I wanted to explain, before I get too deep into this project of a new podcast, precisely why I chose the title Mind and Desire. Where is that coming from? The answer is from a passage in Aristotle that impressed me so much already a long time ago, that I actually had a blog which bore a similar name but used Aristotle's Greek terminology.
So the blog was called Orexis Dianoetike, which can be translated in a lot of ways. Desire or affectivity that is informed by mind or is intellectual. And we'll talk a little bit more about ways of rendering this and just a bit.
And you might say, well, where does mind and desire come from? Well, there's a, you might say, flipped mirror image of that in the same passage that this came from. So the term is orektikos nous. And nous is the word for “mind”. Orektikos is coming from orexis, which means, very broadly speaking, desire or affectivity
So I had been using that as a title for a blog that I started a very long time ago, more than 10 years ago. And I really wanted to hold on to that. Now, why did I want to do that?
What was the attraction of it? It stems from, let's say, a broader picture that is conveyed by this passage of Aristotle. A broader picture, not just for Aristotle and Aristotelian ethics, and we could say a vision of human being, but rather of virtue ethics and philosophy as a way of life more broadly speaking. So it could also extend to the Stoics or the Platonists or later Christian thinkers, or even we could say, down to the present with people who aren't virtue ethicists as such but have similar points of view like existentialists.
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