Entangled phronesis and the four causes of emulation: Developmental insights into role modelling

A new theory of emulation – the method by which one learns from moral role models – is emerging through the combined efforts of philosophers, psychologists and educationists. Using a previous argument reconceptualising emulation as a moral virtue as a philosophical springboard, in this paper, I extend this theory by building a more robust case for how emulation qua role modelling works in practice through direct appeal to Aristotle’s account of causation: the four causes. Historically revered for their explanatory power, I argue that reconstructing the four causes and synthesising them with emulation enables us to better comprehend it as a quadripartite causal process. Through doing so, I propose that emulation is driven by ‘entangled phronesis’ – a mechanism which enables immature moral learners to acquire virtue by sharing in the phronesis, that is, practical wisdom, of a role model. Since the degree of entanglement depends upon a learner’s phase of virtuous character development, I also divide emulation into two types: pre-phronetic ‘habituated emulation’ and phronetically-informed ‘complete emulation’. Combined with my four-causal account of emulation, these concepts represent a novel contribution to neo-Aristotelian character developmental theory and help explain – step-by-step – the method by which one potentially acquires moral virtue and phronesis from moral role models.