Aristotle David - The Nicomachean Ethics

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THE NICOMACHEAN 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 was probably written later, in Aristotles fifties and sixties, when he was head of the Lyceum, the school he founded in Athens.

SIR DAVID ROSS (18771971) was Provost of Oriel College and Deputy Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. He was the author of important editions of many of Aristotles works, and acted as General Editor of the complete Oxford Translation of Aristotle, for which the present translation was first written.

LESLEY BROWN is Centenary Fellow and Tutor at Somerville College, Oxford, and a University Lecturer in the Philosophy Faculty, University of Oxford.

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ARISTOTLE

Translated by
DAVID ROSS

Revised with an Introduction and Notes by
LESLEY BROWN

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aristotle.
[Nicomachean Ethics. English]
The Nicomachean Ethics/Aristotle; translated by David Ross; revised with an
introduction and notes by Lesley Brown.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9780199213610
1. Ethics. I. Ross, W. D. (William David), 18771971. II. Brown, Lesley, 1944
III. Title. B430.A5R67 2009
171.3dc22
2009005379

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Printed in Great Britain
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ISBN 9780199213610

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ARISTOTLE was the first Western thinker to divide philosophy into branches which are still recognizable today: logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, philosophy of mind, ethics and politics, rhetoric; he made major contributions in all these fields. He was born in Stagira, a city of northern Greece, in 384 BC. His father Nicomachus was a doctor at the court of Amyntas of Macedon, who preceded Philip, the conqueror of much of Greece. Aristotle later served as tutor to Philips remarkable son, Alexander the Great.

As a young man Aristotle went to Athens in 367 to study with Plato at his Academy, remaining there until Platos death in 347. This was a period in which Plato wrote works such as Timaeus, Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus, as well as his Laws, and it is intriguing to ask how much these owe to the challenges from his brilliant pupil Aristotle. After a period in Asia Minor (where he may have pursued research for his biological works) and then back in Macedon as tutor, Aristotle returned to Athens and founded his own philosophical school, the Lyceum: some of its remains have been recently discovered in modern Athens. He died in 322 BC, a year after he had to leave Athens in the wake of the death of his former pupil, the emperor Alexander.

Apart from a few fragments of more popular works, the writings that have come down to us are academic treatises, some more, some less polished. They were not published, in any modern sense, and Aristotle may have continued to revise them. The breadth and character of the teaching at the Lyceum can be gauged from the surviving treatises, which cover an immense range, and are always cast in a questioning, argumentative, and non-dogmatic style. It may be that the works as they survive are lecture-notes, and this would indeed account for some of the rougher features. The fact is that we know little about their original form and purpose, the order in which they were written or how they were edited.

Three works on ethics have come down under his name: Nicomachean Ethics (NE) in ten books, Eudemian Ethics (EE) in eight books, and the so-called Magna Moralia or great ethics. Some parts are more polished than others, and in one of the common books (Book V, on justice) some material seems out of place. Aristotles writing has a certain terse elegance, and it is ideally suited to the presentation of arguments, in which his philosophy abounds. The work opens with a discussion of happiness, then moves to the moral virtuesthe virtues of characterincluding justice; and to the virtues of the intellect; it discusses pleasure and friendship and its role in the best life, returning to a further discussion of happiness, then a final transition to political theory. Aristotle regards ethics as a branch of politics, and his work