Ethics: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics from Hearing [Public]

Description

Book I of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics raises questions of enormous significance. What does it mean for something to be an end? Why must there be a highest good? How can happiness be more than pleasure, success, honor, or contentment? What is the function proper to the human being? And how does the activity of reason disclose a good not merely for this or that individual, but for man as man?

Through careful attention to Aristotle’s own argument, the seminar will examine how the human good possesses universality and necessity without becoming disconnected from the concrete realities of human life. The good is neither imposed upon human nature by extrinsic causes nor fabricated by social agreement. Rather, it is discovered through the intelligibility of human nature itself: through λόγος, through action, through the ordered actuality of the soul, and through the perfection of those capacities by which man lives well.