What IS the Problem of Akrasia?

opening up a whole can of interconnected worms. . .

Some years back, I delivered a talk on Aristotle, Anger, and Akrasia, over at Felician College in New Jersey — discussing some material, and outlining certain issues, appearing in a book I’ve long been laboring away at, reconstructing Aristotle’s theory of anger across the corpus of his texts. A student from the University of Edinburgh wrote me, after watching the videorecording of the talk:

I came across your online lecture, which was very helpful, offering a very in depth description of the problem but you did not seem to offer a judgement on the problem itself. Would you say that Aristotle effectively overcomes the problem of Akrasia?

So, that offers an excellent occasion for engaging in a bit of a digression in this post — what precisely is the “problem of akrasia”? — that’s what has to be asked, examined, and answered, before we can say whether Aristotle does or doesn’t effectively formulate it, mainly in Nicomachean Ethics book 7, let alone overcome it.