The History of Philosophy

Aristotle argues that the well-run state will be so if it provides an opportunity for leisure, for the opportunity to learn, discuss and contemplate, not depending for our happiness on externals of status and material goods, but on being our own masters, and enjoying the purest of pleasures: the exercise of our intellects. This ultimately is why we

Virtues of character include courage, temperance and justice.

There are two ethical treatises bearing Aristotle’s name, the Eudemian Ethics and the Nicomachean Ethics.

In the Nicomachean Ethics he begins by noting that every pursuit aims at some good, which means that there are as many different kinds of good as there are pursuits. Such things as boat-building, military strategy and getting rich each requires subordinate goods to be attained – in carpentry, sword-making, starting a business – each of which has it

Not only is the highest good not instrumental, because it is desired wholly for its own sake and is sufficient of itself, but it is the thing towards which all other instrumental goods strive, the ‘single final end’ of all activity. It is indeed happiness: but not as identified with any of the individual instrumental ends. Instead it will be what w

Aristotle’s account of change turns on the idea of potentiality (in Greek dunamis, from which we get the word ‘dynamic’). Substances have a potentiality either to be changed by something acting on them, which is ‘passive potential’, or to cause change in other substances, which is what animate things can do because they possess ‘active potential’.

Practical philosophy is one thing: it is politics, of which ethics is an integral part. ‘Politics’ means the study of the polis – the state – and since the state is the society of people who constitute it, ethics and politics are continuous with each other. You might say that Aristotle thought of politics as ‘the theory of conduct’ in general. In l

Aristotle’s views in practical philosophy, ethics and politics, are much plainer sailing than his metaphysics and psychology. They turn on the idea that the best kind of society is one whose individual members live the best kind of lives.

‘Virtue makes the goal right, practical wisdom teaches how to reach it,’ Aristotle says, and habits formed in developing character will help to identify the right goals. If we do not have, or do not yet have, the practical wisdom to work out how to reach those goals, we must imitate those who do have such wisdom. And Aristotle concedes that ‘moral