Mind your Prayers. Aristotle’s Notion of euchê

Abstract

Abstract In Aristotle’s world there is no God to answer our prayers (euchê) and yet prayers follow the excellent city of the Politics like a shadow. Nonetheless, as far as I know, people have been content to narrow the focus of investigation to Aristotle’s utopia, its plausibility, structure and infrastructure, leaving prayers out of the picture. The most prayers themselves seem to deserve is a footnote or so. The result is that attention is switched away from the most basic questions: What is the function of practical reason that prayers are meant to perform and why could not, or should not, that function be carried out by deliberate choices, wishes, and action plans? Prayers matter, and matter a lot, so I will argue, for they mirror our understanding of constitutive moral luck. The legislators and the rulers who ignore or overlook this truth are theoretically incompetent and politically perilous.