Cultivating our passionate attachments

Aristotle tells us that philosophy can be divided into the 'speculative, practical, and productive', but this tripartite division has long since been replaced by numerous specialisms and subdivisions in modern-day philosophy departments (1984 [Topics]: 145a15-6). Regarding the practical branch of philosophy, Aristotle views it as comprising both ethics and politics, along with what many philosophers now consider to be moral philosophy, which some have argued is best viewed as a subcategory of the ethical sphere. Moving boundary stones always has an effect on what they demarcate, of course, and the historical Aristotle would surely have raised an eyebrow at how his expansive conception of practical philosophy has now been cleanly divided into the two disciplines of politics and ethics with the latter being increasingly occupied with the intellectual concerns of what I follow Elizabeth Anscombe's influential formulation in terming 'modern moral philosophy' (1958: 1). Not only would most practical philosophers working in the Anglophone world most readily identify as 'moral philosophers', but the apparatus of the modern philosophy department is solidly geared to reinforce this. Students can opt for courses in moral philosophy, permanent chairs of moral philosophy have been long established, and these self-described moral philosophers belong to societies and publish in journals, which all define themselves - at least in name - as moral philosophy.1