WorkAristotle

Eudemian Ethics

Aristotle's other complete ethics: through most of the twentieth century a draft he was thought to have outgrown, until 1978 reversed the verdict.

by Aristotle193 passages held

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Original language: Ancient Greek

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Overview

Three of the eight books here are word for word three of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics, and the manuscripts carry no note saying which treatise they were composed for. The title points at Eudemus of Rhodes, a pupil, who may have edited the thing rather than merely received it — the sources leave that open too. What the eight books contain is a complete ethics: happiness as the end of action, virtue as a state of character lying between two opposite ways of getting it wrong, choice and responsibility, friendship at length, and, where it parts company most visibly from its twin, a closing account of the good life as the service and contemplation of God, put to work as a yardstick by which a person can judge how much wealth or honour is enough. The relation between the two ethics has been read every way round. For most of the twentieth century this was the juvenilia, an early draft its author outgrew and replaced. Anthony Kenny's The Aristotelian Ethics of 1978 turned that over. Measuring unconscious features of style by computer — connectives and particles rather than doctrine — Kenny argued that the shared books sit closer to this treatise than to the other one, and that what we have here is the mature work. He added a historical point with some sting in it: for over four hundred years, until Aspasius commented on the Nicomachean in the second century AD, the eight-book version was what Aristotelian ethics meant. It is still the less read of the two, and only now getting editions and commentaries of its own.

Key concepts

What does Aristotle mean by a virtue as a mean state?

A virtue is a stable state of character that avoids two opposite ways of going wrong. The mean is not an average amount or a compromise chosen mechanically; it marks the fitting response between excess and deficiency. This account makes character practical: a person must judge what the situation calls for, then act accordingly.

How does deliberation shape the choices for which someone is responsible?

Deliberation works out how an end can be pursued before choice commits a person to action. It does not create the goal by itself; it considers the available means and makes the decision intelligible as the agent’s own. That connection lets the work discuss choice and responsibility together rather than treating conduct as mere behavior.

What makes an action voluntary rather than merely something a person does?

An action is voluntary when it proceeds from the agent rather than being imposed by an outside force or occurring without the agent’s control. The distinction matters because praise, blame, and responsibility attach to what someone can properly claim as their doing. Aristotle uses it to examine agency before judging the character expressed in action.

Why does friendship belong inside ethics rather than private affection?

Friendship belongs inside ethics because a good life is lived through relations as well as through individual character. The work treats friendship at length, making affection and mutual action part of the question of how people should live together. It therefore challenges any account of virtue that measures a person only in isolation.

How can service and contemplation of God measure an ordinary human life?

Service and contemplation of God provide a standard for judging how human activities should be ordered. They do not simply add a religious topic to the ethical discussion; they help determine whether wealth, honour, and other advantages have reached a sufficient place in a life. The closing account therefore measures possessions by the good life, not the reverse.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Happiness through virtue

What makes a human life go well when fortune, pleasure, wealth, and honour can all mislead? The answer determines how choice, friendship, and even the right amount of possessions should serve a life directed toward its proper end.

Aristotle makes happiness the end of action, but he does not reduce it to a feeling or a lucky outcome. A person becomes good through a state of character that chooses the mean between opposing errors, guided by rationality, deliberation, and voluntary action. Courage and justice therefore belong to agency, while friendship tests whether a good life can stand alone. The closing books add service and contemplation of God, using that standard to judge when wealth or honour has become excessive. For over four hundred years, this eight-book ethics shaped the received Aristotelian account.

virtue
friendship
virtue ethics
nature
utility
agency
courage
rationality
pleasure
causality
happiness
choice
fortune
character
teleology
voluntary action
good
justice
epistemology
human nature
desire
affection
knowledge
definition
deliberation
logic
action
moral psychology
moral responsibility
practical reason

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 193
distinct concepts: 287
by passages held, corpus-wide: #139

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: friendship with utility.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 5 pairings. 27 shared passages in all. 90 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
friendship	utility	11
courage	virtue	9
utility	virtue	3
ethics	virtue	2
friendship	virtue	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

-350 Organon and Categories (Κατηγορίαι)
The medieval schools came at these six through Porphyry's Isagoge. The rest of the corpus simply uses them: the Physics, the Metaphysics and the biological works take the syllogism and the ten kinds as given.
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-330 Constitution of Athens (Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία)
Historians use it as a source rather than as a text to interpret, which is true of nothing else under Aristotle's name. It belongs beside the Politics, as the surviving piece of the survey that fed it.
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-330 Politics: A Treatise on Government (Πολιτικά)
Not a finished book but lectures, with shorter pieces and marginal notes worked in — and the place where the Nicomachean Ethics was heading when it closed by saying that the study of character runs on into the study of constitutions.
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-330 The Art of Poetry (Περὶ Ποιητικῆς)
The Rhetoric is its nearest neighbour in the corpus: nowhere else does Aristotle take an art apart from the maker's side, and nowhere else does he discuss poetry at any length.
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Economics
Aristotle treats the same ground himself in the household economics of Politics I. These three books keep their place in his corpus on the strength of the name alone; scholarship removed them without settling on anyone else.
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Eudemian Ethics you are here GRCEN
Metaphysics
Form, matter and cause are argued out in the Physics, not here, and the works on animals and the soul are built on the framework it lays down; what this book asks is what it takes for anything to be at all. Alexander of Aphrodisias, Avicenna, Averroes and Aquinas each built a commentary on it.
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The "Art" of Rhetoric
The published title keeps the quotation marks around Art from Freese's 1926 Loeb edition. Its subject is public life — the assembly, the court, the funeral oration — but its form is the school's, like everything else of his that survives.
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The Nicomachean Ethics (Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια)
The fullest of Aristotle's ethical treatises, and the one the tradition kept: it shares three books with the Eudemian Ethics, which covers the same ground. Its last page hands the subject over to the Politics.
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— or open another of their works