The Nicomachean Ethics

some have suggested that eudaimonia should instead be translated ‘flourishing’ or ‘fulfilment’. Clearly by ‘happiness’ Aristotle is not speaking of any kind of mental state, still less of one where subjects’ self-reports

But to get a more informative answer, he invokes the idea that human beings have a function—rational activity—and concludes that happiness is excellent rational activity: in his words, rational activity in accordance with virtue

There is a way human beings ought to be and ought to live. This is not because god created them for a purpose—something Aristotle did not hold—but simply because they are a certain kind of living being, and every living species has its own work or function. Human beings have many capacities—Aristotle calls them capacities of soul, but by soul he ju

One school of interpretation finds Aristotle firmly advocating an inclusive account of happiness in 1.7, such that the best life will include the best combination of those goods we desire for themselves. Only thus can it ‘not be made more desirable by the addition’ of other goods. But, if Aristotle favoured such an inclusive account in Book I, this

Since scientific knowledge requires proof, and any proof has to start from unproven assumptions, intuitive reason (nous) is needed as the grasp of these starting points for the deductive reasoning he takes scientific knowledge to require.

All three agree that the highest good for human beings is happiness, and that a rational choice of life will be one directed to one’s own happiness. Only a life in which one cultivates the traditional virtues (justice, temperance, courage, and practical wisdom) will be a happy life. Plato’s

The highest good must be wanted for itself; it must consist in activity (rather than some state a person is in) and must be self-sufficient and lacking in nothing.

Aristotle insists that habituation, not teaching, is the route to moral virtue (II. 1). We must practise doing good actions, not just read about virtue. Though

it is happiness, eudaimonia (1.4). And they all equate this with doing well or faring well. But what happiness is is a matter of long-standing dispute, we learn, with three ‘lives’ in contention: those of sensual enjoyment, of political achievement, and of intellectual contemplation (1.5).