Aristotle - The Eudemian ethics

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THE EUDEMIAN ETHICS

ARISTOTLE (384322 BC), with Plato one of the two greatest philosophers of antiquity, and in the view of many the greatest philosopher of all time, lived and taught in Athens for most of his career. He began as a pupil of Plato, and for some time acted as tutor to Alexander the Great. He left writings on a prodigious variety of subjects, covering the whole field of knowledge from biology and astronomy to rhetoric and literary criticism, from political theory to the most abstract reaches of philosophy. He wrote two treatises on ethics, called Eudemian and Nicomachean after their first editors, his pupil Eudemus and his son Nicomachus. The Nicomachean Ethics is much better known, but the Eudemian Ethics too has a claim to be a mature expression of Aristotles ethical thought.

SIR ANTHONY KENNY is an Emeritus Fellow of St Johns College, Oxford. He is a former Master of Balliol College and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and was President of the British Academy from 1989 to 1993. His many books include The Aristotelian Ethics (1978), Aristotles Theory of the Will (1979), and Aristotle on the Perfect Life (1992). His most recent book is A New History of Western Philosophy (2010).

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ARISTOTLE

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
ANTHONY KENNY

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ARISTOTLE was born in 384, fifteen years after the death of Socrates, in the small colony of Stagira, on the peninsula of Chalcidice. He was the son of Nicomachus, court physician to the father of King Philip II of Macedon. After the death of his father he migrated to Athens in 367, being then 17, and joined Platos Academy there. He remained for twenty years as Platos pupil and colleague, and it can safely be said that on no other occasion in history was such intellectual power concentrated in a single institution.

One of Aristotles many claims on posterity is that he was the founder of the discipline of logic. His most important works on the subject are the Categories, the De Interpretatione, and the Prior Analytics. These set out his teaching on simple terms, on propositions, and on syllogisms. They were grouped together, with two works of informal logic, and a treatise on scientific method, the Posterior Analytics, into a collection known as the Organon, or tool, of thought.

While Aristotle was at the Academy, King Philip II adopted an expansionist policy and waged war on a number of Greek city-states, and made himself master of Greece. It cannot have been an easy time for a Macedonian in Athens. Within the Academy, however, relations seem to have remained cordial. Aristotle always acknowledged a great debt to Plato, whom on his death he described as the best and happiest of mortals whom it is not right for evil men even to praise.

Already, however, during his period at the Academy, Aristotle began to distance himself from Platos most famous doctrine, the Theory of Ideas. In his surviving works Aristotle often takes issue with the theory. Sometimes he does so politely, as where, in the Nicomachean Ethics, he introduces a series of arguments against the Idea of Good with the remarks that he has an uphill task because the Forms were introduced by his good friends. However, his duty as a philosopher is to honour truth above his friends. In the Posterior Analytics, however, he dismisses Ideas contemptuously as tarradiddle.

When Plato died in 347, his nephew Speusippus became head of the Academy, and Aristotle left Athens. He migrated to Assos on the north-western coast of what is now Turkey, a city under the rule of Hermias, a graduate of the Academy, who had already invited a number of Academicians to form a new philosophical institute there. During his period in Assos, and during the next few years when he lived at Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, Aristotle carried out extensive scientific research, particularly in zoology and marine biology.

Hermias met a tragic death in 345 and about three years later Aristotle was summoned to the Macedonian capital by King Philip II as tutor to his 13-year-old son, the future Alexander the Great. We know little of the content of his instruction: the