Aristotle was acutely aware of the importance of moral psychological observations to virtue ethics. In his brief discussion of bravery in the Nicomachean Ethics, he makes at least ten explicit empirical claims about the actual psychological states and abilities of moral agents (Aristotle 1985). His psychological observations concern the limits beyond which human beings cannot control their behavior, sanity and the capacity for emotional response, motivation, fear, self-esteem, anger and revenge, false belief and hopefulness, the false beliefs of the less-than-virtuous about their own emotional responses and physical abilities, the relative difficulties of exacting self-control, and the emotional response of humans to pains and difficulties. 1 The other virtues Aristotle enumerates and characterizes, from generosity and justice to truthfulness and shame, are similarly laden with empirical observations about human behavior, reason, emotion, and capabilities.

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While philosophers of mind have devoted abundant time and attention to questions of content and consciousness, philosophical questions about the nature and scope of mental action have been relatively neglected. Galen Strawson's account of mental action, the most well developed extant account, holds that cognitive mental action consists in triggering the delivery of content to one's field of consciousness. However, Strawson fails to recognize several distinct types of mental action that might not reduce to triggering content delivery. In this article, we argue that meditation provides a useful model for understanding a wider range of types of mental action than heretofore recognized. Conclusions yielded by two distinct bodies of current psychological research on meditation and cognition, and meditation and introspection, buttress meditation's suitability for this role.

Character traits have several vital functions. They should enable us to assess others morally, inform us of others' behavioral tendencies, and accurately explain and predict others' behavior. But traits of character, as they have traditionally been understood, cannot adequately serve these purposes. For character traits are traditionally thought to be context-insensitive. The Contextual Account of Character Traits, which I here develop and defend, posits traits that are context-sensitive. Context-sensitive character traits are more receptive to the complexity of human psychology and behavior and, hence, they not only adequately, but excellently, satisfy their theoretic and pragmatic functions.