Second are General Topics which offer detailed introductions to the main areas of Aristotle's philosophical activity. First, the present, general entry offers a brief account of Aristotle's life and characterizes his central philosophical commitments, highlighting his most distinctive methods and most influential achievements. The set of entries on Aristotle in this site addresses this situation by proceeding in three tiers. The long history of interpretation and appropriation of Aristotelian texts and themes-spanning over two millennia and comprising philosophers working within a variety of religious and secular traditions-has rendered even basic points of interpretation controversial.

In all these areas, Aristotle's theories have provided illumination, met with resistance, sparked debate, and generally stimulated the sustained interest of an abiding readership.īecause of its wide range and its remoteness in time, Aristotle's philosophy defies easy encapsulation. His extant writings span a wide range of disciplines, from logic, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, through ethics, political theory, aesthetics and rhetoric, and into such primarily non-philosophical fields as empirical biology, where he excelled at detailed plant and animal observation and taxonomy. A prodigious researcher and writer, Aristotle left a great body of work, perhaps numbering as many as two-hundred treatises, from which approximately thirty-one survive. Judged solely in terms of his philosophical influence, only Plato is his peer: Aristotle's works shaped centuries of philosophy from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance, and even today continue to be studied with keen, non-antiquarian interest. This edition also includes an updated list for further reading and a new chronology of Aristotle’s life and works.Īristotle (384–322 B.C.) numbers among the greatest philosophers of all time. Thomson’s translation has been revised by Hugh Tredennick, and is accompanied by a new introduction by Jonathan Barnes. Aristotle’s work has had a profound and lasting influence on all subsequent Western thought about ethical matters. The Ethics also discusses the nature of practical reasoning, the value and the objects of pleasure, the different forms of friendship, and the relationship between individual virtue, society and the State. He argues that happiness consists in ‘activity of the soul in accordance with virtue’, for example with moral virtues, such as courage, generosity and justice, and intellectual virtues, such as knowledge, wisdom and insight. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle sets out to examine the nature of happiness. Similarly neither can one day, or a brief space of time, make a man blessed and happy’ ‘One swallow does not make a summer neither does one day.

The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle