Aristotle on the Perfect Life

Abstract
Aristotle's teaching on the subject of happiness has been a topic of intense philosophical debate. Did he hold that happiness consists in the exercise of all the virtues, moral and intellectual, or that supreme happiness is to be found only in the practice of philosophical contemplation? The question is vital to the relevance of his ethics today. The author of this title helped to set the terms of this debate a quarter of a century ago. Later, in The Aristotelian Ethics (Clarendon Press, 1978), he argued that Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics had no less a claim than the better-known Nicomachean Ethics to be taken as a late and definitive statement of Aristotle's position. This new book refines a view of the relationship between the two treatises and shows how to reach a consensus on the interpretation of the texts. Aristotle's admirers struggle to read a comprehensive account of the supreme happiness into the Nicomachean Ethics: this book argues that those who are prepared to take the neglected Eudemian Ethics with equal seriousness are able to preserve their admiration intact without doing violence to any of the relevant texts.

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