The focus of Aristotle on Prescription is Aristotle’s reflections on rule-making. It is widely believed that Aristotle was only concerned with decision-making, understood as a deliberative process enabling a person to arrive at particular, contingent decisions. However, rule-making is fundamental to Aristotle’s ethical texts. Establishing rules means indicating patterns for action that are sufficiently specific to meet situational difficulties and sufficiently constant in time to provide us with a code of behaviour to be used in similar situations. When we prescribe rules, we demonstrate the ability to direct not only our own life but also other people’s lives. Alesse’s book explores Aristotle’s deep reflections on the nature and functions of prescription, and on the relationship between rules and individual decisions.

The notion of practical wisdom is one of Aristotle's greatest inventions. It has inspired philosophers as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Elizabeth Anscombe, Michael Thompson, and John McDowell. Now a leading scholar of ancient philosophy offers a challenge to received accounts of practical wisdom by situating it in the larger context of Aristotle's views on knowledge and reality. That happiness is the end pursued by practical wisdom is commonly agreed. What is disputed is whether happiness is to be found in the practical life of political action, in which we exhibit courage, temperance, and other virtues of character, or in the contemplative life, where theoretical wisdom is the essential virtue. C. D. C. Reeve argues that the dichotomy is bogus, that these lives are in fact parts of a single life, which is the best human one. In support of this view, he develops innovative accounts of many of the central notions in Aristotle's metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology, including matter and form, scientific knowledge, dialectic, educatedness, perception, understanding, political science, practical truth, deliberation, and deliberate choice. These accounts are based directly on freshly translated passages from many of Aristotle's writings. Action, Contemplation, and Happiness is an accessible essay not just on practical wisdom but on Aristotle's philosophy as a whole.

In this incisive study Sarah Broadie gives an argued account of the main topics of Aristotle's ethics: eudaimonia, virtue, voluntary agency, practical reason, akrasia, pleasure, and the ethical status of theoria. She explores the sense of "eudaimonia," probes Aristotle's division of the soul and its virtues, and traces the ambiguities in "voluntary." Fresh light is shed on his comparison of practical wisdom with other kinds of knowledge, and a realistic account is developed of Aristototelian deliberation. The concept of pleasure as value-judgment is expounded, and the problem of akrasia is argued to be less of a problem to Aristotle than to his modern interpreters. Showing that the theoretic ideal of Nicomachean Ethics X is in step with the earlier emphasis on practice, as well as with the doctrine of the Eudemian Ethics, this work makes a major contribution towards the understanding of Aristotle's ethics.

What is the good life? Posing this question today would likely elicit very different answers. Some might say that the good life means doing good - improving one's community and the lives of others. Others might respond that it means doing well - cultivating one's own abilities in a meaningful way. But for Aristotle these two distinct ideas - doi...

Explores the extent to which Aristotle's ethical treatises employ the concepts, methods, and practices developed in his 'scientific' works.

Presents a new translation with commentary exploring the final book of Aristotle's Ethics in a philosophically rigorous yet interpretatively open way.

Twenty-three centuries after its compilation, 'The Politics' still has much to contribute to this central question of political science. Aristotle's thorough and carefully argued analysis is based on a study of over 150 city constitutions, covering a huge range of political issues in order to establish which types of constitution are best - both ideally and in particular circumstances - and how they may be maintained. Aristotle's opinions form an essential background to the thinking of philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli and Jean Bodin and both his premises and arguments raise questions that are as relevant to modern society as they were to the ancient world.

Arguably the foundational text of Western political theory, Aristotle's Politics has become one of the most widely and carefully studied works in ethical and political philosophy. This volume of essays offers fresh interpretations of Aristotle's key work and opens new paths for students and scholars to explore. The contributors embrace a variety of methodological approaches that range across the disciplines of classics, political science, philosophy, and ancient history. Their essays illuminate perennial questions such as the relationship between individual and community, the nature of democratic deliberation, and how to improve political institutions. Offering groundbreaking studies that both set Aristotle within the context of his own time and draw on contemporary discussion of his writings, this collection will provide researchers with an understanding of many of the major scholarly debates surrounding this key text.