Happy lives and the highest good
Subtitle: an essay on Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics
By: Gabriel Richardson Lear.
Publisher: Princeton University Press; Princeton University
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Princeton, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 238
Description: "Gabriel Richardson Lear presents a bold new approach to one of the enduring debates about Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: the controversy about whether it coherently argues that the best life for humans is one devoted to a single activity, namely philosophical contemplation. Many scholars oppose this reading because the bulk of the Ethics is devoted to various moral virtues - courage and generosity, for example - that are not in any obvious way either manifestations of philosophical contemplation or subordinated to it. They argue that Aristotle was inconsistent, and that we should not try to read the entire Ethics as an attempt to flesh out the notion that the best life aims at the "monistic good" of contemplation."--BOOK JACKET.