Talk:Akrasia

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: Comments

message: 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)
thread_title:  Akrasia since Freud? 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: Moral Incontinence

message: 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)
thread_title: Eudamonia

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

message: 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.

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)
thread_title:  Removed "delayed gratification" comment 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Richard Holton's view 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Psychology suggestion/question?