The Nicomachean Ethics
The founding text of virtue ethics: happiness is not a feeling but an activity of the soul, built by habit.
Aristotle’s lectures on how to live, assembled by or for his son Nicomachus. He begins not with rules but with a question, what is the good that all human action aims at, and answers with eudaimonia: flourishing, achieved through the exercise of virtue across a whole life. Courage and generosity are habits, learned by practice, each a mean between excess and deficiency. Two millennia of moral philosophy have argued with this book.
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A. C. Grayling
Aristotle wrote it not for scholars, not for other professional philosophers, but for everybody.
Interview · October 2009
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