaves the reader with valuable food for thought: Is not a man who is unjust inescapably wretched if his soul lacks its proper excellence?

This chapter considers Thrasymachus’ cynical rant, in which “the stronger” emerge as unjust men who think “night and day” about nothing other than their own advantage: No longer like unerring craftsmen, rulers are rather like other unjust men; the tyrant is revealed as Thrasymachus’ ideal. This chapter further probes what Socrates might mean by his odd claim that no one – not even good and decent men – rules willingly: If it is the work of good and just men to benefit others, do the reluctant rulers of Book 1, so similar to Rep. 7’s philosophers who have to be compelled to rule, qualify as just?

Polemarchus defines justice as the meting out of benefits and harms to friends and enemies as is fitting; his just man therefore necessarily requires skill: At what, however, is the just man skilled? Would not the skill of justice endorse thieving if that is what will help friends and harm enemies? Since t-justice (justice as a technē) is still justice, it must correctly identify friends and enemies lest it help enemies and harm friends. Socrates replaces these categories with good or just men and bad or unjust ones and asks: Is it just to harm those who are just, those who have committed no injustice? In Socrates’ final lesson to Polemarchus, the just man’s expertise is shown to harm no one, to make no one worse – that is, more unjust. Implicit in Socrates’ analogy with heat and dryness is that t-justice helps all people by making them “better,” more “lay-just” (or l-just), more just in the ordinary way. The chapter concludes with a brief excursus on the final argument in the Hippias Minor, in which “he who does wrong intentionally is the good man.”

Thrasymachus is shown to be disgusted not only by the deference the interlocutors have been showing one another but also by the imminent conclusion of the Socrates–Polemarchus exchange that the t-just man helps everyone by making them better – that is, more l-just. The transition to Thrasymachus’ “political” characterization of justice as the “advantage of the stronger,” where “the stronger” is the ruler, is shown to be the natural extension of Polemarchus’ t-justice, transformed at the hand of Thrasymachus into the craft of ruling. Of the variety of labels scholars have affixed to Thrasymachus and to his position, it is determined that Thrasymachus is best described as a cynic and perhaps as an immoralist. It contends further that Thrasymachus’ view is consistent throughout. It locates the crux of the disagreement between Thrasymachus and Socrates in the clash between Thrasymachus’ notion that a ruler in the precise sense never makes, through error, laws that fail to further the ruler’s own advantage, and Socrates’ contention that, on the contrary, a ruler in the precise sense advances the welfare of the ruled, promoting the advantage not of the stronger but of the weaker.

In this chapter, I argue that, in light of his critique of rival theories of efficient causation, there is a puzzle latent in Aristotle’s own account. According to that critique, efficient causes must explain why their effects come about when they do rather than at some other time, a feature I call temporal contrastiveness. But it is not clear how the various elements of one of Aristotle’s preferred examples of such causation, the activity of experts, can enjoy this feature. Solving the puzzle yields a novel reading of Aristotle, one according to which expert skills genuinely change in the course of their exercise.

I begin by considering a condition Aristotle sets on action individuation: A difference in final cause entails a difference in actions. Next, I turn to Aristotle’s account of the teleological structure of expert activity. This kind of activity mirrors the classic case of Anscombe’s poisoner. But for Aristotle, the final causes in expert activity very finely, with the result that final causation is not transitive. So it turns out that Anscombe and Aristotle disagree about one of the most basic tenets of action theory: Anscombe individuates actions coarsely, Aristotle finely. In this regard, Aristotle is not her friend.

This introduction gives context for a detailed study of accidental causation. Accidental causation sits at the intersection of two strands of Aristotle’s thought: causation and accidentality. Accidental causation itself is not, however, well-understood. The introduction concludes with an overview of the rest of the volume.

I offer a new analysis of Aristotle’s concept of an accidental cause. Using passages from Metaphysics 5 and 6, as well as Physics 2, I argue that accidental causes are causally inert. After defending this reading against some objections, I draw some conclusions about Aristotle’s basic understanding of causation.

I present a new puzzle that concerns Aristotle’s accidents. This puzzle arises when applying a basic requirement of accidentality to the variety of cases Aristotle provides. In short, Aristotle seems to offer, now the thought that a is accidental to b, and now that b is accidental to a; but if accidentality is asymmetric, as it seems to be, then a’s being accidental to b implies that b is not accidental to a. One might offer a schooled Aristotelian solution, allowing that while a is in a sense accidental to b, b is accidental to a in a quite different sense. But, as I will argue, this solution does not work, for there are cases in which a and b are accidental to each other in the same sense. Ultimately, the solution to the new puzzle relies not on distinguishing between senses of ‘accident’ but rather on distinguishing between accidentality and accidental sameness.