Highest Good in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Bhagavad Gita
Subtitle: Knowledge, Happiness, and Freedom
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2025
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9781350215139
Description: This open access book presents a comparative study of two classics  of world literature, offering the first sustained consideration of what  unites and divides the Nicomachean Ethics and the Bhagavad Gita.   Focusing on the nature of ethical action and how it relates to the  highest good, Roopen Majithia demonstrates how the Gita stresses the  objectivity of knowledge and freedom from being a subject, while the  Ethics emphasizes the knower, working out Aristotle's central commitment  to the idea of substance as the primary building block of the world. Yet  both the Gita and the Ethics explain variety in human behaviour in terms  of three driving forces. Both agree moral agency is a construct that is a  function of background, education, and habit, presupposing a cultural,  political, and economic infrastructure, all of which shapes how each in turn  conceives the highest good.   What distinguishes the texts is how the content of right action is  generated. Reading them together, alert to their individual accounts  of how the practical relates to the reflective dimensions of life, Majithia  enriches our understanding of two cornerstone texts in the Greek and  Indian philosophical traditions.    The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Marjorie Young Bell Faculty Fund, The Philosophy Department's Baxter Fund and The Hart Almerrin Massey Endowment.