The Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle — Aristotle — John Shaqi
The Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle
Aristotle · en
beforehand, commending itself by its inherent attractiveness or promise
of enjoyment.
This view has the great advantage of exhibiting morality as essentially
reasonable, but the accompanying disadvantage of lowering it into a
somewhat prosaic and unideal Prudentialism, nor is it saved from this
by the tacking on to it, by a sort of after-thought, of the second and
higher Ideal—an addition which ruins the coherence of the account
without really transmuting its substance The source of our
dissatisfaction with the whole theory lies deeper than in its tendency
to identify the end with the maximum of enjoyment or satisfaction, or
to regard the goodness or badness of acts and feelings as lying solely
in their efficacy to produce such a result It arises from the
application to morality of the distinction of means and end For this
distinction, for all its plausibility and usefulness in ordinary
thought and speech, cannot finally be maintained In morality—and this
is vital to its character—everything is both means and end, and so
neither in distinction or separation, and all thinking about it which
presupposes the finality of this distinction wanders into misconception
and error. The thinking which really matters in conduct is not a
thinking which imaginatively forecasts ideals which promise to fulfil
desire, or calculates means to their attainment—that is sometimes
useful, sometimes harmful, and always subordinate, but thinking which
reveals to the agent the situation in which he is to act, both, that
is, the universal situation on which as man he always and everywhere
stands, and the ever-varying and ever-novel situation in which he as
this individual, here and now, finds himself. In such knowledge of
given or historic fact lie the natural determinants of his conduct, in
such knowledge alone lies the condition of his freedom and his good.
But this does not mean that Moral Philosophy has not still much to
learn from Aristotle’s _Ethics_. The work still remains one of the best
introductions to a study of its important subject-matter, it spreads
before us a view of the relevant facts, it reduces them to manageable
compass and order, it raises some of the central problems, and makes
acute and valuable suggestions towards their solution. Above all, it
perpetually incites to renewed and independent reflection upon them.
J. A. SMITH
The following is a list of the works of Aristotle:—
First edition of works (with omission of Rhetorica, Poetica, and second
book of Economica), 5 vols by Aldus Manutius, Venice, 1495 8, re
impression supervised by Erasmus and with certain corrections by
Grynaeus (including Rhetorica and Poetica), 1531, 1539, revised 1550,
later editions were followed by that of Immanuel Bekker and Brandis
(Greek and Latin), 5 vols. The 5th vol contains the Index by Bomtz,
1831-70, Didot edition (Greek and Latin), 5 vols 1848 74