Table Of ContentTitle Pages
Aristotle's Ethical Theory
W.F.R. Hardie
Print publication date: 1980
Print ISBN-13: 9780198246329
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198246329.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Aristotle's Ethical Theory
(p.ii) (p.iii) Aristotle's Ethical Theory
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Dedication
Aristotle's Ethical Theory
W.F.R. Hardie
Print publication date: 1980
Print ISBN-13: 9780198246329
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198246329.001.0001
Dedication
(p.v) TO I. St. M. H.
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Preface (1968)
Aristotle's Ethical Theory
W.F.R. Hardie
Print publication date: 1980
Print ISBN-13: 9780198246329
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198246329.001.0001
(p.vi) (p.vii) Preface (1968)
I HAVE tried in this book to give an account of Aristotle’s main ethical doctrines,
and to justify my interpretations by the detailed scrutiny of particular passages,
often very familiar passages. In the study of Aristotle familiarity can be an
obstacle to understanding; we are prone to think we know what he means before
we do. I hope that I have avoided some misunderstandings by making the
analyses of particular passages part of a continuous account of the whole
relevant doctrine.
The book contains some independent discussions of philosophical questions
which I take to be raised by Aristotle’s work. A historian of philosophy may be
tempted to think that his whole task is to discover what questions his author was
asking and how he answered them, and not himself to discuss philosophical
questions. But he cannot avoid discussing philosophical questions if he finds that
what is said in the text he studies is intelligible only as a step towards saying
something different and better. He must place his author in a historical sequence
but also on a map of the subject. Interpretation involves risks, but the risks are
less if they are taken openly.
I have not assumed in readers any knowledge of Greek. When I have mentioned
Greek words I have transliterated them as well as translated. Translated
passages are usually quotations from the Oxford Translation of Aristotle.1
I am grateful to many with whom I have discussed Aristotelian questions, in
particular to Professor G. E. L. Owen who read some of the chapters in
typescript.
My obligations to commentators, and to the writers of books and articles, will be
obvious to readers who read only the Index. I regret if I have anywhere failed to
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Preface (1968)
acknowledge what (p.viii) I have appropriated. My greatest obligation is to the
works of Sir David Ross.
I have to make some acknowledgements of pcrmission to use work previously
published.
Chapter VII (‘Virtue is a Mean’) was published in the Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, 1964–5. I am grateful to the editor for his permission to
print it again here.
I have used some of the material contained in two other articles: ‘Aristotle’s
Treatment of the Relation between the Soul and the Body’ published in the
Philosophical Quarterly, 1964, and ‘The Final Good in Aristotle’s Ethics’
published in Philosophy, 1965. I thank the editors of these journals for their
permission.
I thank also the editor of the Listener for his permission to use (in the Appendix
to Chapter V) paragraphs from a Third Programme talk (‘Bodies and Minds’)
which was published in his paper on 14 April 1960.
I acknowledge the courtesy of the Librarian of Balliol College, Oxford, in
allowing me to borrow some manuscripts by the late Professor J. A. Smith.
Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to the publishers and printers, and to
their reader, whose acute queries and suggestions were always reasonable and
almost always accepted.
Corpus Christi College
W. F. R. H.
Oxford
Notes:
(1) Works of Aristotle. Translated into English under the editorship of J. A. Smith
and W. D. Ross.
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Preface to the Second Edition (1980)
Aristotle's Ethical Theory
W.F.R. Hardie
Print publication date: 1980
Print ISBN-13: 9780198246329
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198246329.001.0001
(p.ix) Preface to the Second Edition (1980)
THIS book was published in 1968 and has been out of print for a number of
years. It is now reprinted with the pagination unchanged but with additional
matter in the form of Appended Notes. These notes are printed continuously at
the end of the book in an order determined by the order of the chapters or pages
to which they primarily refer. The Bibliography has been rearranged and
brought up to date. The revised Index has been enlarged by the inclusion of
references to the Appended Notes, and an index of Aristotelian passages has
been added.
In writing the notes I have had two main objectives in view: to correct or
supplement some of the interpretations which I now think were wrong or
inadequate in the book and to take account of some recent contributions to the
study of the Ethics. Some of the points made in the notes have been anticipated
in articles. In particular I thank the editor of Philosophy for allowing me to use
my article, ‘Aristotle on the best life for a man’ (1979). Points argued in it
reappear with modifications in the notes to chapter II (The Final Good) and
chapter XVI (Theoretical Activity).
I have come to think differently on two questions which I have found puzzling in
Aristotle’s doctrine on ethical virtue. What has Aristotle in mind when he speaks,
most explicitly in his introduction to EN VII but not only there, of extraordinary
or heroic virtue? The first note appended to XIII (Moral Weakness) is a second
version, written two years later, of the Appendix (‘Continence, Virtue, Heroic
Virtue’) which I was allowed to add to my chapter VII (‘Virtue is a Mean’) when
the greater part of that chapter was reprinted in Articles on Aristotle, 2 (1977).
The second puzzle has some connection with the first. What was Aristotle’s
purpose in IV 3 where he gives a description of the (p.x) magnanimous man
(rnegalopsuchos) which has evoked hostile and disrespectful reactions? I have
discussed megalopsuchia and the interpretations of commentators in an article
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Preface to the Second Edition (1980)
in Phronesis (1978), and have found room here only for a short note to chapter
VI.
The notes on V (The Nature of Man) are based on, but not transcribed from,
parts of an article, ‘Concepts of Consciousness in Aristotle’, in Mind (1976).
Two major books were published after I had, as I thought, completed my
Appended Notes: the edition of the De Motu Animalium (1978) by Martha Craven
Nussbaum and The Aristotelian Ethics (1978) by Anthony Kenny. Beyond adding
to my Bibliography I could react only by writing two short ‘postscripts’: one to
my chapter XII (Practical Syllogism) suggested by the fourth of Nussbaum’s five
Interpretive Essays (‘Practical Syllogisms and Practical Science’) and one in
response to the second of Kenny’s philosophical chapters (‘Happiness in the
Aristotelian Ethics’).
W. F. R. H.
Corpus Christi College
Oxford
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Introductory Note: Aristotle’s Ethical Writings
Aristotle's Ethical Theory
W.F.R. Hardie
Print publication date: 1980
Print ISBN-13: 9780198246329
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198246329.001.0001
Introductory Note: Aristotle’s Ethical Writings
W.F.R. Hardie
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198246329.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This book examines Aristotle's ethical doctrines as they are expounded in the
work known as the Nicomachean Ethics (EN). Two other works on ethics have
come down as Aristotle's, the Eudemian Ethics (EE) and the Great Ethics or
Magna Moralia. This chapter briefly refers to the general character of these
other two treatises, and to the variety of the opinions which have been held by
scholars about their relations to the Nicomachean Ethics. It also describes the
characteristics of the Nicomachean Ethics. The discussion aims to anticipate
some of the questions which the non-specialist reader is likely to have in mind
about Aristotle's ethical writings.
Keywords: Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Greek philosophy, Magna Moralia, Aristotle
THIS book examines Aristotle’s ethical doctrines as they are expounded in the
work known as the Nicomachean Ethics. Two other works on ethics have come
down to us as Aristotle’s, the Eudemian Ethics and the Great Ethics or Magna
Moralia. Later in this note I shall refer briefly to the general character of these
other two treatises, and to the variety of the opinions which have been held by
scholars about their relations to the Nicomachean Ethics. But I shall first say
something about the characteristics of the Nicomachean Ethics. I am assuming
that the reader may never have read an Aristotelian treatise and may not know
Greek. Such a reader, if he approaches the work expecting it to resemble a
modern book, planned as a whole and written for publication, will find in it
features which should surprise him and cause him to wonder how the work came
to be written in its present form.1
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Introductory Note: Aristotle’s Ethical Writings
The EN is divided into ten ‘books’ of roughly similar length, a length (twenty
pages or so) which makes it natural to think of them as analogous to the
chapters of a modern book. But the analogy fails in more than one way. In a
modern book it is normal for each chapter to deal with a single topic and hence
we expect the chapters to vary considerably in length. It is true that, if a chapter
threatens to exceed a certain length, the author may allow one topic to spread
over two chapters, just as in the EN the topic (p.2) of philia (friendship) spreads
over two books (VIII and IX). In the EN some of the books deal with a single
topic, or a set of closely connected topics, as ν with justice and VI with the
intellectual excellencies. But sometimes there is a transition from one topic to
another in the middle of a book. It is as if a book had to be of a certain
approximate length, perhaps the length convenient for a single roll of papyrus.
When we look at the over-all arrangement of the contents of the EN we notice a
more important difference between the treatise and a modern book: there are
signs that the treatise was not planned and composed as a unitary whole by the
author of its parts or that, if it was, it was planned to have a looser structure
than a modern book. It need not surprise us to find separate discussions of the
final good or end, happiness, in both the first and the last books (I and X); for it
is natural to separate preliminary outlines from final conclusions. But it is
disconcerting that there is no clear reference in I to the doctrine of X that the
highest form of happiness is intellectual ‘contemplation’ (theōria), although in X
we are reminded of what has been said in I.1 Again the reader may be surprised
to find two whole books2 dealing with friendship and only one3 book covering, in
a rather untidy form, the important topics of the virtues of the intellect and the
intellectual aspect of right conduct. Again the formulas of transition are often
mechanical, e.g. at the beginning of VII: ‘let us now make a fresh start and point
out…’4 Such formulas suggest the stitching together of sections which might
have been composed without an eye on an over-all plan.
There is one very conspicuous anomaly in the arrangement of the treatise. It
contains two separated treatments of pleasure which are not made to seem
consistent and neither of which refers to the other.5 At the end of the first
treatment our text says: ‘we have discussed pleasure and pain…; it remains to
speak of friendship.’6 Then the section on friendship (VIII and IX) ends with the
words: ‘so much, then, for friendship; our next task must be to discuss (p.3)
pleasure.’1 It is difficult to suppose that Aristotle could have planned this
sequence. The two treatments of pleasure cover similar ground in their
criticisms of the views which they reject but X contains also an elaborate
exposition of a positive doctrine. A possible inference is that the discussion of
pleasure and pain in VII was inserted by an editor who might have felt that the
piece dealt with the subject from an angle different from that of the discussion
in X and made points not repeated there. We can be grateful for his clumsiness if
it preserved an essay by Aristotle which would otherwise have been lost. A
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Introductory Note: Aristotle’s Ethical Writings
modern editor producing posthumously the work of the author might have
printed the earlier less finished treatment of pleasure as an appendix.
So much on the general arrangement of the contents of the work. There are,
moreover, considerable variations in the texture of the argument, in the degree
of finish and elaboration with which the points are made. Some passages are
highly condensed or sketchy. Here, for example, is a complete argument from
the attack in 1. 6 on the Platonic doctrine of the good: ‘but again it will not be
good any the more for being eternal, since that which lasts long is no whiter than
that which perishes in a day.’2 Sometimes an argument is mentioned rather than
stated: one passage in the Metaphysics mentions three Platonic arguments and
three Aristotelian refutations in four lines.3 A man preparing a lecture may need
to write down only a word or two to remind him of an argument which he knows
will trip from his tongue.
There are other ways in which the composition is unequal. Sometimes the
sequence of thought is unclear. Sometimes pas sages are repeated in an
apparently pointless way with minor variations. Commentators would like to
change the order of paragraphs or sentences in order to make the argument
more consecutive and more intelligible. Modern editors have some times
actually practised such surgery. An eminent scholar once went so far as to
compare the contents of an Aristotelian treatise with the contents of a waste-
paper basket. Two explanations of this kind of roughness or disorder might
suggest themselves. One is that a basic text, amended from time to time by
Aristotle, has (p.4) accumulated variants and accretions but has never been
finished and polished. Another is that an editor in producing a text has at some
points conflated two or more versions of sections dealing with the same points,
and has been over-anxious that nothing significant or valuable should be lost.
Sometimes both causes may be at work. This source of difficulty is specially
frequent in the central books of the EN (V–VII).
The description I have given of some of the ways in which the EN is, from our
point of view, a work of an unexpected and unfamiliar form would be misleading
if it were taken to imply that the treatise is not a methodical and carefully
written exposition of Aristotle’s ethical views. The philosophy of morals is a set
of more and less closely connected topics. Hence both the selection of topics to
be discussed and the order in which they are discussed, whether in a book or in
a course of lectures, are inevitably arbitrary to some extent. Thus the fact that
we cannot be sure how far the work in its present form was planned by Aristotle
himself is not inconsistent with the assurance of Rackham that ‘the
Nicomachean Ethics is the authoritative statement of Aristotle’s system’.1 It has
always over the centuries been so regarded. Again the observation that the state
of the text is at some points confused must not be understood as suggesting that
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