aristotle and happiness essay

Happiness According to Aristotle

Simple definitions of happiness according to aristotle.

What does it mean to be truly happy? Aristotle , a great thinker from ancient Greece, offers us an excellent recipe for real happiness. He introduces us to ‘ eudaimonia ,’ which isn’t the typical happy feeling you get from eating your favorite ice cream or watching a funny movie. Instead, eudaimonia is something deeper. It’s like playing a challenging video game, where every level you beat makes you a better player, and the real prize is becoming the hero of your own adventure.

Think of eudaimonia as the ultimate goal in life – flourishing like a sturdy tree boasting a full spread of leaves. For Aristotle, being your best self involves growing your virtues – qualities like being honest, fair, and disciplined – and using your brainpower to make life awesome. When you act with good intentions and work on improving yourself, it’s as if you’re a tree spreading your branches toward the sun, reaching your full potential and basking in the glow of true happiness.

How to Guide

Searching for this deeper happiness seems like an exciting quest, right? Aristotle left us a guidebook to finding eudaimonia:

Practice virtues like courage, justice, and temperance. You become courageous by facing fears, fair by treating people equally, and moderate by not indulging in too much of anything.
Engage in challenging activities that stretch what you can do. Keep improving and take pride in personal achievements.
Build strong friendships and help your community. Do your part to make the world a kinder place.
Always keep learning and exploring. Use your curiosity to understand the world better.
Look for a balance in life. Don’t go over the top with anything; keep it “just right” to stay healthy and happy.

Aristotle believed that by following these guidelines, you would not just have fun, but also create a meaningful life filled with eudaimonia.

Types of Happiness According to Aristotle

Even though Aristotle saw eudaimonia as the ultimate form of happiness, he recognized that people find happiness in different ways:

The Life of Pleasure: Enjoying things that feel good, like tasty meals and comfortable places to rest.
The Life of Honor: Wanting to be recognized and remembered, to feel valued and respected by others.
The Life of Mind: Loving to learn, think deeply, and ponder over life’s big questions.

Out of these, Aristotle cherished the Life of Mind, believing that true happiness comes from within and through the use of reason and intellect.

Examples of Happiness According to Aristotle

Someone who shares with people in need, not for a thank you, but out of goodness. This shows a noble character, and it spreads joy to others, which is a key part of Aristotle’s happiness.
An athlete who practices tirelessly, finding satisfaction in mastering their skills, not just in victory. They cherish personal growth, embodying Aristotle’s concept of flourishing through discipline and effort.
A teacher who dedicates their life to educating others, feeling rewarded by the progress of their students. Their joy comes from the impact they have on others, aligning with Aristotle’s vision of contributing to the greater good.

Why is Happiness According to Aristotle Important?

Aim for eudaimonia, and you’re really aiming for the highest level of human flourishing, according to Aristotle. It’s not just about feeling happy; it’s about creating a cycle of goodness that radiates from you to others. Living virtuously elevates not just ourselves but the people and world around us. How we choose to live our lives impacts everything – that is why Aristotle’s happiness matters.

By striving to be the best we can be, we set off a chain reaction of positivity. This ancient concept is as alive today as it was back then because it gets us to consider our potential impact on society. For the average person, this approach to happiness can lead to a fulfilling and meaningful life, influencing our day-to-day choices and interactions. It’s a guiding light in a world where happiness is often mistaken for fleeting pleasures.

Origin of Aristotle’s Thoughts on Happiness

Aristotle, who lived around 2,300 years ago, shared his wisdom on happiness in his work, the “Nicomachean Ethics.” He stepped out from the shadow of his teacher, Plato , to focus on the practical ways we can live well. He cared about real-life experiences and how we can nurture the best qualities within ourselves.

Controversies Around Happiness According to Aristotle

While Aristotle’s teachings on happiness are influential, they’re not without debate . Some argue that ‘happiness’ as a word doesn’t fully capture the depth of eudaimonia. Also, critics claim that achieving Aristotle’s ideal could be really tough for people facing hardships. Plus, is eudaimonia possible for everyone, or is it an exclusive state that only a few can attain? These questions spark discussions on how to adapt Aristotle’s insights to our modern lives.

Other Important Points

Aristotle’s take on happiness isn’t a short-lived joyride; it’s a long-term journey towards a life well-lived, marked by actions that enrich our character. Also, according to Aristotle, true happiness means recognizing the value of community – human connection is vital in our quest for eudaimonia.

Lastly, he preached balance in all things: too much courage could make you reckless, too little might make you a coward. Finding the middle ground, or the Golden Mean, is key to his vision of happiness.

The Center for Hellenic Studies

Happiness according to aristotle.

Citation with persistent identifier: Reece, Bryan C. “Happiness According to Aristotle.” CHS Research Bulletin 7 (2019). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:ReeceB.Happiness_According_to_Aristotle.2019

Aristotle thinks that questions about how we should live as individuals and as communities must be answered with reference to a more fundamental question: What is the happy life for a human being? This question about happiness thus holds the key for the entire Aristotelian system of moral and political philosophy. Unfortunately, while the centrality of Aristotle’s theory of happiness is uncontroversial, there is no agreement about the content of his theory. Particularly controversial are his remarks on the relationship between, and especially the relative importance of, theoretical and practical activity in the ideal human life. I here give an outline sketch of a new interpretation of Aristotle’s remarks on this relationship and its ramifications for human happiness.

How should we live? Aristotle proposes to address this fundamental philosophical question by giving interrelated answers to two further questions: What kinds of activities are the best expressions of distinctively human identity? What is the proper balance of theoretical and practical activity in the ideal human life?

Aristotle’s answers have generated abiding interest, but also lingering puzzlement. He thinks that humans are distinctively rational, having the ability to reason theoretically and practically. The best activities for them to perform, and therefore the activities that constitute their happiness (which Aristotle thinks is itself an activity), are virtuous (excellent) rational activities ( Nicomachean Ethics 1.7, 1098 a 16–17): manifestations of reliable practical dispositions like courage, justice, generosity, and self-control, which are exercises of practical wisdom, as well as of reliable theoretical dispositions such as insightfulness, understanding, and theoretical wisdom. The manifestation of theoretical wisdom ( sophia ) turns out to be especially important for Aristotle. He says that this activity, theoretical contemplation ( theôria ), is what human happiness is ( NE 10.8, 1178 b 32). This is surprising, for if human happiness simply consists in theoretical contemplation, we might well wonder what role Aristotle envisions for the practical activities to which he devotes far more space in his ethical and political works than he does to contemplation.

Interpreters have struggled with the problem of reconciling Aristotle’s assignment of preeminent status in his theory of happiness to theoretical contemplation and the natural thought, encouraged by the flow of his discussions of virtuous behavior, that practical activities are permissible and valuable features of happy human lives. [1] I call this ‘the Standard Problem of Happiness.’ But there is an even more difficult version of this interpretive problem, which I call ‘the Hard Problem of Happiness.’ That problem is to explain how Aristotle could have thought that happiness is theoretical contemplation while also affirming that a reliable pattern of virtuous practical activity is non-optional and not coherently regrettable for happy humans. I here offer a very brief outline of my way of addressing this problem. [2]

A major obstacle to solving the Hard Problem is an assumption about the relationship between theoretical wisdom, which is manifested in theoretical contemplation, and practical wisdom, which is manifested in virtuous practical activities. The standard view is that Aristotle thinks that human beings can have and reliably manifest theoretical wisdom without having and reliably manifesting practical wisdom. That view is based on a passage apparently claiming that two pre-Socratic philosophers, Anaxagoras and Thales, had theoretical but not practical wisdom ( NE 6.7, 1141 b 2–16). The evidential value of this passage fades away on closer inspection. It is a report of others’ opinions that Aristotle does not fully endorse, but the appeal of which he explains. Thus, the purported textual evidence for the standard view does not support it. In fact, Aristotle gives strong reasons for thinking that having and reliably manifesting practical wisdom is necessary for having and reliably manifesting theoretical wisdom: only the continual, reliable exercise of practical wisdom, in activities that express such virtues as self-control and justice, makes it behaviorally feasible for embodied, socially situated, choice-making beings like us to develop and exercise theoretical wisdom. This means that a life of theoretical contemplation, in Aristotle’s strict sense, cannot be successfully lived without the level of virtuous public engagement that practical wisdom dictates in each circumstance. This interpretation solves a major problem for the standard view: it is on that view, wrongly, an open question whether any particular instance of theoretical contemplation is performed in the right way, at the right time, and for the right reasons. One who is a contemplator in Aristotle’s strict sense also has practical wisdom, and practical wisdom guarantees that one reliably chooses to act in the right way, at the right time, and for the right reasons.

This interpretation requires, as any solution to the Hard Problem does, that theoretical contemplation and virtuous practical activities are included in one and the same happy life. But Aristotle appears to claim at NE 10. 7, 1178 a 2 – 10. 8, 1178 a 14 that there are two kinds of happy life: one in accordance with theoretical contemplation, the other with virtuous practical activity. This claim is notoriously problematic. Properly interpreted, though, Aristotle does not here distinguish between two kinds of happiness, but rather between two ways of being proper to human beings that apply within one and the same happy life. [3] Theoretical contemplation is proper to humans in one way, virtuous practical activity in another.

But many interpreters see a problem for the idea that theoretical contemplation is proper to human beings: Aristotle also says that divine beings contemplate ( Metaph . 12.7, 1072 b 13–30, NE 10.8, 1178 b 7–32). [4] It would initially appear, then, that Aristotle is committed both to affirming and to denying that theoretical contemplation is proper to humans. However, careful scrutiny of his descriptions of the nature of divine and human contemplation reveals them to be type-distinct activities. On his view, human contemplation, but not divine contemplation, is a manifestation of theoretical wisdom, a virtue that includes two further virtues: a particular sort of nous , the developed capacity to grasp first principles intuitively as first principles, and epistêmê , the developed capacity for scientific demonstration from first principles ( NE 6.7, 1141 a 18–20, 6.3, 1139 b 31–32). So, Aristotle’s claim that divine beings contemplate does not conflict with his view that theoretical contemplation, understood as the manifestation of theoretical wisdom, is proper to human beings.

On the account so far sketched, theoretical contemplation and virtuous practical activities are necessary parts of human happiness, and only happy human beings engage in these activities. So, theoretical contemplation and virtuous practical activities are necessary parts of human happiness and are also unique to it. In short, they are proper to human happiness. But they are not each proper to human happiness in the same way. Theoretical contemplation is necessary for and unique to happiness as what happiness is , whereas virtuous practical activities are necessary and unique parts of happiness in a different, and secondary, way. Aristotle often distinguishes between primary and secondary ways of being proper: one is the essence ( ousia ) and the other is a unique, necessary property ( idion , pl. idia ). Aristotle relies on the theory on which this distinction between two ways of being proper is based in articulating his view of happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics , for he seeks an essence-specifying definition of human happiness from which the unique, necessary parts of happiness can be deduced. Theoretical contemplation is the essence of human happiness, the activity that makes it what it is. That is why Aristotle says that happiness is theoretical contemplation. (This addresses the first half of the Hard Problem.) Virtuous activities are unique, necessary properties of human happiness. Even though they are not what happiness is, Aristotle thinks that they are non-optional and non-regrettable parts of happiness. (This addresses the second half of the Hard Problem). It would be incoherent to wish that happiness did not require engaging in virtuous practical activities, just as it would be incoherent to wish that one were another sort of being without the features that follow from the human essence ( NE 9.4, 1166 a 20–22 and 8.7, 1159 a 5–12).

This solution to the Hard Problem shows Aristotle’s account of happiness to be a distinctive answer to the question of how we ought to balance theoretical and practical activity in our pursuit of the ideal human life.

Bibliography

Annas, Julia. 1993. The Morality of Happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aufderheide, Joachim. 2015. “The Content of Happiness: A New Case for Theôria.” In The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant , ed. Joachim Aufderheide and Ralf M. Bader, 36–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Charles, David. 2017. “Aristotle on Virtue and Happiness.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Ethics , ed. Christopher Bobonich, 105–123. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cooper, John. 1975. Reason and Human Good in Aristotle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Devereux, Daniel. 1981. “Aristotle on the Essence of Happiness.” In Studies in Aristotle , ed. Dominic J. O’Meara, 247–260. Washington: Catholic University of America Press.

Gauthier, René Antoine. 1958. La Morale d’ Aristote. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Gigon, Olof. 1975. “Phronêsis und Sophia in der Nicomachischen Ethik des Aristoteles.” In Kephalaion: Studies in Greek Philosophy and its Continuation offered to Professor C. J. de Vogel , ed. Jaap Mansfeld and L. M. de Rijk, 91–104. Assen: Van Gorcum.

Gottlieb, Paula. 1994. “Aristotle on Dividing the Soul and Uniting the Virtues.” Phronesis 39:275–290.

Irwin, Terence. 1980. “The Metaphysical and Psychological Basis of Aristotle’s Ethics.” In Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics , ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, 35–53. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kenny, Anthony. 1992. Aristotle on the Perfect Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keyt, David. 1983. “Intellectualism in Aristotle .” In Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy , vol. 2, ed. John P. Anton and Anthony Preus, 364–387. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Kosman, Aryeh. 2000. “ Metaphysics Λ 9: Divine Thought.” In Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda: Symposium Aristotelicum , ed. Michael Frede and David Charles, 307–326. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kraut, Richard. 1989. Aristotle on the Human Good. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Laks, André. 2000. “ Metaphysics Λ 7.” In Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda: Symposium Aristotelicum , ed. Michael Frede and David Charles, 207–243. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lear, Gabriel Richardson. 2004. Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Natali, Carlo. 1989. La Saggezza di Aristotele. Naples: Bibliopolis.

Nightingale, Andrea Wilson. 2004. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Price, Anthony W. 2011. Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Reece, Bryan C. forthcoming. “Are There Really Two Kinds of Happiness in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics ?” Classical Philology.

Scott, Dominic. 1999. “Primary and Secondary Eudaimonia.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 73:225–242.

* My research on this topic has been generously supported by The Center for Hellenic Studies. I am grateful to everyone involved with the CHS, especially to Gregory Nagy, Mark Schiefsky, Richard Martin, and the library staff: Erika Bainbridge, Sophie Boisseau, Lanah Koelle, Michael Strickland, and Temple Wright.

[1] Many have offered interpretations of Aristotle’s remarks on practical and intellectual virtue, or their relationship to each other or to happiness. I list only a few here: (Annas 1993), (Aufderheide 2015), (Charles 2017), (Cooper 1975), (Devereux 1981), (Gauthier 1958), (Gigon 1975), (Gottlieb 1994), (Irwin 1980), (Kenny 1992), (Keyt 1983), (Kraut 1989), (Lear 2004), (Natali 1989), (Nightingale 2004), (Price 2011), (Scott 1999).

[2] The paragraphs that follow summarize parts of this research project that I drafted or revised during my fellowship at The Center for Hellenic Studies. The project as a whole is under contract with Cambridge University Press as a monograph called Aristotle on Happiness, Virtue, and Wisdom .

[3] I give a detailed defense of this interpretation in (Reece forthcoming).

[4] There are many who discuss the nature of divine contemplation, including (Kosman 2000) and (Laks 2000), as well as the problem that it initially appears to pose for Aristotle’s account of human happiness, including (Charles 2017), (Keyt 1983), (Kraut 1989, 312–319), and (Lear 2004, 189–193).

Photo of a man holding a child on a beach with an inflatable boat in the background. Other people are also near the boat.

Hellenic values; a volunteer helps a refugee girl after arriving on an inflatable boat at Lesbos, Greece, March 2016. Photo by Alexander Koerner/Getty

Why read Aristotle today?

Modern self-help draws heavily on stoic philosophy. but aristotle was better at understanding real human happiness.

by Edith Hall + BIO

In the Western world, only since the mid-18th century has it been possible to discuss ethical questions publicly without referring to Christianity. Modern thinking about morality, which assumes that gods do not exist, or at least do not intervene, is in its infancy. But the ancient Greeks and Romans elaborated robust philosophical schools of ethical thought for more than a millennium, from the first professed agnostics such as Protagoras (fifth century BCE) to the last pagan thinkers. The Platonists’ Academy at Athens was not finally closed down until 529 CE, by the Emperor Justinian.

That longstanding tradition of moral philosophy is an invaluable legacy of ancient Mediterranean civilisation. It has prompted several contemporary secular thinkers, faced with the moral vacuum left by the decline of Christianity since the late 1960s, to revive ancient schools of thought. Stoicism, founded in Athens by the Cypriot Zeno in about 300 BCE, has advocates. Self-styled Stoic organisations on both sides of the Atlantic offer courses, publish books and blogposts, and even run an annual Stoic Week. Some Stoic principles underlay Dale Carnegie’s self-help classic How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948). He recommended Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations to its readers. But authentic ancient Stoicism was pessimistic and grim. It denounced pleasure. It required the suppression of emotions and physical appetites. It recommended the resigned acceptance of misfortune, rather than active engagement with the fine-grained business of everyday problem-solving. It left little room for hope, human agency or constructive repudiation of suffering.

Less familiar is the recipe for happiness ( eudaimonia ) advocated by Aristotle, yet it has much to be said for it. Outside of philosophy departments, where neo-Aristotelian thinkers such as Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse have championed his virtue ethics as an alternative to utilitarianism and Kantian approaches, it is not as well known as it should be. At his Lyceum in Athens, Aristotle developed a model for the maximisation of happiness that could be implemented by individuals and whole societies, and is still relevant today. It became known as ‘peripatetic philosophy’ because Aristotle conducted philosophical debates while strolling in company with his interlocutors.

The fundamental tenet of peripatetic philosophy is this: the goal of life is to maximise happiness by living virtuously, fulfilling your own potential as a human, and engaging with others – family, friends and fellow citizens – in mutually beneficial activities. Humans are animals, and therefore pleasure in responsible fulfilment of physical needs (eating, sex) is a guide to living well. But since humans are advanced animals, naturally inclining to live together in settled communities ( poleis ), we are ‘political animals’ ( zoa politika ). Humans must take responsibility for their own happiness since ‘god’ is a remote entity, the ‘unmoved mover’ who might maintain the universe’s motion but has neither any interest in human welfare, nor any providential function in rewarding virtue or punishing immorality. Yet purposively imagining a better, happier life is feasible since humans have inborn abilities that allow them to promote individual and collective flourishing. These include the inclinations to ask questions about the world, to deliberate about action, and to activate conscious recollection.

Aristotle’s optimistic, practical recipe for happiness is ripe for rediscovery. It offers to the human race facing third-millennial challenges a unique combination of secular, virtue-based morality and empirical science, neither of which seeks answers in any ideal or metaphysical system beyond what humans can perceive by their senses.

B ut what did Aristotle mean by ‘happiness’ or eudaimonia ? He did not believe it could be achieved by the accumulation of good things in life – including material goods, wealth, status or public recognition – but was an internal, private state of mind. Yet neither did he believe it was a continuous sequence of blissful moods, because this could be enjoyed by someone who spent all day sunbathing or feasting. For Aristotle, eudaimonia required the fulfilment of human potentialities that permanent sunbathing or feasting could not achieve. Nor did he believe that happiness is defined by the total proportion of our time spent experiencing pleasure, as did Socrates’ student Aristippus of Cyrene.

Aristippus evolved an ethical system named ‘hedonism’ (the ancient Greek for pleasure is hedone ), arguing that we should aim to maximise physical and sensory enjoyment. The 18th-century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham revived hedonism in proposing that the correct basis for moral decisions and legislation was whatever would achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number. In his manifesto An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Bentham actually laid out an algorithm for quantitative hedonism, to measure the total pleasure quotient produced by any given action. The algorithm is often called the ‘hedonic calculus’. Bentham spelled out the variables: how intense is the pleasure? How long will it last? Is it an inevitable or only possible result of the action I am considering? How soon will it happen? Will it be productive and give rise to further pleasure? Will it guarantee no painful consequences? How many people will experience it?

Bentham’s disciple, John Stuart Mill, pointed out that such ‘quantitative hedonism’ did not distinguish human happiness from the happiness of pigs, which could be provided with incessant physical pleasures. So Mill introduced the idea that there were different levels and types of pleasure. Bodily pleasures that we share with animals, such as the pleasure we gain from eating or sex, are ‘lower’ pleasures. Mental pleasures, such as those we derive from the arts, intellectual debate or good behaviour, are ‘higher’ and more valuable. This version of hedonist philosophical theory is usually called prudential hedonism or qualitative hedonism.

Train yourself to be the best possible version of yourself until you do the right thing habitually, on autopilot

There are few philosophers advocating hedonist theories today, but in the public understanding, when ‘happiness’ is not defined as the possession of a set of ‘external’ or ‘objective’ good things such as money and career success, it describes a subjective hedonistic experience – a transient state of elation. The problem with both such views, for Aristotle, is that they neglect the importance of fulfilling one’s potential. He cites approvingly the primordial Greek maxim that nobody can be called happy until he is dead: nobody wants to end up believing on his deathbed that he didn’t fulfil his potential. In her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying (2011), the palliative nurse Bronnie Ware describes exactly the hazards that Aristotle advises us to avoid. Dying people say: ‘I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.’ John F Kennedy summed up Aristotelian happiness thus: ‘the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope’.

For Aristotle insisted that happiness is constituted by something greater from and different to an accumulation of agreeable experiences. To be happy, we need to sustain constructive activities that we believe are goal-directed. This requires conscious analysis of our goals and conduct, and practising ‘virtue ethics’, by ‘living well’. It requires being nurtured effectively to develop your intellectual and physical capacities, and identify your potential (Aristotle had strong views on education), and also training yourself to be the best possible version of yourself until you do the right thing habitually, on autopilot. If you deliberately respond in a friendly way to everyone you encounter, you will begin to do so unconsciously, making yourself and others happier.

Historically, of course, many philosophers, such as Egoists, have questioned whether virtue is inherently desirable. But, since the mid-20th century, others rehabilitated virtue ethics and focused intensively on Aristotle’s ideas: unfortunately, this academic interest has yet to achieve any real public presence in broader culture in the way that Stoicism has.

S ome thinkers today distinguish between two sub-categories of virtue: between virtues such as courage, honesty and integrity, which affect your own and your community’s happiness; and ‘benevolence virtues’ such as kindness and compassion, which benefit others but are less obviously likely to gratify the agent. But Aristotle, for whom self-liking is necessary to virtue, argues that virtues do have intrinsic benefits, a view he shares with Socrates, the Stoics and the Victorian philosopher Thomas Hill Green. For part of his life, Aristotle lived in the Macedonian court tyrannised by the decadent and ruthless Philip II, whose lieutenants and concubines resorted to plots, extortion and murder to further their self-advantage. He knew what an immoral person looks like, and that such people were often subjectively miserable, despite the outward trappings of wealth and success. In the Nicomachean Ethics , he wrote (all translations my own):

Nobody would call a man ideally happy if he has not got a particle of courage nor of temperance nor of decency nor of good sense, but is afraid of the flies that flutter by him, cannot refrain from any of the most outrageous actions in order to gratify a desire to eat or to drink, and ruins his dearest friends for the sake of a penny …

Aristotle says that if happiness is not god-sent, ‘then it comes as the result of a goodness, along with a learning process, and effort’. Every human being can practise a way of life that will make him happier. Aristotle is not offering a magic wand to erase all threats to happiness. There are indeed some qualifications to the universal capacity for pursuing happiness. He accepts that there are certain kinds of advantage that you either have or you don’t. If you have the bad luck to have been born very low down the socio-economic ladder, or have no children or other family or loved ones, or are extremely ugly, your circumstances, which you can’t avoid, as he puts it, ‘taint’ delight. It is harder to achieve happiness. But not impossible. You do not need material possessions or physical strength or beauty to start exercising your mind in company with Aristotle, since the way of life he advocates concerns a moral and psychological excellence rather than one that lies in material possessions or bodily splendour. There are, he acknowledges, even more difficult obstacles: having children or friends who are completely depraved is one such obstacle. Another – which Aristotle saves until last and elsewhere implies is the most difficult problem any human can ever face – is the loss of fine friends in whom you have invested effort, or especially the loss of children, through death.

Yet, potentially, even people poorly endowed by nature or who have experienced terrible bereavements can live a good life. It is possible to undergo even apparently unendurable disasters and still live well: ‘even in adversity goodness shines through, when someone endures repeated and severe misfortune with patience; this is not owing to insensibility but from generosity and greatness of soul.’ In this sense, Aristotle’s is a deeply optimistic moral system. And it has practical relevance to ‘everyone’, implied by Aristotle’s inclusive use of the first personal plural: ‘This sort of philosophy is different from most other types of philosophy, since we are not asking what goodness is for the sake of knowing what it is, but with the aim of becoming good, without which our enquiry would be useless.’ In fact, the only way to be a good person is to do good things and treat people with fairness recurrently.

Aristotle insists that individuals who want to treat others fairly need to love themselves

Friendships are important to the Aristotelian, and adopting virtue ethics need not disrupt your life. An Aristotelian goal is moral self-sufficiency so that you are invulnerable to psychological manipulation, but he recognises that even the most self-sufficient person’s life is enhanced by having friends, and writes brilliantly on different types of relationship, from marriage or its equivalents to reciprocal cooperation between co-workers and fellow citizens. We might be able to cope alone, but why would we ever choose isolation? Moreover, you need no ‘natural talent’ at virtue, indeed Aristotle says that we are not born either good or bad. Nor is it ever too late: you can decide to retrain yourself morally at any point in your life. Most appealing of all, Aristotle insists that individuals who want to treat others fairly need to love themselves . There is no room for self-hatred, self-flagellation or self-deprivation in his humane system. Aristotle saw long before Sigmund Freud that our biological instincts are natural rather than morally despicable. This makes his ethics compatible with modern psychoanalysis.

An innovative Aristotelian idea is that supposedly reprehensible emotions – even anger and vengefulness – are indispensable to a healthy psyche. In this respect, Aristotle’s philosophy contrasts with the Stoic view that, for example, anger is irrational, and a form of temporary madness that should be eliminated. It’s just that such emotions need to be present in the right amount, the ‘middle’ or ‘mean’. Sexual desire, since humans are animals, is excellent in proportion. Either excessive or insufficient sexual appetite is conducive to unhappiness. Anger is also essential to a flourishing personality. An apathetic individual who never gets angry will not stand up for herself or her dependents when appropriate, and can’t achieve happiness. Yet anger in excess or with the wrong people is a vice.

Aristotle’s ethics are inherently flexible. There are no strict doctrines. Intention is always a crucial gauge of right behaviour: he writes penetratingly about the problems that arise when intended altruistic ends require immoral means. But every ethical situation is different. One person might jump on a train without a ticket because he is rushing to see a child who is in hospital; another might methodically dodge fares when she’s commuting to a well-paid job. Aristotle thought that general principles are important, but without taking into account the specific circumstances, especially intention, general principles can mislead. This is why he distrusted fixed penalties. He believed that the principle of equity needed to be integral to the judiciary, which is why some Aristotelians call themselves ‘moral particularists’. Each dilemma requires detailed engagement with the nuts and bolts of its particulars. When it comes to ethics, the devil really can be in the detail.

Politically speaking, a basic education in Aristotelianism could benefit humanity as a whole. Aristotle is positive about democracy, with which he finds fewer faults than other constitutions. Unlike his elitist tutor Plato, who was skeptical about the intelligence of the lower classes, Aristotle believed that the greatest experts on any given topic (eg zoology, of which he is the acknowledged founding father) are likely to be those who have accumulated experience of that topic (eg farmers, bird-catchers, shepherds and fishermen), however low their social status; scholarship must be informed by what they say. The trust that Aristotle felt in humanity’s general good sense enabled him to conceive a prototype of the ‘smart mob’ – a group that, rather than behaving in the loutish manner often associated with crowds, draws on universally distributed intelligence to behave with maximum efficiency. The idea, introduced by Howard Rheingold in Smart Mobs (2003), was anticipated in Aristotle’s Politics : where many people come together to deliberate, and become ‘a single person with many feet and many hands and many senses, so also it becomes one personality as regards the moral and intellectual faculties’.

A ristotle was the first philosopher to make explicit the distinction between doing wrong by omission and by commission . Not doing something when it is right to do it can have just as bad effects as a misdemeanour. This vital ethical principle has ramifications for the way in which we assess public figures. We do ask whether politicians have ever slipped up. But how often do we ask what they have not done with their power and influence to improve societal wellbeing? We do not ask enough what politicians, business leaders, presidents of universities and funding councils have failed to do, the initiatives that they have never launched, thus abnegating the duties of leadership. Aristotle was also clear that rich people who do not use a significant proportion of their wealth to help others are unhappy (because they are not acting according to the virtuous mean between fiscal irresponsibility and financial meanness). But they are also guilty of injustice by omission.

Aristotle is a utopian. He imagines the possibility that everyone will one day be able to realise his potential and make full use of all his faculties (the distinctive ‘Aristotelian principle’ according to the political philosopher John Rawls). Aristotle envisages a futuristic world in which technological advances would render human labour unnecessary. He remembers the mythical craftsmen Daedalus and Hephaestus, who constructed robots that worked to order: ‘for if every tool could perform its own work when ordered, or by seeing what to do in advance, like the statues of Daedalus in the story, or the automatic tripods of Hephaestus … if shuttles could weave like this, and plectrums strum harps of their own accord, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves’. It is almost as if he anticipated modern developments in artificial intelligence.

Aristotle’s political theory is flexible. You can be a capitalist or socialist, a businesswoman or a charity worker, vote for (almost) any political party, and still be a consistent Aristotelian. However, Aristotelian capitalists need to find indigence among their fellow citizens intolerable. Aristotle knew that humans come into conflict when commodities are scarce: ‘poverty is the parent of revolution and crime’. In his insistence on grounding political theory in humanity’s basic needs, Aristotle conceived the most advanced economic ideas ever to have appeared in his time, which was why Karl Marx admired him. Aristotle agrees with the recommendation in Plato’s Laws that gross inequality in assets owned by citizens produces divisive litigation and revolting obsequiousness towards the super-rich. Yet Aristotelian socialists need to acknowledge that extending compulsory public ownership to domestic accommodation does not work. People look after things because they enjoy the sense of private ownership, and because the things have value for them; both these qualities are diluted if shared with others. Aristotle thinks that ‘everybody loves a thing more if it has cost him trouble’.

Scientists and classicists agree: Aristotle would be an environmental campaigner today

A climate-change denier could find no encouragement in Aristotle. As a natural scientist who believed in meticulous research based on repeated acts of empirical observation and rigorous examination of hypotheses, he would be alarmed at the current evidence of human-caused environmental damage. The first reference to the extinction of a species by human activity (over-fishing) occurs in Aristotle’s The History of Animals . By seeing humans as animals, he effected a transformation in the ethical relationship between us and our material environment that has unlimited significance. His commitment to living planned lives in a deliberated way, taking long-term and total responsibility for our physical survival as well as our mental happiness, would, scientists and classicists agree, make him an environmental campaigner today. Only humans have moral agency, and therefore, as co-inhabitants of planet Earth with an astounding number of plants and animals, have the unique responsibility for conservation. But humans also have the capacity, because of their unique mental endowment, to cause terrible damage: as Aristotle said, drawing a chilling distinction, a bad man can do 10,000 times more harm than an animal.

The applicability of Aristotle’s holistic ethical and scientific outlook to our 21st-century problems such as theocracy and pollution prompts the question of why is there so little public awareness of his ideas. One is certainly his much-cited prejudices against women and slaves. He was a well-to-do male householder, and in his Politics he endorses slavery in the case of Greeks enslaving non-Greeks, and pronounces that women are incapable of reasoned deliberation. Yet he would have entertained reasoned arguments to the contrary, if backed up by empirical evidence. In every field of knowledge, he argued that all beliefs must be perpetually open to adjustment: ‘medicine has been improved by being altered from the ancestral system, and gymnastic training, and in general all the arts and faculties’. The laws the Greeks used to live by ‘were too simple and uncivilised’: he cites as examples the obsolete practices of purchasing wives and bearing of arms by citizens. He insists that law-codes need revision, ‘because it is impossible that the structure of the state can have been framed correctly for all time in relation to all its details’.

Yet the most important reason why Aristotle is so unfamiliar is that his surviving works are advanced treatises, written in specialist academic language for his colleagues and students. In fact, he did write several famous works for the public, in accessible, flowing prose that encouraged many thousands of ancient Greeks and Romans, over 10 centuries, to become practising virtue ethicists. They included peasant farmers and cobblers as well as kings and statesmen. This is because, as Themistius, one of the greatest ancient commentators on Aristotle, insisted, he was simply ‘more useful to the mass of people’ than other thinkers. The same still holds. The philosopher Robert J Anderson wrote in 1986: ‘There is no ancient thinker who can speak more directly to the concerns and anxieties of contemporary life than can Aristotle. Nor is it clear that any modern thinker offers as much for persons living in this time of uncertainty.’

One of the reasons why Stoicism is enjoying a revival today is that it gives concrete answers to moral questions. Aristotle’s ethical writings, however, contain few explicit instructions about how to act. Aristotelians need to take full responsibility in deciding what is the right way to behave and in repeatedly exerting their own judgment. The chief benefit that Aristotle can bestow on us today, which makes him so useful and practically applicable, is his alternative conception of ‘happiness’. It cannot be acquired by pleasurable experiences but only by identifying and realising our own potential, moral and creative, in our specific environments, with our particular family, friends and colleagues, and helping others to do so. We need to review both what we choose to do and what we avoid doing, because wrongs caused by omission can be just as destructive as those we commit. This involves embracing emotional impulses but also ensuring that we are using them as guides to what is good rather than letting them dictate our actions. And we need to do these thing continuously, since cultivating virtue, and the happiness that comes with this approach to life, can never be anything less than a lifelong goal.

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Political philosophy

Citizens and spinning wheels

For Indians to be truly free, Gandhi argued they must take up traditional crafts. Was it a quixotic hope or inspired solution?

Benjamin Studebaker

Black-and-white photo of a man in a suit and hat grabbing another man by his collar in front of a bar with bottles.

C L R James and America

The brilliant Trinidadian thinker is remembered as an admirer of the US but he also warned of its dark political future

Harvey Neptune

An old photograph of a man pulling a small cart with a child and belongings, followed by a woman and three children; one child is pushing a stroller.

Thinkers and theories

Rawls the redeemer

For John Rawls, liberalism was more than a political project: it is the best way to fashion a life that is worthy of happiness

Alexandre Lefebvre

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Anthropology

Your body is an archive

If human knowledge can disappear so easily, why have so many cultural practices survived without written records?

Helena Miton

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Seeing plants anew

The stunningly complex behaviour of plants has led to a new way of thinking about our world: plant philosophy

Stella Sandford

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Knowledge is often a matter of discovery. But when the nature of an enquiry itself is at question, it is an act of creation

Céline Henne

The Philosophy of Happiness in Life (+ Aristotle’s View)

We all hope to be happy and live a ‘good life’– whatever that means! Do you wonder, what does it actually mean?

The basic role of ‘philosophy’ is to ask questions, and think about the nature of human thought and the universe. Thus, a discussion of the philosophy of happiness in life can be seen as an examination of the very nature of happiness and what it means for the universe.

Philosophers have been inquiring about happiness since ancient times. Aristotle, when he asked ‘ what is the ultimate purpose of human existence ’ alluded to the fact that purpose was what he argued to be ‘happiness’. He termed this eudaimonia – “ activity expressing virtue ”. This will all be explained shortly.

The purpose of this article is to explore the philosophy of happiness in life, including taking a closer look at Aristotle’s philosophy and answering some of those “big” questions about happiness and living a ‘good life’. In this article, you will also find some practical tips that hopefully you can put in place in your own life. Enjoy!

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Happiness & Subjective Wellbeing Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients identify sources of authentic happiness and strategies to boost wellbeing.

This Article Contains:

A look at the philosophy of happiness, aristotle on happiness, what is real happiness, the value and importance of having true happiness in life, the biggest causes that bring true happiness in life, 15 ways to create happy moments in life, five reasons to be happy from a philosophical perspective, finding happiness in family life, a look at happiness and productivity, how does loneliness affect life satisfaction, 6 recommended books, a take-home message.

Happiness. It is a term that is taken for granted in this modern age. However, since the dawn of time, philosophers have been pursuing the inquiry of happiness… after all, the purpose of life is not just to live, but to live ‘well’.

Philosophers ask some key questions about happiness: can people be happy? If so, do they want to? If people have both a desire to be happy and the ability to be happy, does this mean that they should, therefore, pursue happiness for themselves and others? If they can, they want to, and they ought to be happy, but how do they achieve this goal?

To explore the philosophy of happiness in life, first, the history of happiness will be examined.

Democritus, a philosopher from Ancient Greece, was the first philosopher in the western world to examine the nature of happiness (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). He put forth a suggestion that, unlike it was previously thought, happiness does not result from ‘favorable fate’ (i.e. good luck) or other external circumstances (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Democritus contended that happiness was a ‘case of mind’, introducing a subjectivist view as to what happiness is (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

A more objective view of happiness was introduced by Socrates, and his student, Plato.

They put forth the notion that happiness was “ secure enjoyment of what is good and beautiful ” (Plato, 1999, p. 80). Plato developed the idea that the best life is one whereby a person is either pursuing pleasure of exercising intellectual virtues… an argument which, the next key figure in the development of the philosophy of happiness – Aristotle – disagreed with (Waterman, 1993).

The philosophy of Aristotle will be explored in depth in the next section of this article.

Hellenic history (i.e. ancient Greek times) was largely dominated by the prominent theory of hedonism (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Hedonism is, to put it simply, the pursuit of pleasure as the only intrinsic good (Waterman, 1993). This was the Cyrenaic view of happiness. It was thought that a good life was denoted by seeking pleasure, and satisfying physical, intellectual/social needs (Kashdan, Biswas-Diener & King, 2008).

Kraut (1979, p. 178) describes hedonic happiness as “ the belief that one is getting the important things one wants, as well as certain pleasant affects that normally go along with this belief ” (Waterman, 1993).

In ancient times, it was also thought that it is not possible to live a good life without living in accordance with reason and morality (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). Epicurus, whose work was dominated by hedonism, contended that in fact, virtue (living according to values) and pleasure are interdependent (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

In the middle ages, Christian philosophers said that whilst virtue is essential for a good life, that virtue alone is not sufficient for happiness (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

According to the Christian philosophers, happiness is in the hands of God. Even though the Christians believed that earthly happiness was imperfect, they embraced the idea that Heaven promised eternal happiness (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

A more secular explanation of happiness was introduced in the Age of Enlightenment.

At this time, in the western world pleasure was regarded as the path to, or even the same thing as, happiness (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). From the early nineteenth century, happiness was seen as a value which is derived from maximum pleasure.

Utilitarians, such as the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, suggested the following: “ maximum surplus of pleasure over pain as the cardinal goal of human striving ” (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). Utilitarians believe that morals and legislation should be based on whatever will achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

In the modern era, happiness is something we take for granted. It is assumed that humans are entitled to pursue and attain happiness (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). This is evidenced by the fact that in the US declaration of independence, the pursuit of happiness is protected as a fundamental human right! (Conkle, 2008).

Go into any book store and large sections are dedicated to the wide range of ‘self-help’ books all promoting happiness.

What is This Thing Called Happiness?

It is incredibly challenging to define happiness . Modern psychology describes happiness as subjective wellbeing, or “ people’s evaluations of their lives and encompasses both cognitive judgments of satisfaction and affective appraisals of moods and emotions ” (Kesebir & Diener, 2008, p. 118).

The key components of subjective wellbeing are:

Life satisfaction
Satisfaction with important aspects of one’s life (for example work, relationships, health)
The presence of positive affect
Low levels of negative affect

These four components have featured in philosophical material on happiness since ancient times.

Subjective life satisfaction is a crucial aspect of happiness, which is consistent with the work of contemporary philosopher Wayne Sumner, who described happiness as ‘ a response by a subject to her life conditions as she sees them ’ (1999, p. 156).

Thus, if happiness is ‘a thing’ how is it measured?

Some contemporary philosophers and psychologists question self-report as an appropriate measure of happiness. However, many studies have found that self-report measures of ‘happiness’ (subjective wellbeing) are valid and reliable (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Two other accounts of happiness in modern psychology are firstly, the concept of psychological wellbeing (Ryff & Singer, 1996) and secondly, self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000).

Both of these theories are more consistent with the eudaemonist theories of ‘ flourishing ’ (including Aristotle’s ideas) because they describe the phenomenon of needs (such as autonomy, self-acceptance, and mastery) being met (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Eudaimonia will be explained in detail in the next section of the article (keep reading!) but for now, it suffices to say that eudaemonist theories of happiness define ‘happiness’ (eudaimonia) as a state in which an individual strives for the highest human good.

These days, most empirical psychological research puts forward the theory of subjective wellbeing rather than happiness as defined in a eudaimonic sense (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Although the terms eudaimonia and subjectivewellbeing are not necessarily interchangeable, Kesebir and Diener (2008) argue that subjective wellbeing can be used to describe wellbeing, even if it may not be an absolutely perfect definition!

Can People be Happy?

In order to adequately address this question, it is necessary to differentiate between ‘ideal’ happiness and ‘actual’ happiness.

‘Ideal’ happiness implies a way of being that is complete, lasting and altogether perfect… probably outside of anyone’s reach! (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). However, despite this, people can actually experience mostly positive emotions and report overall satisfaction with their lives and therefore be deemed ‘happy’.

In fact, most people are happy. In a study conducted by the Pew Research Center in the US (2006), 84% of Americans see themselves as either “very happy” or “pretty happy” (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Happiness also has an adaptive function. How is happiness adaptive? Well, positivity and wellbeing are also associated with people being confident enough to explore their environments and approach new goals, which increases the likelihood of them collecting resources.

The fact that most people report being happy, and happiness having an adaptive function, leads Kesebir and Diener (2008) to conclude that yes people can, in fact, be happy.

Do People Want to be Happy?

The overwhelming answer is yes! Research has shown that being happy is desirable. Whilst being happy is certainly not the only goal in life, nonetheless, it is necessary for a good life (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

A study by King and Napa (1998) showed that Americans view happiness as more relevant to the judgment of what constitutes a good life, rather than either wealth or ‘moral goodness’.

Should People be Happy?

Another way of putting this, is happiness justifiable? Happiness is not just the result of positive outcomes, such as better health, improved work performance, more ethical behavior, and better social relationships (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). It actually precedes and causes these outcomes!

Happiness leads to better health. For example, research undertaken by Danner, Snowdon & Friesen in 2001 examined the content of handwritten autobiographies of Catholic sisters. They found that expression in the writing that was characterized by positive affect predicted longevity 60 years later!

Achievement

Happiness is derived not from pursuing pleasure, but by working towards goals which are reflected in one’s values (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Happiness can be predicted not merely by pleasure but by having a sense of meaning , purpose, and fulfillment. Happiness is also associated with better performance in professional life/work.

Social relationships and prosocial behavior

Happiness brings out the best in people… people who are happier are more social, cooperative and ethical (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Happy individuals have also been shown to evaluate others more positively, show greater interest in interacting with others socially, and even be more likely to engage in self-disclosure (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Happy individuals are also more likely to behave ethically (for example, choosing not to buy something because it is known to be stolen) (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

How to be happy?

The conditions and sources of happiness will be explored later on, so do keep reading… briefly in the meantime, happiness is caused by wealth, friends and social relationships, religion, and personality. These factors predict happiness.

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Chances are, you have heard of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Are you aware that it was Aristotle who introduced the ‘science of happiness’? (Pursuit of Happiness, 2018).

Founder of Lyceum, the first scientific institute in Athens, Aristotle delivered a series of lectures termed Nicomachean Ethics to present his theory of happiness (Pursuit of Happiness, 2018).

Aristotle asked, “ what is the ultimate purpose of human existence? ”. He thought that a worthwhile goal should be to pursue “ that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else ” (Pursuit of Happiness, 2018).

However, Aristotle disagreed with the Cyrenaic view that the only intrinsic good is pleasure (Waterman, 1993).

In developing his theory of ‘happiness’, Aristotle drew upon his knowledge about nature. He contended that what separates man from animal is rational capacity – arguing that a human’s unique function is to reason. He went on to say that pleasure alone cannot result in happiness because animals are driven by the pursuit of pleasure and according to Aristotle man has greater capacities than animals (Pursuit of Happiness, 2018).

Instead, he put forward the term ‘ eudaimonia ’.

To explain simply, eudaimonia is defined as ‘ activity expressing virtue ’ or what Aristotle conceived as happiness. Aristotle’s theory of happiness was as follows:

‘the function of man is to live a certain kind of life, and this activity implies a rational principle, and the function of a good man is the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed it is performed in accord with the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, then happiness turns out to be an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue’

(Aristotle, 2004).

A key component of Aristotle’s theory of happiness is the factor of virtue. He contended that in aiming for happiness, the most important factor is to have ‘complete virtue’ or – in other words – good moral character (Pursuit of Happiness, 2008).

Aristotle identified friendship as being one of the most important virtues in achieving the goal of eudaimonia (Pursuit of Happiness, 2008). In fact, he valued friendship very highly, and described a ‘virtuous’ friendship as the most enjoyable, combining both pleasure and virtue.

Aristotle went on to put forward his belief that happiness involves, through the course of an entire life, choosing the ‘greater good’ not necessarily that which brings immediate, short term pleasure (Pursuit of Happiness, 2008).

Thus, according to Aristotle, happiness can only be achieved at the life-end: it is a goal, not a temporary state of being (Pursuit of Happiness, 2008). Aristotle believed that happiness is not short-lived:

‘for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy’

Happiness (eudaimonia), to Aristotle, meant attaining the ‘daimon’ or perfect self (Waterman, 1990). Reaching the ‘ultimate perfection of our natures’, as Aristotle meant by happiness, includes rational reflection (Pursuit of Happiness, 2008).

He argued that education was the embodiment of character refinement (Pursuit of Happiness, 2008). Striving for the daimon (perfect self) gives life meaning and direction (Waterman, 1990). Having a meaningful, purposeful life is valuable.

Efforts that the individual puts in to strive for the daimon are termed ‘ personally expressive ’ (Waterman, 1990).

Personal expressiveness involves intense involvement in an activity, a sense of fulfillment when engaged in an activity, and having a sense of acting in accordance with one’s purpose (Waterman, 1990). It refers to putting in effort, feeling challenged and competent, having clear goals and concentrating (Waterman, 1993).

According to Aristotle, eudaimonia and hedonic enjoyment are separate and distinguishable (Waterman, 1993). However, in a study of university students, personal expressiveness (which is, after all a component of eudaimonia) was found to be positively correlated with hedonic enjoyment (Waterman, 1993).

Telfer (1980), on the other hand, claimed that eudaimonia is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for achieving hedonic enjoyment (Waterman, 1993). How are eudaimonia and hedonic enjoyment different?

Well, personal expressiveness (from striving for eudaimonia) is associated with successfully achieving self-realization, while hedonic enjoyment does not (Waterman, 1993).

Thus, Aristotle identified the best possible life goal and the achievement of the highest level of meeting one’s needs, self-realization many, many years before Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs!

Results from Waterman’s 1993 study provide empirical support for the association between ‘personal expressiveness’ and what was described by Csikszentimikalyi (1975) as “flow” (Waterman, 1993).

Flow , conceptualized as a cognitive-affective state, is an experience whereby the challenge a task presents to a person is aligned with the skills that individual has to deal with such challenges.

Understanding that flow is a distinctive cognitive-affective state combines hedonic enjoyment and personal expressiveness (Waterman, 1993).

Aristotle’s work Nicomachean Ethics contributed a great deal to the understanding of what happiness is. To summarise from Pursuit of Happiness (2018), according to Aristotle, the purpose and ultimate goal in life is to achieve eudaimonia (‘happiness’). He believed that eudaimonia was not simply virtue, nor pleasure, but rather it was the exercise of virtue.

According to Aristotle, eudaimonia is a lifelong goal and depends on rational reflection. To achieve a balance between excess and deficiency (‘temperance’) one displays virtues – for example, generosity, justice, friendship, and citizenship. Eudaimonia requires intellectual contemplation, in order to meet our rational capacities.

To answer Aristotle’s question of “ what is the ultimate purpose of human existence ” is not a simple task, but perhaps the best answer is that the ultimate goal for human beings is to strive for ‘eudaimonia’ (happiness).

Aristotle & virtue theory – CrashCourse

What does ‘true’ happiness look like? Is it landing the dream job? Having a child ? Graduating from university? Whilst happiness is certainly associated with these ‘external’ factors, true happiness is quite different.

To be truly happy, a person’s sense of contentment with their life needs to come from within (Puff, 2018). In other words, real happiness is internal.

There are a few features that characterize ‘true’ (or real) happiness. The first is acceptance . A truly happy individual accepts reality for what it is, and what’s more, they actually come to love ‘what is’ (Puff, 2018).

This acceptance allows a person to feel content. As well as accepting the true state of affairs, real happiness involves accepting the fact that change is inevitable (Puff, 2018). Being willing to accept change as part of life means that truly happy people are in a position to be adaptive.

A state of real happiness is also reflected by a person having an understanding of the transience of life (Puff, 2018). This is important because understanding that in life, both good and ‘bad’ are only short-lived means that truly happy individuals have an understanding that ‘this too shall pass’.

Finally, another aspect of real happiness is an appreciation of the people in an individual’s life. (Puff, 2018). Strong relationships characterize people who are truly ‘flourishing’.

Most people would say that, if they could, they would like to be happy. As well as being desirable, happiness is both important and valuable.

Happy people have better social and work relationships (Conkle, 2008).

In terms of career, happy individuals are more likely to complete college, secure employment, receive positive work evaluations from their superiors, earn higher incomes, and are less likely to lose their job – and, in case of being laid off, people who are happy are re-employed more quickly (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Positive emotions also precede and promote career success (Lyubomirsky, 2018). Happy workers are less likely to burn out, be absent from work and quit their job (Lyubomirsky, 2018). Further on in this article, the relationship between happiness and productivity will be explored more thoroughly.

It has also been found that people who are happy contribute more to society (Conkle, 2008). There is also an association between happiness and cooperation – those who are happy are more cooperative (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). They are also more likely to display ethical behavior (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Perhaps the most important reason to have true happiness in life is that it is linked to longevity. True happiness is a significant predictor of a longer, healthier life (Conkle, 2008).

It is not only the effects of happiness that benefit individuals. Whole countries can flourish too – according to research, nations that are rated as happier also score more highly on generalized trust, volunteerism and democratic attitudes (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

However, as well as these objective reasons why happiness is important, happiness also brings with it some positive experiences and feelings. For example, true happiness is related to feelings of meaning and purpose (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

It is also associated with a sense of fulfillment, plus a feeling of achievement that is attained through actively striving for, and making progress towards, valuable goals (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

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Interestingly, objective life circumstances (demographic details) only account for 8% – 15% of the variance in happiness (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). So what causes true happiness? Kesebir and Diener (2008) identified five sources of happiness:

Wealth is the first cause of happiness. Studies have shown a significant positive correlation between wealth and happiness. It is the case that having enough (i.e. adequate) money is necessary for happiness but is not sufficient to cause happiness. Money gives people freedom, and having enough money enables individuals to meet their needs – e.g. housing, food, and health-care.

Satisfaction with income has been shown to be related to happiness (Diener, 1984). However, money is not the guarantee of happiness – consider lottery winners. Whilst it is necessary to have sufficient money this alone will not cause happiness. So, what else is a source of happiness?

Having friends and social relationships has been shown to be a leading cause of happiness. Humans are primarily social beings and have a need for social connection.

A sense of community is associated with life satisfaction (Diener, 1984). Making and keeping friends is positively correlated with wellbeing. Aristotle (2000) stated that “no one would choose to live without friends, even if he had all the other goods” (p. 143).

In fact, the association between friendship/social support and happiness has been supported by empirical research. Furthermore, being satisfied with family life and marriage is the key to subjective wellbeing (Diener, 1984).

Another source of happiness is religion . While not true universally, religion has been associated with greater happiness. Positive effects have been found with taking part in religious services.

Having a strong religious affiliation has also been shown to be of benefit. Engaging in prayer, and having a relationship with God is also related to greater happiness.

Finally, a large determinant of happiness is personality . Research supports the fact that individual differences in how a person responds both to events and also to other people have an impact on the levels of a person’s happiness.

Lykken & Tellegen (1996) found that stable temperamental tendencies (those that are inherited genetically) contribute up to 50% in the total variability in happiness. This research found that many personality factors – extraversion, neuroticism – as well as self-esteem , optimism , trust , agreeableness, repressive defensiveness, a desire for control, and hardiness all play a part in how happy a person is.

We can, to a certain extent, determine how happy we feel. Kane (2017) has come up with 15 ways in which happiness can be increased:

1. Find joy in the little things

Savoring ordinary moments in everyday life is a skill that can be learned (Tartarkovsky, 2016). For most of us, we spend so much time thinking about things we’re not currently even doing! This can make us unhappy.

Happiness can, in fact, be predicted by where our minds wander to when we’re not focused on the present. By appreciating the simple things in life, we foster positive emotions…from admiring a beautiful flower to enjoying a cup of tea, finding joy in the little things is associated with increased happiness.

2. Start each day with a smile

It sounds easy, but smiling is associated with feeling happy. Beginning the day on a positive note can vastly improve wellbeing.

3. Connect with others

As mentioned in the previous section, having friendship and social support is definitely a source of happiness. So, to create more happy moments in life, step away from the desk and initiate a conversation with a work colleague, or send an SMS to someone you have not seen for a while. Take opportunities to interact with other people as they arise.

4. Do what you’re most passionate about

Using your strengths and finding an activity to engage in which leads to ‘flow’ has been identified as an enduring pathway to happiness. Being completely engaged in an activity is termed ‘flow’. What constitutes an experience of flow?

To begin with, the task needs to require skill but not be too challenging (Tartarkovsky, 2016). It should have clear goals and allow you to completely immerse yourself in what you’re doing so your mind doesn’t wander (Tartarkovsky, 2016). It should completely absorb your attention and give a sense of being ‘in the zone’ (Tartarkovsky, 2016). Perhaps the easiest way to identify a flow experience is that you lose track of time.

By doing what you’re most passionate about, you are more likely to use your strengths and find a sense of flow .

5. Count your blessings and be thankful

Gratitude is known to increase happiness. Gratitude has been defined as having an appreciation for what you have, and being able to reflect on that (Tartarkovsky, 2016). Gratitude creates positive emotions, enhances relationships and is associated with better health (Tartarkovsky, 2016).

Examples of ways to engage in gratitude include writing a gratitude journal, or express appreciation – such as, send a ‘thank you’ card to someone.

6. Choose to be positive and see the best in every situation

Taking a ‘glass half full’ attitude to life can certainly enhance feelings of happiness. Finding the positives in even difficult situations helps to foster positive affect. As one psychologist from Harvard Medical School, Siegel, said “relatively small changes in our attitudes can yield relatively big changes in our sense of wellbeing” (Tartarkovsky, 2016).

7. Take steps to enrich your life

A great way to develop a happier life is to learn something new. By being mentally active and developing new skills, this can promote happiness. For example, learn a musical instrument, or a foreign language, the sky’s the limit!

8. Create goals and plans to achieve what you want most

Striving for things we really want can make us feel happy, provided the goals are realistic. Having goals gives life purpose and direction, and a sense of achievement.

9. Live in the moment

Though easier said than done, a helpful way to create happy moments in life is to live for the moment – not to ruminate about the past, or to focus on the future. Staying in the ‘here and now’ can help us feel happier.

10. Be good to yourself

Treat yourself as well as you would treat a person whom you love and care about. Showing self-compassion can lead to happy moments and improve overall wellbeing.

11. Ask for help when you need it

Seeking help may not immediately come to mind when considering how to create happy moments. However, reaching out for support is one way to achieve happiness. As the old adage says “a problem shared is a problem halved”.

Having someone help you is not a sign of weakness. Rather, by asking for help, you are reducing the burden of a problem on yourself.

12. Let go of sadness and disappointment

Negative emotions can compromise one’s sense of happiness, especially if a person ruminates about what ‘could have been’. Whilst everyone feels such emotions at times, holding onto feelings of sadness and disappointment can really weigh a person down and prevent them from feeling happy and content.

13. Practice mindfulness

The positive effects of practicing mindfulness are widespread and numerous, including increasing levels of happiness. There is lots of material on this blog about mindfulness and its’ positive effects. Mindfulness is a skill and, like any skill, it can be learned. Learning to be mindful can help a person become happier.

14. Walk in nature

Exercise is known to release endorphins, and as such engaging in physical activity is one way to lift mood and create happy moments. Even more beneficial than simply walking is to walk in nature, which has been shown to increase happiness.

15. Laugh, and make time to play

Laughter really is the best medicine! Having a laugh is associated with feeling better. Also, it is beneficial for the sense of wellbeing not to take life too seriously. Just as children find joy in simple pleasures, they also love to play. Engaging in ‘play’ – activities done purely for fun – is associated with increased happiness.

Philosophers believe that happiness is not by itself sufficient to achieve a state of wellbeing, but at the same time, they agree that it is one of the primary factors found in individuals who lead a ‘good life’ (Haybron, 2011).

What then, are reasons to be happy from a philosophical perspective… what contributes to a person living a ‘good life’? This can also be understood as a person having ‘psychosocial prosperity’ (Haybron, 2011).

One reason why a person can feel a sense of happiness is if they have been treated with respect in the last day (Haybron, 2011). How we are treated by others contributes to our overall wellbeing. Being treated with respect helps us develop a sense of self-worth.
Another reason to feel happy is if one has family and friends they can rely on and count on in times of need (Haybron, 2011). Having a strong social network is an important component of happiness.
Perhaps a person has learned something new. They may take this for granted, however, learning something new actually contributes to our psychosocial prosperity (Haybron, 2011).
From a philosophical perspective, a reason to be happy is a person having the opportunity to do what they do best (Haybron, 2011). Using strengths for the greater good is one key to a more meaningful life (Tartarkovsky, 2016). As an example, a musician can derive happiness by creating music and a sports-person can feel happy by training or participating in competitions. Meeting our potential also contributes to wellbeing.
A final reason to be happy from a philosophical perspective is a person having the liberty to choose how they spend their time (Haybron, 2011). This is a freedom to be celebrated. Being autonomous can contribute to a person living their best life.

Many of us spend a lot of time with our families. However, as much we love our partners, children, siblings, and extended families, at times family relationships can be fraught with challenges and problems. Nonetheless, it is possible for us to find happiness in family life by doing some simple, yet effective things suggested by Mann (2007):

Enjoy your family’s company
Exchange stories – for example, about what your day was like in the evening
Make your marriage, or relationship, the priority
Take time to eat meals together as a family
Enjoy simply having fun with one another
Make sure that your family and its needs come before your friends
Limit number of extra-curricular activities
Develop family traditions and honor rituals
Aim to make your home a calm place to spend time
Don’t argue in front of children
Don’t work excessively
Encourage siblings to get along with one another
Have family ‘in-jokes’
Be adaptable
Communicate, including active listening

Take time to appreciate your family, and focus on the little things you can do to find happiness in family life.

The aim of any workplace is to have productive employees. This leads to the question – can happiness increase productivity? The results are unequivocal!

Researchers Boehm and Lyubomirsky define a ‘happy worker’ as one who frequently experiences positive emotions such as joy, satisfaction, contentment, enthusiasm, and interest (Oswald, Proto & Sgroi, 2009).

They conducted longitudinal as well as experimental studies, and their research clearly showed that people who could be classified as ‘happy’ were more likely to succeed in their careers. Amabile et al. (2005) also found that happiness results in greater creativity.

Why are happy workers more productive?

It has been suggested that the link between positive mood and work appears to be mediated by intrinsic motivation (that is, performing a task due to internal inspiration rather than external reasons) (Oswald et al., 2009). This makes sense because if one is feeling more joyful, the person is more likely to find their work meaningful and intrinsically rewarding.

It has been found by some experimental studies that happiness raises productivity. For example, research has shown that the experience of positive affect means that individuals change their allocation of time to completing more interesting tasks, but still manage to maintain their performance for the less interesting tasks (Oswald et al., 2009).

Other research has reported that positive affect influences memory recall and the likelihood of altruistic actions. However, much of this research has taken place in laboratory sessions where participation was unpaid. Which certainly leads to the obvious question… does happiness actually increase productivity in a true employment situation?

Oswald and colleagues (2009) did some research with very clear results on the relationship between happiness and productivity. They conducted two separate experiments.

The first experiment included 182 participants from the University of Warwick. The study involved some participants watching a short video clip designed to try and increase levels of happiness, and then completing a task which they were paid for in terms of both questions answered and accuracy. The participants who watched the video showed significantly greater productivity.

Most interestingly, however, 16 individuals did not display increased happiness after watching the movie clip, and these people did not show the same increase in productivity! Thus, this experiment certainly supported the notion that an increase in productivity can be linked to happiness.

Oswald and colleagues also conducted a second study which involved a further 179 participants who had not taken part in the first experiment. These individuals reported their level of happiness and were subsequently asked whether they had experienced a ‘bad life event’ (which was defined as bereavement or illness in the family) in the last two years.

A statistically significant effect was found… experiencing a bad life event, which was classified by the experts as ‘happiness shocks’ was related to lower levels of performance on the task.

Examining the evidence certainly makes one thing clear: happiness is certainly related to productivity both in unpaid and paid tasks. This has tremendous implications for the work-force and provides an impetus for working towards happier employees.

According to the Belonging Hypothesis put forth by psychologists Baumeister and Leary in 1995, human beings have an almost universal, fundamental human need to have a certain degree of interaction with others and to form relationships.

Indeed, people who are lonely have an unmet need to belong (Mellor, Stokes, Firth, Hayashi & Cummins, 2008). Loneliness has been found in a plethora of research to have a very negative effect on psychological wellbeing, and also health (Kim, 1997).

What about ‘happiness’? In other words, can loneliness also have an impact on life satisfaction?

There is evidence to suggest that loneliness does affect life satisfaction. Gray, Ventis, and Hayslip (1992) conducted a study of 60 elderly people living in the community. Their findings were clear: the aged person’s sense of isolation, and loneliness , explained the variation in life satisfaction (Gray et al., 1992).

Clearly, lonely older persons were less satisfied with their lives overall. In other research, Mellor and colleagues (2008) found that individuals who were less lonely had higher ratings of life satisfaction.

It may be assumed that only older people are prone to feeling isolated and lonely, however, an interesting study by Neto (1995) looked at satisfaction with life among second-generation migrants.

The researchers studied 519 Portuguese youth who was actually born in France. The study found that loneliness had a clear negative correlation with the satisfaction with life expressed by the young people (Neto, 1995). Indeed, along with the perceived state of health, loneliness was the strongest predictor of satisfaction with life (Neto, 1995).

Therefore, yes, loneliness affects life satisfaction. Loneliness is associated with feeling less satisfied with one’s life, and, presumably, less happy overall.

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Perhaps you have a desire to understand this topic further… great! Here are some books that you can read to further your understanding:

Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to brain science – S. Bok (2010) ( Amazon )
Nicomachean ethics – Aristotle (2000). R Crisp, ed. ( Amazon )
What is this thing called happiness? – F. Feldman (2010) ( Amazon )
Authentic happiness: Using the new Positive Psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment – M. Seligman (2004) ( Amazon )
Philosophy of happiness: A theoretical and practical examination – M. Janello (2014) ( Amazon )
Happiness: A Philosopher’s guide – F. Lenoir (2015) ( Amazon )

I don’t know about you but, whilst exploring the philosophy of happiness is fascinating, it can be incredibly overwhelming too. I hope that I have managed to simplify some of the ideas about happiness so that you have a better understanding of the nature of happiness and what it means to live a ‘good life’.

Philosophy can be complex, but if you can take one message from this article it is that it is important and worthwhile for humans to strive for wellbeing and ‘true happiness’. Whilst Aristotle argued that ‘eudaimonia’ (happiness) cannot be achieved until the end of one’s life, tips in this article show that each of us has the capacity to create happy moments each and every day.

What can you do today to embrace the ‘good life’? What ideas do you have about happiness – what does real happiness look like for you? What are your opinions as to what the philosophy of happiness in life means?

This article can provide a helpful resource for understanding more about the nature of happiness, so feel free to look back at it down the track. I would love to hear your thoughts on this fascinating topic!

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Happiness Exercises for free .

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Conkle, A. (2008). Serious research on happiness. Association for Psychological Science . Retrieved from https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observe/serious-research-on-happiness
Danner, D., Snowdon, D., & Friesen, W. (2001). Positive emotions in early life and longevity: Findings from the nun study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80 , 804 – 813.
Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95 , 542 – 575
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Haybron, D. (2011). Happiness. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/happiness
Kane, S. (2017). 15 ways to increase your happiness. Psych Central. Retrieved from https://psychcentral.com/lib/15-ways-to-increase-your-happiness
Kashdan, T. B., Biswas-Diener, R., & King, L. A. (2008). Reconsidering happiness: the costs of distinguishing between hedonics and eudaimonia. Journal of Positive Psychology, 3 , 219 – 233.
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Kim, O. S. (1997). Korean version of the revised UCLA loneliness scale: reliability and validity test. Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing,? , 871 – 879.
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Lykken, D., & Tellegan, A. (1996). Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon. Psychological Science, 7 , 186-189.
Lyubomirsky, S. (2018). Is happiness a consequence or cause of career success? Psychology Today . Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/how-happiness/201808/is-happiness-consequence-or-cause-career-success
Mann, D. (2007). 15 secrets of happy families. Web MD. Retrieved from https://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/15-secrets-to-have-a-happy-family
Mellor, D., Stokes, M., Firth, L., Hayashi, Y. & Cummins, R. (2008). Need for belonging, relationship satisfaction, loneliness and life satisfaction. Personality and Individual Differences, 45 , 213 – 218.
Neto, F. (1995). Predictors of satisfaction with life among second generation migrants. Social Indicators Research, 35 , 93-116.
Oswald, A. J., Proto, E., & Sgroi, D. (2009). Happiness and productivity, IZA Discussion Papers, No. 4645, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10419/35451
Plato (1999). The Symposium . Walter Hamilton (ed). London: Penguin Classics
Puff, R. (2018). The pitfalls to pursuing happiness. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/meditation-modern-life/201809/the-pitfalls-pursuing-happiness
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development and wellbeing. American Psychologist, 55 , 68 – 78.
Ryff, C. D., & Singer, B. (1996). Psychological wellbeing: meaning, measurement, and implications for psychotherapy research. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 65 , 14 – 23.
Tartarkovsky, M. (2016). Five pathways to happiness. Psych Central. Retrieved from https://psychcentral.com/lib/five-pathways-to-happiness
The Pursuit of Happiness (2018). Aristotle. Retrieved from https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/aristotle
Waterman, A. S. (1990). The relevance of Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia for the psychological study of happiness. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 10 , 39 – 44
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Happy Lives and the Highest Good: an essay on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

Lear, Gabriel Richardson, Happy Lives and the Highest Good: an essay on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics , Princeton University Press, 2004, 256pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 069114668.

Reviewed by Julia Annas, University of Arizona

Most of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics discusses the life of moral virtue, exercised in accordance with practical reasoning, a life taken in the opening passages to be necessary for happiness or eudaimonia , though not sufficient, since some measure of external goods is also required. This is the position regarded as Aristotelian in ancient ethical debate throughout the following period. Our text of the Nicomachean Ethics , however, ends with a passage urging that a life of human happiness lies in contemplation or study ( theoria ) of the highest objects of the intellect.

Can we resolve this puzzle without examining what kind of text our Nicomachean Ethics is? Were the passages we read as Book I and Book X even intended to form part of the same philosophical work? Here we find a range of responses, at one extreme of which is Jonathan Barnes, who in his discussion of the ancient transmission of Aristotle’s works, puts the point with characteristic force: ‘[O]ur EN is an absurdity, surely put together by a desperate scribe or an unscrupulous bookseller and not united by an author or an editor’. 1 Gabriel Richardson Lear assumes that the Nicomachean Ethics is a literary unity; she regards it as containing a progressive argument (p 146) entitling her, for example, to use passages in Book X to illuminate the earlier discussion of to kalon and suggesting that the reason Aristotle is not more informative in the earlier passage is that ‘he is not fully in the position to do so’ until Book X. 2 This puts her at or near the opposite extreme from Barnes, but she nowhere defends her assumptions about the text, and explicitly (p 5) lays aside the relationship of the Nicomachea n to the Eudemian version. Given the very different interpretative assumptions that scholars make about the text, it would have been helpful to have had serious discussion of the literary problems our text offers.

Lear uses Aristotle’s other works to interpret crucial parts of his views on happiness, taking the Nicomachean Ethics to be understood properly only in the context of Aristotle’s physical and metaphysical works, rather than as a self-standing work. She also at several places suggests interesting deep affinities between Aristotle and Plato. This gives her a distinctive approach to the much-fought-over discussion of our final end in the opening passages of the Ethics . She joins the currently growing number of scholars finding Aristotle’s final end to be monistic, rather than inclusivist. Her account of Book I argues that the inclusivist approach is wrong because for Aristotle our telos should be taken to be the ‘technical’ (p 3) notion we find in the Physics and biological works: a normative standard for the performance of an activity. The human telos will thus not be what puts an end to desire but will rather be the goal appropriate to our nature and essence, something which determines the success and value of human activities. Given this account of our telos , we find that when an end is for the sake of another end, this must mean ‘at least that the higher ends provide the criteria of success for the subordinate ones’ (p 17). Lower ends are given their value by their role in contributing to the higher ends. Since happiness is the ‘most final’ end, we are led to an account of our highest end as monistic, with all other ends subordinate to success in achieving it.

Lear follows through the apparently drastic result that there appears to be no place in this conception for what she calls ‘mid-level ends’, ends choiceworthy for themselves and also for their contribution to our final end. She ingeniously finds such a place via the notion of ‘approximation’: ends such as virtuous activity can be choiceworthy for their own sakes and also by virtue of approximating the activity constituting our final end. This notion of approximation is also taken from the physical and biological works, including the way the Prime Mover functions as a final cause and the way that the reproduction of animals approximates the activity of the Prime Mover, at De Anima II 4.

Approximation gives us a way in which a lower end can be related to a higher one that is neither instrumental nor constitutive, and this paves the way for an ingenious solution to the problem of mid-level ends on a monistic interpretation. Morally virtuous activity approximates contemplation, according to Lear, and thus we can reconcile taking contemplation to be our monistic final end with the fact that most of the Ethics is devoted to studying practical reasoning in the exercise of moral virtue. Our final end is contemplation, but the exercise of moral virtue is choiceworthy for its own sake, since it is an approximation of contemplation.

Readers may be worried that, as Lear admits, ‘Aristotle never explicitly says that excellent practical reasoning is good because its essence is defined with reference to wise contemplation’ (p 90). The second half of the book attempts to meet these worries. In Chapter 5 she argues that theoretical and practical reasoning are both to be understood as aiming at truth in different ways, such as precision, in terms of which theoretical reasoning is superior. This is the most speculative part of the book, and, although the ideas are suggestive and interesting, much remains unclear in the claims that Aristotle is talking about ‘living truthfully’ (p 99) and attaining theoretical and practical truthfulness. Lear is clearer in her account of the moral virtues (she deals with courage, temperance and greateness of soul), in a way elucidating how their practice might be understood as an approximation of theoretical contemplation. She focuses on the fine or kalon as the object of virtuous action, giving all virtuous activity an object which is an object of practice determined as what it is by a conception of what is objectively good for humans; this is what she claims as the basis for the way the fine is elsewhere said to be the principle of order, symmetry and boundedness. Each moral choice thus shows that the moral agent has some conception of human flourishing; since this is in fact contemplation, ‘morally virtuous actions will be fine and worth choosing for their own sakes because they are appropriate to the philosopher, whether the virtuous agent understands this or not’. Courageous actions, for example, express a commitment to ‘the excellent rational use of a leisurely citizen’s life’ (p 149, 159); the citizen soldier thinks death in battle worth it because of his commitment as a citizen to the common life of the city; and this in turn is worth it because it allows for leisure, whose best use is contemplation. Only the philosopher will have full understanding of the point of virtuous actions, and this enables Lear in her final chapter to avoid the usual ‘competition’ between the active life and the life of contemplation, since doing everything for the sake of contemplation emerges from a deeper understanding of moral virtue rather than philosophers’ self-interested modification of it.

Lear is quite explicit that the soldier dying on the battlefield may not realize that ‘the exercise of courage approximates contemplation by being structurally similar to it, insofar as it is an exercise of practical reason and truthfulness’ (p 161); only philosophers will understand that. The same is true of any exercise of practical reasoning in virtue: the courageous, the temperate and those with greatness of soul need not understand that what they do is done for the sake of contemplation (though to be virtuous it has to be done for the sake of the fine, something which requires understanding the nature of practical reasoning and its proper aims). Most of us most of the time, even if we make progress in virtue, are thus missing an understanding of what ultimately makes our actions valuable. Lear seems to think that this result is not so strange when we bear in mind that the exercise of practical reason is choiceworthy for itself in being an approximation of theoretical reasoning. But problems remain which Lear’s discussion stimulates without settling.

One is the question of the audience. Lear makes casual reference to Aristotle’s audience ‘who have been raised in fine habits’ (e.g., p 121). On Lear’s view the audience for the Ethics will radically fail to understand it if they attend to it alone. They will understand it only if they come equipped with knowledge of Aristotle’s physical and metaphysical works, and prepared to interpret the work from the beginning in the light of ideas which are expressed only at the end—only if, that is, they come equipped with Lear’s own interpretative batteries. Now this is certainly possible: the fact that the Ethics does not contain the crucial notions in Lear’s interpretation does not mean that we can understand everything in it by studying it alone. Nonetheless, the distance between Lear’s interpretation and interpretations which treat the discussion of moral virtue as self-standing rather than radically underdescribed suggests the need for some attention to the question of how the Ethics was intended to be read, and by whom. These are interestingly different problems from the ones usually thought to arise from the fact that Book X turns up in our Nicomachean Ethics , but they remain problems nonetheless.

The book is rewarding for its close study of several of Aristotle’s most vexed passages in an accessible and imaginative way; particularly worthwhile are the discussions of self-sufficiency (bringing in the related passages from Plato’s Philebus ), the kalon and ‘greatness of soul’. The book is most likely to convince of its main theses those who share its substantial methodological assumptions, and it would have been helpful to have had explicit discussion of these. The book will also be valuable in furthering examination of deep similarities between Aristotle’s ethical thought and that of Plato, which I have not had the scope to examine here.

1 Barnes adds in a footnote: ‘That our EN is not a unity is beyond controversy—the existence of two treatments of pleasure is enough to prove the fact. The only questions concern who invented our text, and when, and from what materials, and for what motives.’ ( p 58-9 of Jonathan Barnes, ‘Roman Aristotle,’ in Jonathan Barnes and Miriam Griffin (eds), Philosophia Togata II:Plato and Aristotle at Rome, Oxford University Press 1997, pp 1-69.)

2 She also claims (apparently on the basis of her overall interpretation) that Book VI has a ‘protreptic’ structure (pp 93-4).

Action, Contemplation, and Happiness: an Essay on Aristotle

Lloyd p. gerson . [email protected].

The focus of this carefully structured monograph is Aristotle’s philosophy of human action, especially in its normative dimension. Much like in his previous monographs on Aristotle’s metaphysics ( Substantial Knowledge , 2000) and Aristotle’s ethics ( The Practices of Reason , 1992), Reeve strives to situate his main topics within the widest possible Aristotelian framework. Thus, he draws upon material from the entire corpus to help explicate the specific texts offered in support of his overall interpretation. As Reeve allows, this approach means ignoring any developmentalism in the corpus, or at least any that is potentially relevant to the ethical doctrines. Thus, there is nothing regarding the question of the priority and posteriority of the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics . The Protrepticus is employed as if it were contemporaneous with these works, and the Magna Moralia is, apparently, treated as genuine. I am very far from insisting that this way of presenting Aristotle’s philosophy is misguided. It does, however, elicit the question of what we are actually to suppose ‘Aristotelianism’ to be. For example, the Protrepticus is usually taken as a work of Aristotle’s early period when he was still working in the shadow of Plato, and the Nicomachean Ethics as a much later work when Aristotle was treating ethical issues in a way far less congenial to Platonism. Reeve actually resists the ‘de-Platonizing’ of Aristotle, but I would have liked to have seen the case for this spelled out more fully. This is particularly important when treating books 9 and 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics and the implications of their exhortation to ‘immortalization’. Reeve is in my view exactly right to take Aristotle seriously here, though he says little about the particularly shocking implication that we—Aristotle, Reeve, and their readers—are not, after all, really human beings, but rather intellects, whether or to what extent these are separable or not.

Most puzzling to me is the intended audience for this book. If that audience are those seeking an introduction to Aristotle’s ethical theory, it seems that Reeve already wrote that book 20 years ago. If the intended audience are those seeking an overall introduction to Aristotle’s philosophy, then this book falls short since, naturally enough, many topics are left out or treated only briefly for the sake of the context of the main themes. Besides, the work is far too complex for an introduction. Nor is the book aiming to break new ground in the study of some of the perennial questions regarding Aristotle’s account of human nature and human happiness. Reeve relies very heavily and, I might add, judiciously, on the latest contemporary scholarship as would befit the purpose of an introduction but would be out of place in an original interpretative work, except of course insofar as the author engaged these other scholars in an adversarial capacity. In asking myself the question, ‘to whom could I recommend this book?’ my best answer is one of my academic colleagues who already knows something of Aristotle’s ethics and theory of action but who doesn’t have a very clear picture of the metaphysical and epistemological background to these. I am certainly not suggesting that this is an unworthy audience, but I wish Reeve had been clearer about whom he thinks he is addressing.

The book is divided into nine chapters. The first chapter immediately reveals Reeve’s commitment to a bottom-up reconstruction of Aristotle’s philosophy of human action. It treats of the transmission of form in all its varieties on the grounds that this transmission—either from world to soul in the case of perception and understanding or from soul to world in the case of desire and action—is the central physical occurrence upon which rest all of Aristotle’s reflections on what is distinctively human. Some complex topics in biology, celestial mechanics, and psychology are inevitably treated in a fairly cursory manner, though I suppose my imagined reader would discover that Aristotle’s concept of form is extremely powerful and subtly varied and, most interestingly, readily translatable into the language of contemporary information-theory.

The second chapter is an extended commentary on a single sentence in the Nicomachean Ethics : ‘Three things in the soul control action and truth—perception, understanding, and desire (VI 2, 1139a17-18).’ In fact, this extended commentary encompasses chapters 3, 4, and 5 as well, considerably more than half of the book. In this elementary though sophisticated and wide ranging account of a number of specific topics, Reeve puts his mastery of all the relevant material to effective use. The reader is constantly urged to think about Aristotle’s claims in the widest possible context. Although De Anima is naturally the main text discussed, the biological writings, the Parva Naturalia , and even the Posterior Analytics are regularly brought in to reinforce the account of fundamental principles. Occasionally, Reeve surprises with an unconvincing interpretation. He writes, for example, ‘[i]n explaining why human beings have a better functioning understanding than other animals, Aristotle appeals not to understanding itself but to material processes in the body’ (54) and then quotes a long passage from Parts of Animals . But in a passage in De Anima 3.4 that Reeve himself quotes just two pages earlier, Aristotle claims that it is absurd to suppose that intellect ( nous ), the part with which we think, is ‘blended with a body’. That is, it is the possession of an immaterial intellect that sets us apart from animals such that animals cannot even have beliefs ( doxai ) or conviction ( pistis ). This seems a particularly important point to emphasize given the ensuing discussion of the role of intellect in human destiny.

The third chapter deals with theoretical wisdom ( sophia ), obviously relevant to the account of contemplation and the happiest life. Although Reeve’s discussion of scientific knowledge ( epistēmē ) and the grasp of first principles is mostly beyond reproach, there are several occasions where he is at best misleading and at worst simply mistaken. For example, Reeve uses the same term, ‘knowledge’, for what he calls ‘craft knowledge’ and ‘scientific knowledge’ (59). I take it that by ‘craft knowledge’ what Reeve means is what Aristotle calls technē . But Aristotle sharply distinguishes technē and epistēmē , stating that the former concerns the realm of becoming, whereas the latter concerns the realm of being (see Posterior Analytics II 19, 100a8). Again, Reeve refers to the distinction between what he calls ‘objectural’ and ‘nonobjectural’ truth (64), wherein the former is a property of being and the latter a property of propositions, statements, or thoughts. But Reeve identifies the former as a property of ‘particulars, universals, or combinations of them’. It seems to me that this is at least misleading, since universals do not have an extra-mental existence for Aristotle. Next, the penultimate section of this chapter is titled ‘natural, mathematical, and theoretical sciences’ (84), which is certainly odd, since the theoretical sciences include the first two mentioned, and the only other theoretical science Aristotle recognizes is theology. Finally, there is the puzzling claim made at the end of the chapter, that uniquely in the case of God, the fact that he exists and the reason why he exists are the same (92). I don’t quite get the point that is being made here with the words ‘why he exists’, since for any necessary being, like a mathematical object, why it exists could only mean ‘why it necessarily exists’ given that it does exist.

Chapters four and five focus on ethical virtue and practical wisdom. The account of ethical virtue is, again, unremarkable, but in my opinion mostly sound. Reeve manages to sidestep a number of highly contentious issues regarding which there exists already a mountain of scholarship, only lightly touched on in the footnotes. One of these issues is the relation between what Aristotle calls ‘the reasoning part of the soul’ and the part that ‘listens to reason or obeys it’ (114). It is the latter part wherein virtues of character are located. But exactly what obeying reason without reasoning (or, ‘not being fully rational’, 162-3) is supposed to mean is obscure, and Reeve does not offer much of an explanation, though getting this straight would seem to be essential to understanding how ethical virtue is developed and also how one can fail to achieve it. The peremptory discussion of incontinence might well have been extended to address this issue. Reeve simply asserts without argument the contestable claim of Aristotle that possession of one ethical virtue entails the possession of all (117). The chapter on practical reason is the most fully developed in the book. Reeve argues persuasively for practical wisdom as, in a sense, the intersection of theoretical understanding and ethical virtue (155-61). He is also correct to focus on the individual agent as providing the epistemological link between universal scientific truths about human nature and the particular circumstances of life wherein practical decisions are to be made. This explains why the necessary particularity of practical reasoning does not compromise the universality of ethical principles.

The remaining three chapters of the book focus on human nature rather than on the previous contextualized account of human action. They deal with friendship, the divine element in human nature, and the relative worth of the ways of living or bioi in the quest to discover which one is the happiest. As in the rest of the book, Reeve aims to place his exposition of Aristotle’s doctrine within the wider scientific framework. So, we get a few pages on substance, a few more on form, matter, and change, and some brief discussions of universals, actuality and potentiality, and finally a rather dense discussion of the extremely difficult topic of the productive or active or agent intellect. All of this is a prelude to a discussion of those puzzling passages in books 9 and 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics in which Aristotle urges us all to ‘immortalize ourselves’.

Perhaps the most contentious issue in Aristotle scholarship today is whether the exhortation to immortalize ourselves by engaging in the life of the gods, that is, the life of contemplation, is or is not intended to exclude or diminish the ‘merely human life’, particularly the life of political engagement. These are the so-called inclusivist and exclusivist interpretations. Reeve spends a good deal of time, and adduces much useful background from the Metaphysics and elsewhere, to argue for what is very likely to be the correct exegetical, reconciling position, namely, that the apex of the happiest life does indeed reside in the contemplation of the divine, though this life includes in a subordinate role political engagement of various sorts (272-3). As Reeve shows, practical wisdom and political science are properly understood as necessary for constructing a life that maximizes the opportunity for the ‘immortalizing’ activity of contemplation. In conclusion, he does not even shy away from describing this life as approximating a ‘beatific state’ (276), a term not often seen in Aristotelian scholarship.

This book represents a fine display of the author’s grasp of Aristotle’s philosophy, but it is not as useful for readers as it might well have been if a particular group of readers had been clearly identified.

Aristotle: Pioneer of Happiness

Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence. Aristotle

Aristotle & Happiness

Aristotle’s Background
Happiness as Ultimate Purpose
Aristotle’s Hierarchical View of Nature
Aristotle’s Definition of Happiness
Happiness as the Exercise of Virtue
Aristotle & Friendship
The Golden Mean

Bibliography

Internet Resources

“ Happiness depends on ourselves.” More than anybody else, Aristotle enshrines happiness as a central purpose of human life and a goal in itself. As a result, he devotes more space to the topic of happiness than any thinker prior to the modern era.

Living during the same period as Mencius , but on the other side of the world, he draws some similar conclusions. That is, happiness depends on the cultivation of virtue, though his virtues are somewhat more individualistic than the essentially social virtues of the Confucians .

Yet as we shall see, Aristotle was convinced that a genuinely happy life required the fulfillment of a broad range of conditions, including physical as well as mental well-being . In this way he introduced the idea of a science of happiness in the classical sense, in terms of a new field of knowledge.

Essentially, Aristotle argues that virtue is achieved by maintaining the Mean, which is the balance between two excesses. Aristotle’s doctrine of the Mean is reminiscent of Buddha’s Middle Path, but there are intriguing differences. For Aristotle the mean was a method of achieving virtue, but for Buddha the Middle Path referred to a peaceful way of life which negotiated the extremes of harsh asceticism and sensual pleasure seeking. The Middle Path was a minimal requirement for the meditative life, and not the source of virtue in itself.

Aristotle: A Little Background

Aristotle is one of the greatest thinkers in the history of western science and philosophy, making contributions to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance and theatre. He was a student of Plato who in turn studied under Socrates . Although we do not actually possess any of Aristotle’s own writings intended for publication, we have volumes of the lecture notes he delivered for his students; through these Aristotle was to exercise his profound influence through the ages. Indeed, the medieval outlook is sometimes considered to be the “Aristotelian worldview” and St. Thomas Aquinas simply refers to Aristotle as “The Philosopher” as though there were no other.

Aristotle was the first to classify areas of human knowledge into distinct disciplines such as mathematics, biology, and ethics. Some of these classifications are still used today, such as the species-genus system taught in biology classes. He was the first to devise a formal system for reasoning, whereby the validity of an argument is determined by its structure rather than its content. Consider the following syllogism: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. Here we can see that as long as the premises are true, the conclusion must also be true, no matter what we substitute for “men or “is mortal.” Aristotle’s brand of logic dominated this area of thought until the rise of modern symbolic logic in the late 19th Century.

Aristotle was the founder of the Lyceum, the first scientific institute, based in Athens, Greece. Along with his teacher Plato, he was one of the strongest advocates of a liberal arts education, which stresses the education of the whole person, including one’s moral character, rather than merely learning a set of skills. According to Aristotle, this view of education is necessary if we are to produce a society of happy as well as productive individuals.

Aristotle (right) and Plato in Raphael's painting, 'The School of Athens', in the Vatican.

Happiness as the Ultimate Purpose of Human Existence

One of Aristotle’s most influential works is the Nicomachean Ethics , where he presents a theory of happiness that is still relevant today, over 2,300 years later. The key question Aristotle seeks to answer in these lectures is “What is the ultimate purpose of human existence?” What is that end or goal for which we should direct all of our activities? Everywhere we see people seeking pleasure, wealth, and a good reputation. But while each of these has some value, none of them can occupy the place of the chief good for which humanity should aim. To be an ultimate end, an act must be self-sufficient and final, “that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1097a30-34), and it must be attainable by man. Aristotle claims that nearly everyone would agree that happiness is the end which meets all these requirements. It is easy enough to see that we desire money, pleasure, and honor only because we believe that these goods will make us happy. It seems that all other goods are a means towards obtaining happiness, while happiness is always an end in itself.

The Greek word that usually gets translated as “happiness” is eudaimonia , and like most translations from ancient languages, this can be misleading. The main trouble is that happiness (especially in modern America) is often conceived of as a subjective state of mind, as when one says one is happy when one is enjoying a cool beer on a hot day, or is out “having fun” with one’s friends. For Aristotle, however, happiness is a final end or goal that encompasses the totality of one’s life. It is not something that can be gained or lost in a few hours, like pleasurable sensations. It is more like the ultimate value of your life as lived up to this moment, measuring how well you have lived up to your full potential as a human being. For this reason, one cannot really make any pronouncements about whether one has lived a happy life until it is over, just as we would not say of a football game that it was a “great game” at halftime (indeed we know of many such games that turn out to be blowouts or duds). For the same reason we cannot say that children are happy, any more than we can say that an acorn is a tree, for the potential for a flourishing human life has not yet been realized. As Aristotle says, “for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.” ( Nicomachean Ethics , 1098a18)

Aristotle Explains The Hierarchical View of Nature

In order to explain human happiness, Aristotle draws on a view of nature he derived from his biological investigations. If we look at nature, we notice that there are four different kinds of things that exist in the world, each one defined by a different purpose:

rocks, metals and other lifeless things. The only goal which these things seek is to come to a rest. They are "beyond stupid" since they are inanimate objects with no soul

plants and other wildlife. Here we see a new kind of thing emerge,something which is alive. Because plants seek nourishment and growth, they have souls and can be even said to be satisfied when they attain these goals

all the creatures we study as belonging to the animal kingdom. Here we see a higher level of life emerge: animals seek pleasure and reproduction, and we can talk about a happy or sad dog, for example, to the extent that they are healthy and lead a pleasant life

what is it that makes human beings different from the rest of the animal kingdom? Aristotle answers: Reason. Only humans are capable of acting according to principles, and in so doing taking responsibility for their choices. We can blame Johnny for stealing the candy since he knows it is wrong, but we wouldn't blame an animal since it doesn't know any better.

It seems that our unique function is to reason: by reasoning things out we attain our ends, solve our problems, and hence live a life that is qualitatively different in kind from plants or animals. The good for a human is different from the good for an animal because we have different capacities or potentialities. We have a rational capacity and the exercising of this capacity is thus the perfecting of our natures as human beings. For this reason, pleasure alone cannot constitute human happiness, for pleasure is what animals seek and human beings have higher capacities than animals. The goal is not to annihilate our physical urges, however, but rather to channel them in ways that are appropriate to our natures as rational animals.

Aristotle's Definition of Happiness:

…the function of man is to live a certain kind of life, and this activity implies a rational principle, and the function of a good man is the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed it is performed in accord with the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, then happiness turns out to be an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. ( Nicomachean Ethics , 1098a13)

The Pursuit of Happiness as the Exercise of Virtue

In the quote above, we can see another important feature of Aristotle’s theory: the link between the concepts of happiness and virtue. Aristotle tells us that the most important factor in the effort to achieve happiness is to have a good moral character — what he calls “complete virtue.” But being virtuous is not a passive state: one must act in accordance with virtue. Nor is it enough to have a few virtues; rather one must strive to possess all of them. As Aristotle writes,

He is happy who lives in accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some chance period but throughout a complete life. (Nicomachean Ethics, 1101a10)

According to Aristotle, happiness consists in achieving, through the course of a whole lifetime, all the goods — health, wealth, knowledge, friends, etc. — that lead to the perfection of human nature and to the enrichment of human life. This requires us to make choices , some of which may be very difficult. Often the lesser good promises immediate pleasure and is more tempting, while the greater good is painful and requires some sort of sacrifice. For example, it may be easier and more enjoyable to spend the night watching television, but you know that you will be better off if you spend it researching for your term paper. Developing a good character requires a strong effort of will to do the right thing, even in difficult situations.

Another example is the taking of drugs, which is becoming more and more of a problem in our society today. For a fairly small price, one can immediately take one’s mind off of one’s troubles and experience deep euphoria by popping an oxycontin pill or snorting some cocaine. Yet, inevitably, this short-term pleasure will lead to longer term pain. A few hours later you may feel miserable and so need to take the drug again, which leads to a never-ending spiral of need and relief. Addiction inevitably drains your funds and provides a burden to your friends and family. All of those virtues — generosity, temperance, friendship, courage, etc. — that make up the good life appear to be conspicuously absent in a life of drug use.

Aristotle would be strongly critical of the culture of “instant gratification” which seems to predominate in our society today.

In order to achieve the life of complete virtue, we need to make the right choices, and this involves keeping our eye on the future, on the ultimate result we want for our lives as a whole. We will not achieve happiness simply by enjoying the pleasures of the moment. Unfortunately, this is something most people are not able to overcome in themselves. As he laments, “the mass of mankind are evidently quite slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts”. Later in the Ethics Aristotle draws attention to the concept of akrasia, or weakness of the will. In many cases the overwhelming prospect of some great pleasure obscures one’s perception of what is truly good. Fortunately, this natural disposition is curable through training, which for Aristotle meant education and the constant aim to perfect virtue. As he puts it, a clumsy archer may indeed get better with practice, so long as he keeps aiming for the target.

Note also that it is not enough to think about doing the right thing, or even intend to do the right thing: we have to actually do it. Thus, it is one thing to think of writing the great American novel, another to actually write it. When we impose a form and order upon all those letters to actually produce a compelling story or essay, we are manifesting our rational potential, and the result of that is a sense of deep fulfillment. Or to take another example, when we exercise our citizenship by voting, we are manifesting our rational potential in yet another way, by taking responsibility for our community. There are myriad ways in which we can exercise our latent virtue in this way, and it would seem that the fullest attainment of human happiness would be one which brought all these ways together in a comprehensive rational life-plan.

There is yet another activity few people engage in which is required to live a truly happy life, according to Aristotle: intellectual contemplation. Since our nature is to be rational, the ultimate perfection of our natures is rational reflection. This means having an intellectual curiosity which perpetuates that natural wonder to know which begins in childhood but seems to be stamped out soon thereafter. For Aristotle, education should be about the cultivation of character, and this involves a practical and a theoretical component. The practical component is the acquisition of a moral character, as discussed above. The theoretical component is the making of a philosopher. Here there is no tangible reward, but the critical questioning of things raises our minds above the realm of nature and closer to the abode of the gods.

First of all, friendship seems to be so valued by people that no one would choose to live without friends. People who value honor will likely seek out either flattery or those who have more power than they do, in order that they may obtain personal gain through these relationships. Aristotle believes that the love of friendship is greater than this because it can be enjoyed as it is. “ Being loved , however, people enjoy for its own sake, and for this reason it would seem it is something better than being honoured and that friendship is chosen for its own sake” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1159a25-28). The emphasis on enjoyment here is noteworthy: a virtuous friendship is one that is most enjoyable since it combines pleasure and virtue together, thus fulfilling our emotional and intellectual natures.

Golden Mean

Aristotle’s ethics is sometimes referred to as “virtue ethics” since its focus is not on the moral weight of duties or obligations, but on the development of character and the acquiring of defined virtues such as courage, justice, temperance, benevolence, and prudence. Roughly 2,000 years later, Martin Seligman would reach a similar conclusion on strengths and virtues being essential to long term happiness. Of course, anyone who knows anything about Aristotle has heard his doctrine of virtue as being a “golden mean” between the extremes of excess and deficiency.

Courage, for example, is a mean regarding the feeling of fear, between the deficiency of rashness (too little fear) and the excess of cowardice (too much fear). Justice is a mean between getting or giving too much and getting or giving too little.

Benevolence is a mean between giving to people who don’t deserve it and not giving to anyone at all. Aristotle is not recommending that one should be moderate in all thi ngs, since one should at all times exercise the virtues. One can’t reason “I should be cruel to my neighbor now since I was too nice to him before.” The mean is a mean between two vices, and not simply a mean between too much and too little.

Furthermore, the mean is “relative to ourselves,” indicating that one person’s mean may be another person’s extreme. Milo the wrestler, as Aristotle puts it, needs more gruel than a normal person, and his mean diet will vary accordingly. Similarly for the moral virtues. Aristotle suggests that some people are born with weaker wills than others; for these people, it may actually be a mean to flee in battle (the extremes being to get slaughtered or commit suicide). Here we see the flexibility in Aristotle’s account: as soon as he begins to lay down some moral rules, he relaxes them in order to take into consideration the variety and contingency of particular temperaments.

Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean is well in keeping with ancient ways of thinking which conceived of justice as a state of equilibrium between opposing forces. In the early cosmologies, the Universe is stabilized as a result of the reconciliation between the opposing forces of Chaos and Order. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus conceived of right living as acting in accordance with the Logos , the principle of the harmony of opposites; and Plato defined justice in the soul as the proper balance among its parts.

Like Plato, Aristotle thought of the virtuous character along the lines of a healthy body. According to the prevailing medical theory of his day, health in the body consists of an appropriate balance between the opposing qualities of hot, cold, the dry, and the moist. The goal of the physician is to produce a proper balance among these elements, by specifying the appropriate training and diet regimen, which will of course be different for every person.

Similarly with health in the soul: exhibiting too much passion may lead to reckless acts of anger or violence which will be injurious to one’s mental well-being as well as to others; but not showing any passion is a denial of one’s human nature and results in the sickly qualities of morbidity, dullness, and antisocial behavior.

The healthy path is the “middle path ,” though remember it is not exactly the middle, given that people who are born with extremely passionate natures will have a different mean than those with sullen, dispassionate natures. Aristotle concludes that goodness of character is “a settled condition of the soul which wills or chooses the mean relatively to ourselves, this mean being determined by a rule or whatever we like to call that by which the wise man determines it . ” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1006b36)

Happiness is the ultimate end and purpose of human existence
Happiness is not pleasure, nor is it virtue. It is the exercise of virtue.
Happiness cannot be achieved until the end of one’s life. Hence it is a goal and not a temporary state.
Happiness is the perfection of human nature. Since man is a rational animal, human happiness depends on the exercise of his reason.
Happiness depends on acquiring a moral character, where one displays the virtues of courage, generosity, justice, friendship, and citizenship in one’s life. These virtues involve striking a balance or “mean” between an excess and a deficiency.
Happiness requires intellectual contemplation, for this is the ultimate realization of our rational capacities.

Further External Readings

Aristotle’s Ethics
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (2004), ed. Hugh Treddenick. London: Penguin.

Ackrill, J. (1981). Aristotle the Philosopher. Oxford: Oxford University Press. A comprehensive introduction to Aristotle.

Adler, Mortimer (1978). Aristotle for Everybody. New York: Macmillan. A popular exposition for the general reader.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (2004), ed. Hugh Treddenick. London: Penguin. The main source for Aristotle’s ethics.

Aristotle, Politics (1992), ed. Trevor Saunders. London: Penguin. Aristotle situates ethics within the discussion of the best constitution.

A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. 6. Cambridge University Press. One of the standard classics of the history of Greek philosophy.

Hughes, Gerald J. (2001). Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle on Ethics. London: Routledge.

Ross, Sir David (1995). Aristotle (6th ed.). London: Routledge. A classic overview by one of Aristotle’s most prominent English translators, in print since 1923.

Picture credit: Archer and target by aroncb / SXC.hu.

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Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) numbers among the greatest philosophers of all time. Judged solely in terms of his philosophical influence, only Plato is his peer: Aristotle’s works shaped centuries of philosophy from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance, and even today continue to be studied with keen, non-antiquarian interest. A prodigious researcher and writer, Aristotle left a great body of work, perhaps numbering as many as two-hundred treatises, from which approximately thirty-one survive. [ 1 ] His extant writings span a wide range of disciplines, from logic, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, through ethics, political theory, aesthetics and rhetoric, and into such primarily non-philosophical fields as empirical biology, where he excelled at detailed plant and animal observation and description. In all these areas, Aristotle’s theories have provided illumination, met with resistance, sparked debate, and generally stimulated the sustained interest of an abiding readership.

Because of its wide range and its remoteness in time, Aristotle’s philosophy defies easy encapsulation. The long history of interpretation and appropriation of Aristotelian texts and themes—spanning over two millennia and comprising philosophers working within a variety of religious and secular traditions—has rendered even basic points of interpretation controversial. The set of entries on Aristotle in this site addresses this situation by proceeding in three tiers. First, the present, general entry offers a brief account of Aristotle’s life and characterizes his central philosophical commitments, highlighting his most distinctive methods and most influential achievements. [ 2 ] Second are General Topics , which offer detailed introductions to the main areas of Aristotle’s philosophical activity. Finally, there follow Special Topics , which investigate in greater detail more narrowly focused issues, especially those of central concern in recent Aristotelian scholarship.

1. Aristotle’s Life

2. the aristotelian corpus: character and primary divisions, 3. phainomena and the endoxic method, 4.2 science, 4.3 dialectic, 5. essentialism and homonymy, 6. category theory, 7. the four causal account of explanatory adequacy, 8. hylomorphism, 9. aristotelian teleology, 10. substance, 11. living beings, 12. happiness and political association, 13. rhetoric and the arts, 14. aristotle’s legacy, a. translations, b. translations with commentaries, c. general works, d. bibliography of works cited, other internet resources, related entries.

Born in 384 B.C.E. in the Macedonian region of northeastern Greece in the small city of Stagira (whence the moniker ‘the Stagirite’, which one still occasionally encounters in Aristotelian scholarship), Aristotle was sent to Athens at about the age of seventeen to study in Plato’s Academy, then a pre-eminent place of learning in the Greek world. Once in Athens, Aristotle remained associated with the Academy until Plato’s death in 347, at which time he left for Assos, in Asia Minor, on the northwest coast of present-day Turkey. There he continued the philosophical activity he had begun in the Academy, but in all likelihood also began to expand his researches into marine biology. He remained at Assos for approximately three years, when, evidently upon the death of his host Hermeias, a friend and former Academic who had been the ruler of Assos, Aristotle moved to the nearby coastal island of Lesbos. There he continued his philosophical and empirical researches for an additional two years, working in conjunction with Theophrastus, a native of Lesbos who was also reported in antiquity to have been associated with Plato’s Academy. While in Lesbos, Aristotle married Pythias, the niece of Hermeias, with whom he had a daughter, also named Pythias.

In 343, upon the request of Philip, the king of Macedon, Aristotle left Lesbos for Pella, the Macedonian capital, in order to tutor the king’s thirteen-year-old son, Alexander—the boy who was eventually to become Alexander the Great. Although speculation concerning Aristotle’s influence upon the developing Alexander has proven irresistible to historians, in fact little concrete is known about their interaction. On the balance, it seems reasonable to conclude that some tuition took place, but that it lasted only two or three years, when Alexander was aged from thirteen to fifteen. By fifteen, Alexander was apparently already serving as a deputy military commander for his father, a circumstance undermining, if inconclusively, the judgment of those historians who conjecture a longer period of tuition. Be that as it may, some suppose that their association lasted as long as eight years.

It is difficult to rule out that possibility decisively, since little is known about the period of Aristotle’s life from 341–335. He evidently remained a further five years in Stagira or Macedon before returning to Athens for the second and final time, in 335. In Athens, Aristotle set up his own school in a public exercise area dedicated to the god Apollo Lykeios, whence its name, the Lyceum . Those affiliated with Aristotle’s school later came to be called Peripatetics , probably because of the existence of an ambulatory ( peripatos ) on the school’s property adjacent to the exercise ground. Members of the Lyceum conducted research into a wide range of subjects, all of which were of interest to Aristotle himself: botany, biology, logic, music, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, cosmology, physics, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, theology, rhetoric, political history, government and political theory, and the arts. In all these areas, the Lyceum collected manuscripts, thereby, according to some ancient accounts, assembling the first great library of antiquity.

During this period, Aristotle’s wife, Pythias, died and he developed a new relationship with Herpyllis, perhaps like him a native of Stagira, though her origins are disputed, as is the question of her exact relationship to Aristotle. Some suppose that she was merely his slave; others infer from the provisions of Aristotle’s will that she was a freed woman and likely his wife at the time of his death. In any event, they had children together, including a son, Nicomachus, named for Aristotle’s father and after whom his Nicomachean Ethics is presumably named.

After thirteen years in Athens, Aristotle once again found cause to retire from the city, in 323. Probably his departure was occasioned by a resurgence of the always-simmering anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens, which was free to come to the boil after Alexander succumbed to disease in Babylon during that same year. Because of his connections to Macedon, Aristotle reasonably feared for his safety and left Athens, remarking, as an oft-repeated ancient tale would tell it, that he saw no reason to permit Athens to sin twice against philosophy. He withdrew directly to Chalcis, on Euboea, an island off the Attic coast, and died there of natural causes the following year, in 322. [ 3 ]

Aristotle’s writings tend to present formidable difficulties to his novice readers. To begin, he makes heavy use of unexplained technical terminology, and his sentence structure can at times prove frustrating. Further, on occasion a chapter or even a full treatise coming down to us under his name appears haphazardly organized, if organized at all; indeed, in several cases, scholars dispute whether a continuous treatise currently arranged under a single title was ever intended by Aristotle to be published in its present form or was rather stitched together by some later editor employing whatever principles of organization he deemed suitable. [ 4 ] This helps explain why students who turn to Aristotle after first being introduced to the supple and mellifluous prose on display in Plato’s dialogues often find the experience frustrating. Aristotle’s prose requires some acclimatization.

All the more puzzling, then, is Cicero’s observation that if Plato’s prose was silver, Aristotle’s was a flowing river of gold ( Ac. Pr. 38.119, cf. Top . 1.3, De or. 1.2.49). Cicero was arguably the greatest prose stylist of Latin and was also without question an accomplished and fair-minded critic of the prose styles of others writing in both Latin and Greek. We must assume, then, that Cicero had before him works of Aristotle other than those we possess. In fact, we know that Aristotle wrote dialogues, presumably while still in the Academy, and in their few surviving remnants we are afforded a glimpse of the style Cicero describes. In most of what we possess, unfortunately, we find work of a much less polished character. Rather, Aristotle’s extant works read like what they very probably are: lecture notes, drafts first written and then reworked, ongoing records of continuing investigations, and, generally speaking, in-house compilations intended not for a general audience but for an inner circle of auditors. These are to be contrasted with the “exoteric” writings Aristotle sometimes mentions, his more graceful compositions intended for a wider audience ( Pol. 1278b30; EE 1217b22, 1218b34). Unfortunately, then, we are left for the most part, though certainly not entirely, with unfinished works in progress rather than with finished and polished productions. Still, many of those who persist with Aristotle come to appreciate the unembellished directness of his style.

More importantly, the unvarnished condition of Aristotle’s surviving treatises does not hamper our ability to come to grips with their philosophical content. His thirty-one surviving works (that is, those contained in the “Corpus Aristotelicum” of our medieval manuscripts that are judged to be authentic) all contain recognizably Aristotelian doctrine; and most of these contain theses whose basic purport is clear, even where matters of detail and nuance are subject to exegetical controversy.

These works may be categorized in terms of the intuitive organizational principles preferred by Aristotle. He refers to the branches of learning as “sciences” ( epistêmai ), best regarded as organized bodies of learning completed for presentation rather than as ongoing records of empirical researches. Moreover, again in his terminology, natural sciences such as physics are but one branch of theoretical science , which comprises both empirical and non-empirical pursuits. He distinguishes theoretical science from more practically oriented studies, some of which concern human conduct and others of which focus on the productive crafts. Thus, the Aristotelian sciences divide into three: (i) theoretical, (ii) practical, and (iii) productive. The principles of division are straightforward: theoretical science seeks knowledge for its own sake; practical science concerns conduct and goodness in action, both individual and societal; and productive science aims at the creation of beautiful or useful objects ( Top . 145a15–16; Phys . 192b8–12; DC 298a27–32, DA 403a27–b2; Met. 1025b25, 1026a18–19, 1064a16–19, b1–3; EN 1139a26–28, 1141b29–32).

(i) The theoretical sciences include prominently what Aristotle calls first philosophy , or metaphysics as we now call it, but also mathematics , and physics , or natural philosophy. Physics studies the natural universe as a whole, and tends in Aristotle’s hands to concentrate on conceptual puzzles pertaining to nature rather than on empirical research; but it reaches further, so that it includes also a theory of causal explanation and finally even a proof of an unmoved mover thought to be the first and final cause of all motion. Many of the puzzles of primary concern to Aristotle have proven perennially attractive to philosophers, mathematicians, and theoretically inclined natural scientists. They include, as a small sample, Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, puzzles about time, the nature of place, and difficulties encountered in thought about the infinite.

Natural philosophy also incorporates the special sciences, including biology, botany, and astronomical theory. Most contemporary critics think that Aristotle treats psychology as a sub-branch of natural philosophy, because he regards the soul ( psuchê ) as the basic principle of life, including all animal and plant life. In fact, however, the evidence for this conclusion is inconclusive at best. It is instructive to note that earlier periods of Aristotelian scholarship thought this controversial, so that, for instance, even something as innocuous-sounding as the question of the proper home of psychology in Aristotle’s division of the sciences ignited a multi-decade debate in the Renaissance. [ 5 ]

(ii) Practical sciences are less contentious, at least as regards their range. These deal with conduct and action, both individual and societal. Practical science thus contrasts with theoretical science, which seeks knowledge for its own sake, and, less obviously, with the productive sciences, which deal with the creation of products external to sciences themselves. Both politics and ethics fall under this branch.

(iii) Finally, then, the productive sciences are mainly crafts aimed at the production of artefacts, or of human productions more broadly construed. The productive sciences include, among others, ship-building, agriculture, and medicine, but also the arts of music, theatre, and dance. Another form of productive science is rhetoric, which treats the principles of speech-making appropriate to various forensic and persuasive settings, including centrally political assemblies.

Significantly, Aristotle’s tri-fold division of the sciences makes no mention of logic. Although he did not use the word ‘logic’ in our sense of the term, Aristotle in fact developed the first formalized system of logic and valid inference. In Aristotle’s framework—although he is nowhere explicit about this—logic belongs to no one science, but rather formulates the principles of correct argumentation suitable to all areas of inquiry in common. It systematizes the principles licensing acceptable inference, and helps to highlight at an abstract level seductive patterns of incorrect inference to be avoided by anyone with a primary interest in truth. So, alongside his more technical work in logic and logical theory, Aristotle investigates informal styles of argumentation and seeks to expose common patterns of fallacious reasoning.

Aristotle’s investigations into logic and the forms of argumentation make up part of the group of works coming down to us from the Middle Ages under the heading the Organon ( organon = tool in Greek). Although not so characterized in these terms by Aristotle, the name is apt, so long as it is borne in mind that intellectual inquiry requires a broad range of tools. Thus, in addition to logic and argumentation (treated primarily in the Prior Analytics and Topics ), the works included in the Organon deal with category theory, the doctrine of propositions and terms, the structure of scientific theory, and to some extent the basic principles of epistemology.

When we slot Aristotle’s most important surviving authentic works into this scheme, we end up with the following basic divisions of his major writings:

Categories ( Cat .)
De Interpretatione ( DI ) [ On Interpretation ]
Prior Analytics ( APr )
Posterior Analytics ( APo )
Topics ( Top .)
Sophistical Refutations ( SE )
Physics ( Phys .)
Generation and Corruption ( Gen. et Corr .)
De Caelo ( DC ) [ On the Heavens ]
Metaphysics ( Met .)
De Anima ( DA ) [ On the Soul ]
Parva Naturalia ( PN ) [ Brief Natural Treatises ]
History of Animals ( HA )
Parts of Animals ( PA )
Movement of Animals ( MA )
Meteorology ( Meteor .)
Progression of Animals ( IA )
Generation of Animals ( GA )
Nicomachean Ethics ( EN )
Eudemian Ethics ( EE )
Magna Moralia ( MM ) [ Great Ethics ]
Politics ( Pol .)
Rhetoric ( Rhet .)
Poetics ( Poet .)

The titles in this list are those in most common use today in English-language scholarship, followed by standard abbreviations in parentheses. For no discernible reason, Latin titles are customarily employed in some cases, English in others. Where Latin titles are in general use, English equivalents are given in square brackets.

Aristotle’s basic approach to philosophy is best grasped initially by way of contrast. Whereas Descartes seeks to place philosophy and science on firm foundations by subjecting all knowledge claims to a searing methodological doubt, Aristotle begins with the conviction that our perceptual and cognitive faculties are basically dependable, that they for the most part put us into direct contact with the features and divisions of our world, and that we need not dally with sceptical postures before engaging in substantive philosophy. Accordingly, he proceeds in all areas of inquiry in the manner of a modern-day natural scientist, who takes it for granted that progress follows the assiduous application of a well-trained mind and so, when presented with a problem, simply goes to work. When he goes to work, Aristotle begins by considering how the world appears, reflecting on the puzzles those appearances throw up, and reviewing what has been said about those puzzles to date. These methods comprise his twin appeals to phainomena and the endoxic method.

These two methods reflect in different ways Aristotle’s deepest motivations for doing philosophy in the first place. “Human beings began to do philosophy,” he says, “even as they do now, because of wonder, at first because they wondered about the strange things right in front of them, and then later, advancing little by little, because they came to find greater things puzzling” ( Met. 982b12). Human beings philosophize, according to Aristotle, because they find aspects of their experience puzzling. The sorts of puzzles we encounter in thinking about the universe and our place within it— aporiai , in Aristotle’s terminology—tax our understanding and induce us to philosophize.

According to Aristotle, it behooves us to begin philosophizing by laying out the phainomena , the appearances , or, more fully, things appearing to be the case , and then also collecting the endoxa , the credible opinions handed down regarding matters we find puzzling. As a typical example, in a passage of his Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle confronts a puzzle of human conduct, the fact that we are apparently sometimes akratic or weak-willed. When introducing this puzzle, Aristotle pauses to reflect upon a precept governing his approach to many areas of inquiry:

As in other cases, we must set out the appearances ( phainomena ) and run through all the puzzles regarding them. In this way we must prove the credible opinions ( endoxa ) about these sorts of experiences—ideally, all the credible opinions, but if not all, then most of them, those which are the most important. For if the objections are answered and the credible opinions remain, we shall have an adequate proof. ( EN 1145b2–7)

Scholars dispute concerning the degree to which Aristotle regards himself as beholden to the credible opinions ( endoxa ) he recounts and the basic appearances ( phainomena ) to which he appeals. [ 6 ] Of course, since the endoxa will sometimes conflict with one another, often precisely because the phainomena generate aporiai , or puzzles, it is not always possible to respect them in their entirety. So, as a group they must be re-interpreted and systematized, and, where that does not suffice, some must be rejected outright. It is in any case abundantly clear that Aristotle is willing to abandon some or all of the endoxa and phainomena whenever science or philosophy demands that he do so ( Met. 1073b36, 1074b6; PA 644b5; EN 1145b2–30).

Still, his attitude towards phainomena does betray a preference to conserve as many appearances as is practicable in a given domain—not because the appearances are unassailably accurate, but rather because, as he supposes, appearances tend to track the truth. We are outfitted with sense organs and powers of mind so structured as to put us into contact with the world and thus to provide us with data regarding its basic constituents and divisions. While our faculties are not infallible, neither are they systematically deceptive or misdirecting. Since philosophy’s aim is truth and much of what appears to us proves upon analysis to be correct, phainomena provide both an impetus to philosophize and a check on some of its more extravagant impulses.

Of course, it is not always clear what constitutes a phainomenon ; still less is it clear which phainomenon is to be respected in the face of bona fide disagreement. This is in part why Aristotle endorses his second and related methodological precept, that we ought to begin philosophical discussions by collecting the most stable and entrenched opinions regarding the topic of inquiry handed down to us by our predecessors. Aristotle’s term for these privileged views, endoxa , is variously rendered as ‘reputable opinions’, ‘credible opinions’, ‘entrenched beliefs’, ‘credible beliefs’, or ‘common beliefs’. Each of these translations captures at least part of what Aristotle intends with this word, but it is important to appreciate that it is a fairly technical term for him. An endoxon is the sort of opinion we spontaneously regard as reputable or worthy of respect, even if upon reflection we may come to question its veracity. (Aristotle appropriates this term from ordinary Greek, in which an endoxos is a notable or honourable man, a man of high repute whom we would spontaneously respect—though we might, of course, upon closer inspection, find cause to criticize him.) As he explains his use of the term, endoxa are widely shared opinions, often ultimately issuing from those we esteem most: ‘ Endoxa are those opinions accepted by everyone, or by the majority, or by the wise—and among the wise, by all or most of them, or by those who are the most notable and having the highest reputation’ ( Top. 100b21–23). Endoxa play a special role in Aristotelian philosophy in part because they form a significant sub-class of phainomena ( EN 1154b3–8): because they are the privileged opinions we find ourselves unreflectively endorsing and reaffirming after some reflection, they themselves come to qualify as appearances to be preserved where possible.

For this reason, Aristotle’s method of beginning with the endoxa is more than a pious platitude to the effect that it behooves us to mind our superiors. He does think this, as far as it goes, but he also maintains, more instructively, that we can be led astray by the terms within which philosophical problems are bequeathed to us. Very often, the puzzles confronting us were given crisp formulations by earlier thinkers and we find them puzzling precisely for that reason. Equally often, however, if we reflect upon the terms within which the puzzles are cast, we find a way forward; when a formulation of a puzzle betrays an untenable structuring assumption, a solution naturally commends itself. This is why in more abstract domains of inquiry we are likely to find ourselves seeking guidance from our predecessors even as we call into question their ways of articulating the problems we are confronting.

Aristotle applies his method of running through the phainomena and collecting the endoxa widely, in nearly every area of his philosophy. To take a typical illustration, we find the method clearly deployed in his discussion of time in Physics iv 10–14. We begin with a phainomenon : we feel sure that time exists or at least that time passes . So much is, inescapably, how our world appears: we experience time as passing, as unidirectional, as unrecoverable when lost. Yet when we move to offer an account of what time might be, we find ourselves flummoxed. For guidance, we turn to what has been said about time by those who have reflected upon its nature. It emerges directly that both philosophers and natural scientists have raised problems about time.

As Aristotle sets them out, these problems take the form of puzzles, or aporiai , regarding whether and if so how time exists ( Phys . 218a8–30). If we say that time is the totality of the past, present and future, we immediately find someone objecting that time exists but that the past and future do not. According to the objector, only the present exists. If we retort then that time is what did exist, what exists at present and what will exist, then we notice first that our account is insufficient: after all, there are many things which did, do, or will exist, but these are things that are in time and so not the same as time itself. We further see that our account already threatens circularity, since to say that something did or will exist seems only to say that it existed at an earlier time or will come to exist at a later time . Then again we find someone objecting to our account that even the notion of the present is troubling. After all, either the present is constantly changing or it remains forever the same. If it remains forever the same, then the current present is the same as the present of 10,000 years ago; yet that is absurd. If it is constantly changing, then no two presents are the same, in which case a past present must have come into and out of existence before the present present. When? Either it went out of existence even as it came into existence, which seems odd to say the least, or it went out of existence at some instant after it came into existence, in which case, again, two presents must have existed at the same instant. Now, Aristotle does not endorse the claims set out in stating these sorts of aporiai ; in fact, very often he cannot, because some aporiai qualify as aporiai just because they comprise individually plausible arguments generating incompatible conclusions. They thus serve as springboards to deeper, more demanding analysis.

In general, then, in setting such aporiai , Aristotle does not mean to endorse any given endoxon on one side or the other. Rather, he thinks that such considerations present credible puzzles, reflection upon which may steer us towards a defensible understanding of the nature of time. In this way, aporiai bring into sharp relief the issues requiring attention if progress is to be made. Thus, by reflecting upon the aporiai regarding time, we are led immediately to think about duration and divisibility, about quanta and continua , and about a variety of categorial questions. That is, if time exists, then what sort of thing is it? Is it the sort of thing which exists absolutely and independently? Or is it rather the sort of thing which, like a surface, depends upon other things for its existence? When we begin to address these sorts of questions, we also begin to ascertain the sorts of assumptions at play in the endoxa coming down to us regarding the nature of time. Consequently, when we collect the endoxa and survey them critically, we learn something about our quarry, in this case about the nature of time—and crucially also something about the constellation of concepts which must be refined if we are to make genuine philosophical progress with respect to it. What holds in the case of time, Aristotle implies, holds generally. This is why he characteristically begins a philosophical inquiry by presenting the phainomena , collecting the endoxa , and running through the puzzles to which they give rise.

4. Logic, Science, and Dialectic

Aristotle’s reliance on endoxa takes on a still greater significance given the role such opinions play in dialectic , which he regards as an important form of non-scientific reasoning. Dialectic, like science ( epistêmê ), trades in logical inference; but science requires premises of a sort beyond the scope of ordinary dialectical reasoning. Whereas science relies upon premises which are necessary and known to be so, a dialectical discussion can proceed by relying on endoxa , and so can claim only to be as secure as the endoxa upon which it relies. This is not a problem, suggests Aristotle, since we often reason fruitfully and well in circumstances where we cannot claim to have attained scientific understanding. Minimally, however, all reasoning—whether scientific or dialectical—must respect the canons of logic and inference.

Among the great achievements to which Aristotle can lay claim is the first systematic treatment of the principles of correct reasoning, the first logic. Although today we recognize many forms of logic beyond Aristotle’s, it remains true that he not only developed a theory of deduction, now called syllogistic, but added to it a modal syllogistic and went a long way towards proving some meta-theorems pertinent to these systems. Of course, philosophers before Aristotle reasoned well or reasoned poorly, and the competent among them had a secure working grasp of the principles of validity and soundness in argumentation. No-one before Aristotle, however, developed a systematic treatment of the principles governing correct inference; and no-one before him attempted to codify the formal and syntactic principles at play in such inference. Aristotle somewhat uncharacteristically draws attention to this fact at the end of a discussion of logic inference and fallacy:

Once you have surveyed our work, if it seems to you that our system has developed adequately in comparison with other treatments arising from the tradition to date—bearing in mind how things were at the beginning of our inquiry—it falls to you, our students, to be indulgent with respect to any omissions in our system, and to feel a great debt of gratitude for the discoveries it contains ( Soph. Ref. 184b2–8).

Even if we now regard it as commonplace that his logic is but a fraction of the logic we know and use, Aristotle’s accomplishment was so encompassing that no less a figure than Kant, writing over two millennia after the appearance of Aristotle’s treatises on logic, found it easy to offer an appropriately laudatory judgment: ‘That from the earliest times logic has traveled a secure course can be seen from the fact that since the time of Aristotle it has not had to go a single step backwards…What is further remarkable about logic is that until now it has also been unable to take a single step forward, and therefore seems to all appearance to be finished and complete’ ( Critique of Pure Reason B vii).

In Aristotle’s logic, the basic ingredients of reasoning are given in terms of inclusion and exclusion relations, of the sort graphically captured many years later by the device of Venn diagrams. He begins with the notion of a patently correct sort of argument, one whose evident and unassailable acceptability induces Aristotle to refer to is as a ‘perfect deduction’ ( APr . 24b22–25). Generally, a deduction ( sullogismon ), according to Aristotle, is a valid or acceptable argument. More exactly, a deduction is ‘an argument in which when certain things are laid down something else follows of necessity in virtue of their being so’ ( APr . 24b18–20). His view of deductions is, then, akin to a notion of validity, though there are some minor differences. For example, Aristotle maintains that irrelevant premises will ruin a deduction, whereas validity is indifferent to irrelevance or indeed to the addition of premises of any kind to an already valid argument. Moreover, Aristotle insists that deductions make progress, whereas every inference from p to p is trivially valid. Still, Aristotle’s general conception of deduction is sufficiently close to validity that we may pass into speaking in terms of valid structures when characterizing his syllogistic. In general, he contends that a deduction is the sort of argument whose structure guarantees its validity, irrespective of the truth or falsity of its premises. This holds intuitively for the following structure:

All A s are B s.
All B s are C s.
Hence, all A s are C s.

Accordingly, anything taking this form will be a deduction in Aristotle’s sense. Let the A s, B s, and C s be anything at all, and if indeed the A s are B s, and the B s C s, then of necessity the A s will be C s. This particular deduction is perfect because its validity needs no proof, and perhaps because it admits of no proof either: any proof would seem to rely ultimately upon the intuitive validity of this sort of argument.

Aristotle seeks to exploit the intuitive validity of perfect deductions in a surprisingly bold way, given the infancy of his subject: he thinks he can establish principles of transformation in terms of which every deduction (or, more precisely, every non-modal deduction) can be translated into a perfect deduction. He contends that by using such transformations we can place all deduction on a firm footing.

If we focus on just the simplest kinds of deduction, Aristotle’s procedure comes quickly into view. The perfect deduction already presented is an instance of universal affirmation: all A s are B s; all B s C s; and so, all A s are C s. Now, contends Aristotle, it is possible to run through all combinations of simple premises and display their basic inferential structures and then to relate them back to this and similarly perfect deductions. Thus, if we vary the quantity of a proposition’s subject (universal all versus indeterminate some ) along with the quality or kind of the predication ( positive versus negative ), we arrive at all the possible combinations of the most basic kind of arguments.

It turns out that some of these arguments are deductions, or valid syllogisms, and some are not. Those which are not admit of counterexamples, whereas those which are, of course, do not. There are counterexamples to those, for instance, suffering from what came to be called undistributed middle terms, e.g.: all A s are B s; some B s are C s; so, all A s are C s (all university students are literate; some literate people read poetry; so, all university students read poetry). There is no counterexample to the perfect deduction in the form of a universal affirmation: if all A s are B s, and all B s C s, then there is no escaping the fact that all A s are C s. So, if all the kinds of deductions possible can be reduced to the intuitively valid sorts, then the validity of all can be vouchsafed.

To effect this sort of reduction, Aristotle relies upon a series of meta-theorems, some of which he proves and others of which he merely reports (though it turns out that they do all indeed admit of proofs). His principles are meta -theorems in the sense that no argument can run afoul of them and still qualify as a genuine deduction. They include such theorems as: (i) no deduction contains two negative premises; (ii) a deduction with a negative conclusion must have a negative premise; (iii) a deduction with a universal conclusion requires two universal premises; and (iv) a deduction with a negative conclusion requires exactly one negative premise. He does, in fact, offer proofs for the most significant of his meta-theorems, so that we can be assured that all deductions in his system are valid, even when their validity is difficult to grasp immediately.

In developing and proving these meta-theorems of logic, Aristotle charts territory left unexplored before him and unimproved for many centuries after his death.

For a fuller account of Aristotle’s achievements in logic, see the entry on Aristotle’s Logic .

Aristotle approaches the study of logic not as an end in itself, but with a view to its role in human inquiry and explanation. Logic is a tool, he thinks, one making an important but incomplete contribution to science and dialectic. Its contribution is incomplete because science ( epistêmê ) employs arguments which are more than mere deductions. A deduction is minimally a valid syllogism, and certainly science must employ arguments passing this threshold. Still, science needs more: a science proceeds by organizing the data in its domain into a series of arguments which, beyond being deductions, feature premises which are necessary and, as Aristotle says, “better known by nature”, or “more intelligible by nature” ( gnôrimôteron phusei ) ( APo . 71b33–72a25; Top . 141b3–14; Phys . 184a16–23). By this he means that they should reveal the genuine, mind-independent natures of things.

He further insists that science ( epistêmê )—a comparatively broad term in his usage, since it extends to fields of inquiry like mathematics and metaphysics no less than the empirical sciences—not only reports the facts but also explains them by displaying their priority relations ( APo . 78a22–28). That is, science explains what is less well known by what is better known and more fundamental, and what is explanatorily anemic by what is explanatorily fruitful.

We may, for instance, wish to know why trees lose their leaves in the autumn. We may say, rightly, that this is due to the wind blowing through them. Still, this is not a deep or general explanation, since the wind blows equally at other times of year without the same result. A deeper explanation—one unavailable to Aristotle but illustrating his view nicely—is more general, and also more causal in character: trees shed their leaves because diminished sunlight in the autumn inhibits the production of chlorophyll, which is required for photosynthesis, and without photosynthesis trees go dormant. Importantly, science should not only record these facts but also display them in their correct explanatory order. That is, although a deciduous tree which fails to photosynthesize is also a tree lacking in chlorophyll production, its failing to produce chlorophyll explains its inability to photosynthesize and not the other way around. This sort of asymmetry must be captured in scientific explanation. Aristotle’s method of scientific exposition is designed precisely to discharge this requirement.

Science seeks to capture not only the causal priorities in nature, but also its deep, invariant patterns. Consequently, in addition to being explanatorily basic, the first premise in a scientific deduction will be necessary. So, says Aristotle:

We think we understand a thing without qualification, and not in the sophistic, accidental way, whenever we think we know the cause in virtue of which something is—that it is the cause of that very thing— and also know that this cannot be otherwise. Clearly, knowledge ( epistêmê ) is something of this sort. After all, both those with knowledge and those without it suppose that this is so—although only those with knowledge are actually in this condition. Hence, whatever is known without qualification cannot be otherwise. ( APo 71b9–16; cf. APo 71b33–72a5; Top . 141b3–14, Phys . 184a10–23; Met. 1029b3–13)

For this reason, science requires more than mere deduction. Altogether, then, the currency of science is demonstration ( apodeixis ), where a demonstration is a deduction with premises revealing the causal structures of the world, set forth so as to capture what is necessary and to reveal what is better known and more intelligible by nature ( APo 71b33–72a5, Phys . 184a16–23, EN 1095b2–4).

Aristotle’s approach to the appropriate form of scientific explanation invites reflection upon a troubling epistemological question: how does demonstration begin? If we are to lay out demonstrations such that the less well known is inferred by means of deduction from the better known, then unless we reach rock-bottom, we will evidently be forced either to continue ever backwards towards the increasingly better known, which seems implausibly endless, or lapse into some form of circularity, which seems undesirable. The alternative seems to be permanent ignorance. Aristotle contends:

Some people think that since knowledge obtained via demonstration requires the knowledge of primary things, there is no knowledge. Others think that there is knowledge and that all knowledge is demonstrable. Neither of these views is either true or necessary. The first group, those supposing that there is no knowledge at all, contend that we are confronted with an infinite regress. They contend that we cannot know posterior things because of prior things if none of the prior things is primary. Here what they contend is correct: it is indeed impossible to traverse an infinite series. Yet, they maintain, if the regress comes to a halt, and there are first principles, they will be unknowable, since surely there will be no demonstration of first principles—given, as they maintain, that only what is demonstrated can be known. But if it is not possible to know the primary things, then neither can we know without qualification or in any proper way the things derived from them. Rather, we can know them instead only on the basis of a hypothesis, to wit, if the primary things obtain, then so too do the things derived from them. The other group agrees that knowledge results only from demonstration, but believes that nothing stands in the way of demonstration, since they admit circular and reciprocal demonstration as possible. ( APo. 72b5–21)

Aristotle’s own preferred alternative is clear:

We contend that not all knowledge is demonstrative: knowledge of the immediate premises is indemonstrable. Indeed, the necessity here is apparent; for if it is necessary to know the prior things, that is, those things from which the demonstration is derived, and if eventually the regress comes to a standstill, it is necessary that these immediate premises be indemonstrable. ( APo . 72b21–23)

In sum, if all knowledge requires demonstration, and all demonstration proceeds from what is more intelligible by nature to what is less so, then either the process goes on indefinitely or it comes to a halt in undemonstrated first principles, which are known, and known securely. Aristotle dismisses the only remaining possibility, that demonstration might be circular, rather curtly, with the remark that this amounts to ‘simply saying that something is the case if it is the case,’ by which device ‘it is easy to prove anything’ ( APo . 72b32–73a6).

Aristotle’s own preferred alternative, that there are first principles of the sciences graspable by those willing to engage in assiduous study, has caused consternation in many of his readers. In Posterior Analytics ii 19, he describes the process by which knowers move from perception to memory, and from memory to experience ( empeiria )—which is a fairly technical term in this connection, reflecting the point at which a single universal comes to take root in the mind—and finally from experience to a grasp of first principles. This final intellectual state Aristotle characterizes as a kind of unmediated intellectual apprehension ( nous ) of first principles ( APo . 100a10–b6).

Scholars have understandably queried what seems a casually asserted passage from the contingent, given in sense experience, to the necessary, as required for the first principles of science. Perhaps, however, Aristotle simply envisages a kind of a posteriori necessity for the sciences, including the natural sciences. In any event, he thinks that we can and do have knowledge, so that somehow we begin in sense perception and build up to an understanding of the necessary and invariant features of the world. This is the knowledge featured in genuine science ( epistêmê ). In reflecting on the sort of progression Aristotle envisages, some commentators have charged him with an epistemological optimism bordering on the naïve; others contend that it is rather the charge of naïveté which is itself naïve, betraying as it does an unargued and untenable alignment of the necessary and the a priori . [ 7 ]

Not all rigorous reasoning qualifies as scientific. Indeed, little of Aristotle’s extant writing conforms to the demands for scientific presentation laid down in the Posterior Analytics . As he recognizes, we often find ourselves reasoning from premises which have the status of endoxa , opinions widely believed or endorsed by the wise, even though they are not known to be necessary. Still less often do we reason having first secured the first principles of our domain of inquiry. So, we need some ‘method by which we will be able to reason deductively about any matter proposed to us on the basis of endoxa , and to give an account of ourselves [when we are under examination by an interlocutor] without lapsing into contradiction’ ( Top . 100a18–20). This method he characterizes as dialectic .

The suggestion that we often use dialectic when engaged in philosophical exchange reflects Aristotle’s supposition that there are two sorts of dialectic: one negative, or destructive, and the other positive, or constructive. In fact, in his work dedicated to dialectic, the Topics , he identifies three roles for dialectic in intellectual inquiry, the first of which is mainly preparatory:

Dialectic is useful for three purposes: for training, for conversational exchange, and for sciences of a philosophical sort. That it is useful for training purposes is directly evident on the basis of these considerations: once we have a direction for our inquiry we will more readily be able to engage a subject proposed to us. It is useful for conversational exchange because once we have enumerated the beliefs of the many, we shall engage them not on the basis of the convictions of others but on the basis of their own; and we shall re-orient them whenever they appear to have said something incorrect to us. It is useful for philosophical sorts of sciences because when we are able to run through the puzzles on both sides of an issue we more readily perceive what is true and what is false. Further, it is useful for uncovering what is primary among the commitments of a science. For it is impossible to say anything regarding the first principles of a science on the basis of the first principles proper to the very science under discussion, since among all the commitments of a science, the first principles are the primary ones. This comes rather, necessarily, from discussion of the credible beliefs ( endoxa ) belonging to the science. This is peculiar to dialectic, or is at least most proper to it. For since it is what cross-examines, dialectic contains the way to the first principles of all inquiries. ( Top . 101a26–b4)

The first two of the three forms of dialectic identified by Aristotle are rather limited in scope. By contrast, the third is philosophically significant.

In its third guise, dialectic has a role to play in ‘science conducted in a philosophical manner’ ( pros tas kata philosphian epistêmas ; Top . 101a27–28, 101a34), where this sort of science includes what we actually find him pursuing in his major philosophical treatises. In these contexts, dialectic helps to sort the endoxa , relegating some to a disputed status while elevating others; it submits endoxa to cross-examination in order to test their staying power; and, most notably, according to Aristotle, dialectic puts us on the road to first principles ( Top. 100a18–b4). If that is so, then dialectic plays a significant role in the order of philosophical discovery: we come to establish first principles in part by determining which among our initial endoxa withstand sustained scrutiny. Here, as elsewhere in his philosophy, Aristotle evinces a noteworthy confidence in the powers of human reason and investigation.

However we arrive at secure principles in philosophy and science, whether by some process leading to a rational grasping of necessary truths, or by sustained dialectical investigation operating over judiciously selected endoxa , it does turn out, according to Aristotle, that we can uncover and come to know genuinely necessary features of reality. Such features, suggests Aristotle, are those captured in the essence-specifying definitions used in science (again in the broad sense of epistêmê ).

Aristotle’s commitment to essentialism runs deep. He relies upon a host of loosely related locutions when discussing the essences of things, and these give some clue to his general orientation. Among the locutions one finds rendered as essence in contemporary translations of Aristotle into English are: (i) to ti esti (the what it is); (ii) to einai (being); (iii) ousia (being); (iv) hoper esti (precisely what something is) and, most importantly, (v) to ti ên einai (the what it was to be) ( APo 83a7; Top . 141b35; Phys . 190a17, 201a18–21; Gen. et Corr . 319b4; DA 424a25, 429b10; Met. 1003b24, 1006a32, 1006b13; EN 1102a30, 1130a12–13). Among these, the last locution (v) requires explication both because it is the most peculiar and because it is Aristotle’s favored technical term for essence. It is an abbreviated way of saying ‘that which it was for an instance of kind K to be an instance of kind K ,’ for instance ‘that which it was (all along) for a human being to be a human being’. In speaking this way, Aristotle supposes that if we wish to know what a human being is, we cannot identify transient or non-universal features of that kind; nor indeed can we identify even universal features which do not run explanatorily deep. Rather, as his preferred locution indicates, he is interested in what makes a human being human—and he assumes, first, that there is some feature F which all and only humans have in common and, second, that F explains the other features which we find across the range of humans.

Importantly, this second feature of Aristotelian essentialism differentiates his approach from the now more common modal approach, according to which: [ 8 ]

F is an essential property of x = df if x loses F , then x ceases to exist.

Aristotle rejects this approach for several reasons, including most notably that he thinks that certain non-essential features satisfy the definition. Thus, beyond the categorical and logical features (everyone is such as to be either identical or not identical with the number nine), Aristotle recognizes a category of properties which he calls idia ( Cat . 3a21, 4a10; Top . 102a18–30, 134a5–135b6), now usually known by their Medieval Latin rendering propria. Propria are non-essential properties which flow from the essence of a kind, such that they are necessary to that kind even without being essential. For instance, if we suppose that being rational is essential to human beings, then it will follow that every human being is capable of grammar . Being capable of grammar is not the same property as being rational, though it follows from it. Aristotle assumes his readers will appreciate that being rational asymmetrically explains being capable of grammar , even though, necessarily, something is rational if and only if it is also capable of grammar. Thus, because it is explanatorily prior, being rational has a better claim to being the essence of human beings than does being capable of grammar . Consequently, Aristotle’s essentialism is more fine-grained than mere modal essentialism. Aristotelian essentialism holds:

F is an essential property of x = d f (i) if x loses F , then x ceases to exist; and (ii) F is in an objective sense an explanatorily basic feature of x .

In sum, in Aristotle’s approach, what it is to be, for instance, a human being is just what it always has been and always will be, namely being rational . Accordingly, this is the feature to be captured in an essence-specifying account of human beings ( APo 75a42–b2; Met. 103b1–2, 1041a25–32).

Aristotle believes for a broad range of cases that kinds have essences discoverable by diligent research. He in fact does not devote much energy to arguing for this contention; still less is he inclined to expend energy combating anti-realist challenges to essentialism, perhaps in part because he is impressed by the deep regularities he finds, or thinks he finds, underwriting his results in biological investigation. [ 9 ] Still, he cannot be accused of profligacy regarding the prospects of essentialism.

On the contrary, he denies essentialism in many cases where others are prepared to embrace it. One finds this sort of denial prominently, though not exclusively, in his criticism of Plato. Indeed, it becomes a signature criticism of Plato and Platonists for Aristotle that many of their preferred examples of sameness and invariance in the world are actually cases of multivocity , or homonymy in his technical terminology. In the opening of the Categories , Aristotle distinguishes between synonymy and homonymy (later called univocity and multivocity ). His preferred phrase for multivocity, which is extremely common in his writings, is ‘being spoken of in many ways’, or, more simply, ‘multiply meant’ ( pollachôs legomenon ). All these locutions have a quasi-technical status for him. The least complex is univocity:

a and b are univocally F iff (i) a is F , (ii) b is F , and (iii) the accounts of F -ness in ‘ a is F ’ and ‘ b is F ’ are the same.

Thus, for instance, since the accounts of ‘human’ in ‘Socrates is human’ and ‘Plato is human’ will be the same, ‘human’ is univocal or synonymous in these applications. (Note that Aristotle’s notion of the word ‘synonymy’ is not the same as the contemporary English usage where it applies to different words with the same meaning.) In cases of univocity, we expect single, non-disjunctive definitions which capture and state the essence of the kinds in question. Let us allow once more for purposes of illustration that the essence-specifying definition of human is rational animal . Then, since human means rational animal across the range of its applications, there is some single essence to all members of the kind.

By contrast, when synonymy fails we have homonymy. According to Aristotle:

a and b are homonymously F iff (i) a is F , (ii) b is F , (iii) the accounts of F -ness in ‘ a is F ’ and ‘ b is F ’ do not completely overlap.

To take an easy example without philosophical significance, bank is homonymous in ‘Socrates and Alcibiades had a picnic on the bank’ and ‘Socrates and Alcibiades opened a joint account at the bank.’ This case is illustrative, if uninteresting, because the accounts of bank in these occurrences have nothing whatsoever in common. Part of the philosophical interest in Aristotle’s account of homonymy resides in its allowing partial overlap. Matters become more interesting if we examine whether—to use an illustration well suited to Aristotle’s purposes but left largely unexplored by him— conscious is synonymous across ‘Charlene was conscious of some awkwardness created by her remarks’ and ‘Higher vertebrates, unlike mollusks, are conscious.’ In these instances, the situation with respect to synonymy or homonymy is perhaps not immediately clear, and so requires reflection and philosophical investigation.

Very regularly, according to Aristotle, this sort of reflection leads to an interesting discovery, namely that we have been presuming a univocal account where in fact none is forthcoming. This, according to Aristotle, is where the Platonists go wrong: they presume univocity where the world delivers homonymy or multivocity. (For a vivid illustration of Plato’s univocity assumption at work, see Meno 71e1–72a5, where Socrates insists that there is but one kind of excellence ( aretê ) common to all kinds of excellent people, not a separate sort for men, women, slaves, children, and so on.) In one especially important example, Aristotle parts company with Plato over the univocity of goodness:

We had perhaps better consider the universal good and run through the puzzles concerning what is meant by it—even though this sort of investigation is unwelcome to us, because those who introduced the Forms are friends of ours. Yet presumably it would be the better course to destroy even what is close to us, as something necessary for preserving the truth—and all the more so, given that we are philosophers. For though we love them both, piety bids us to honour the truth before our friends. ( EN 1096a11–16)

Aristotle counters that Plato is wrong to assume that goodness is ‘something universal, common to all good things, and single’ ( EN 1096a28). Rather, goodness is different in different cases. If he is right about this, far-reaching consequences regarding ethical theory and practice follow.

To establish non-univocity, Aristotle’s appeals to a variety of tests in his Topics where, again, his idiom is linguistic but his quarry is metaphysical. Consider the following sentences:

Socrates is good.
Communism is good.
After a light meal, crème brûlée is good.
Redoubling one’s effort after failure is always good.
Maria’s singing is good, but Renata’s is sublime.

Among the tests for non-univocity recommended in the Topics is a simple paraphrase test: if paraphrases yield distinct, non-interchangeable accounts, then the predicate is multivocal. So, for example, suitable paraphrases might be:

Socrates is a virtuous person .
Communism is a just social system .
After a light meal, crème brûlée is tasty and satisfying .
Trying harder after one has failed is always edifying .
Maria’s singing reaches a high artistic standard , but Renata’s surpasses that standard by any measure .

Since we cannot interchange these paraphrases—we cannot say, for instance, that crème brûlée is a just social system— good must be non-univocal across this range of applications. If that is correct, then Platonists are wrong to assume univocity in this case, since goodness exhibits complexity ignored by their assumption.

So far, then, Aristotle’s appeals to homonymy or multivocity are primarily destructive, in the sense that they attempt to undermine a Platonic presumption regarded by Aristotle as unsustainable. Importantly, just as Aristotle sees a positive as well as a negative role for dialectic in philosophy, so he envisages in addition to its destructive applications a philosophically constructive role for homonymy. To appreciate his basic idea, it serves to reflect upon a continuum of positions in philosophical analysis ranging from pure Platonic univocity to disaggregated Wittgensteinean family resemblance. One might in the face of a successful challenge to Platonic univocity assume that, for instance, the various cases of goodness have nothing in common across all cases, so that good things form at best a motley kind, of the sort championed by Wittgensteineans enamored of the metaphor of family resemblances: all good things belong to a kind only in the limited sense that they manifest a tapestry of partially overlapping properties, as every member of a single family is unmistakably a member of that family even though there is no one physical attribute shared by all of those family members.

Aristotle insists that there is a tertium quid between family resemblance and pure univocity: he identifies, and trumpets, a kind of core-dependent homonymy (also referred to in the literature, with varying degrees of accuracy, as focal meaning and focal connexion ). [ 10 ] Core-dependent homonyms exhibit a kind of order in multiplicity: although shy of univocity, because homonymous, such concepts do not devolve into patchwork family resemblances either. To rely upon one of Aristotle’s own favorite illustrations, consider:

Socrates is healthy.
Socrates’ exercise regimen is healthy.
Socrates’ complexion is healthy.

Aristotle assumes that his readers will immediately appreciate two features of these three predications of healthy . First, they are non-univocal, since the second is paraphraseable roughly as promotes health and the third as is indicative of health , whereas the first means, rather, something more fundamental, like is sound of body or is functioning well . Hence, healthy is non-univocal. Second, even so, the last two predications rely upon the first for their elucidations: each appeals to health in its core sense in an asymmetrical way. That is, any account of each of the latter two predications must allude to the first, whereas an account of the first makes no reference to the second or third in its account. So, suggests Aristotle, health is not only a homonym, but a core-dependent homonym : while not univocal neither is it a case of rank multivocity.

Aristotle’s illustration does succeed in showing that there is conceptual space between mere family resemblance and pure univocity. So, he is right that these are not exhaustive options. The interest in this sort of result resides in its exportability to richer, if more abstract philosophical concepts. Aristotle appeals to homonymy frequently, across a full range of philosophical concepts including justice , causation , love , life , sameness , goodness , and body . His most celebrated appeal to core-dependent homonymy comes in the case of a concept so highly abstract that it is difficult to gauge his success without extended metaphysical reflection. This is his appeal to the core-dependent homonymy of being , which has inspired both philosophical and scholarly controversy. [ 11 ] Aristotle denies that there could be a science of being, on the grounds that there is no single genus being under which all and only beings fall ( SE 11 172a13–15–15; APr. 92b14; Met. B 3, 998b22; EE i 8, 1217b33–35). One motivation for his reasoning this way may be that he regards the notion of a genus as ineliminably taxonomical and contrastive, [ 12 ] so that it makes ready sense to speak of a genus of being only if one can equally well speak of a genus of non-being—just as among living beings one can speak of the animals and the non-animals, viz. the plant kingdom. Since there are no non-beings, there accordingly can be no genus of non-being, and so, ultimately, no genus of being either. Consequently, since each science studies one essential kind arrayed under a single genus, there can be no science of being either.

Subsequently, without expressly reversing his judgment about the existence of a science of being, Aristotle announces that there is nonetheless a science of being qua being ( Met. iv 4), first philosophy, which takes as its subject matter beings insofar as they are beings and thus considers all and only those features pertaining to beings as such—to beings, that is, not insofar as they are mathematical or physical or human beings, but insofar as they are beings, full stop. Although the matter is disputed, his recognition of this science evidently turns crucially on his commitment to the core-dependent homonymy of being itself. [ 13 ] Although the case is not as clear and uncontroversial as Aristotle’s relatively easy appeal to health (which is why, after all, he selected it as an illustration), we are supposed to be able upon reflection to detect an analogous core-dependence in the following instances of exists :

Socrates exists.
Socrates’ location exists.
Socrates’ weighing 73 kilos exists.
Socrates’ being morose today exists.

Of course, the last three items on this list are rather awkward locutions, but this is because they strive to make explicit that we can speak of dependent beings as existing if we wish to do so—but only because of their dependence upon the core instance of being, namely substance. (Here it is noteworthy that ‘primary substance’ is the conventional and not very happy rendering of Aristotle’s protê ousia in Greek, which means, more literally, ‘primary being’). [ 14 ] According to this approach, we would not have Socrates’ weighing anything at all or feeling any way today were it not for the prior fact of his existence. So, exists in the first instance serves as the core instance of being, in terms of which the others are to be explicated. If this is correct, then, implies Aristotle, being is a core-dependent homonym; further, a science of being—or, rather, a science of being qua being—becomes possible, even though there is no genus of being, since it is finally possible to study all beings insofar as they are related to the core instance of being, and then also to study that core instance, namely substance, insofar as it serves as the prime occasion of being.

In speaking of beings which depend upon substance for their existence, Aristotle implicitly appeals to a foundational philosophical commitment which appears early in his thought and remains stable throughout his entire philosophical career: his theory of categories. In what is usually regarded as an early work, The Categories , Aristotle rather abruptly announces:

Of things said without combination, each signifies either: (i) a substance ( ousia ); (ii) a quantity; (iii) a quality; (iv) a relative; (v) where; (vi) when; (vii) being in a position; (viii) having; (ix) acting upon; or (x) a being affected. ( Cat . 1b25–27)

Aristotle does little to frame his theory of categories, offering no explicit derivation of it, nor even specifying overtly what his theory of categories categorizes. If librarians categorize books and botanists categorize plants, then what does the philosophical category theorist categorize?

Aristotle does not say explicitly, but his examples make reasonably clear that he means to categorize the basic kinds of beings there may be. If we again take some clues from linguistic data, without inferring that the ultimate objects of categorization are themselves linguistic, we can contrast things said “with combination”:

with things said ‘without combination’:

‘Man runs’ is truth-evaluable, whereas neither ‘man’ nor ‘runs’ is. Aristotle says that things of this sort signify entities, evidently extra-linguistic entities, which are thus, correlatively, in the first case sufficiently complex to be what makes the sentence ‘Man runs’ true, that is a man running , and in the second, items below the level of truth-making, so, e.g., an entity a man , taken by itself, and an action running , taken by itself. If that is correct, the entities categorized by the categories are the sorts of basic beings that fall below the level of truth-makers, or facts. Such beings evidently contribute, so to speak, to the facticity of facts, just as, in their linguistic analogues, nouns and verbs, things said ‘without combination’, contribute to the truth-evaluability of simple assertions. The constituents of facts contribute to facts as the semantically relevant parts of a proposition contribute to its having the truth conditions it has. Thus, the items categorized in Aristotle’s categories are the constituents of facts. If it is a fact that Socrates is pale , then the basic beings in view are Socrates and being pale . In Aristotle’s terms, the first is a substance and the second is a quality .

Importantly, these beings may be basic without being absolutely simple . After all, Socrates is made up of all manner of parts—arms and legs, organs and bones, molecules and atoms, and so on down. As a useful linguistic analogue, we may consider phonemes , which are basic, relative to the morphemes of a linguistic theory, and yet also complex, since they are made up of simpler sound components, which are irrelevant from the linguist’s point of view because of their lying beneath the level of semantic relevance.

The theory of categories in total recognizes ten sorts of extra-linguistic basic beings:


Substance	man, horse
Quality	white, grammatical
Quantity	two-feet long
Relative	double, slave
Place	in the market
Time	yesterday, tomorrow
Position	lying, sitting
Having	has shoes on
Acting Upon	cutting, burning
Being Affected	being cut, being burnt

Although he does not say so overtly in the Categories , Aristotle evidently presumes that these ten categories of being are both exhaustive and irreducible, so that while there are no other basic beings, it is not possible to eliminate any one of these categories in favor of another.

Both claims have come in for criticism, and each surely requires defense. [ 15 ] Aristotle offers neither conviction a defense in his Categories . Nor, indeed, does he offer any principled grounding for just these categories of being, a circumstance which has left him open to further criticism from later philosophers, including famously Kant who, after lauding Aristotle for coming up with the idea of category theory, proceeds to excoriate him for selecting his particular categories on no principled basis whatsoever. Kant alleges that Aristotle picked his categories of being just as he happened to stumble upon them in his reveries ( Critique of Pure Reason , A81/B107). According to Kant, then, Aristotle’s categories are ungrounded . Philosophers and scholars both before and after Kant have sought to provide the needed grounding, whereas Aristotle himself mainly tends to justify the theory of categories by putting it to work in his various philosophical investigations.

We have already implicitly encountered in passing two of Aristotle’s appeals to category theory: (i) in his approach to time, which he comes to treat as a non-substantial being; and (ii) in his commitment to the core-dependent homonymy of being, which introduces some rather more contentious considerations. These may be revisited briefly to illustrate how Aristotle thinks that his doctrine of categories provides philosophical guidance where it is most needed.

Thinking first of time and its various puzzles, or aporiai , we saw that Aristotle poses a simple question: does time exist? He answers this question in the affirmative, but only because in the end he treats it as a categorically circumscribed question. He claims that ‘time is the measure of motion with respect to the before and after’ ( Phys . 219b1–2). By offering this definition, Aristotle is able to advance the judgment that time does exist, because it is an entity in the category of quantity: time is to motion or change as length is to a line. Time thus exists, but like all items in any non-substance category, it exists in a dependent sort of way. Just as if there were no lines there would be no length, so if there were no change there would be no time. Now, this feature of Aristotle’s theory of time has occasioned both critical and favorable reactions. [ 16 ] In the present context, however, it is important only that it serves to demonstrate how Aristotle handles questions of existence: they are, at root, questions about category membership. A question as to whether, e.g., universals or places or relations exist, is ultimately, for Aristotle, also a question concerning their category of being, if any.

As time is a dependent entity in Aristotle’s theory, so too are all entities in categories outside of substance. This helps explain why Aristotle thinks it appropriate to deploy his apparatus of core-dependent homonymy in the case of being . If we ask whether qualities or quantities exist, Aristotle will answer in the affirmative, but then point out also that as dependent entities they do not exist in the independent manner of substances. Thus, even in the relatively rarified case of being , the theory of categories provides a reason for uncovering core-dependent homonymy. Since all other categories of being depend upon substance, it should be the case that an analysis of any one of them will ultimately make asymmetrical reference to substance. Aristotle contends in his Categories , relying on a distinction that tracks essential ( said-of ) and accidental ( in ) predication, that:

All other things are either said-of primary substances, which are their subjects, or are in them as subjects. Hence, if there were no primary substances, it would be impossible for anything else to exist. ( Cat . 2b5–6)

If this is so, then, Aristotle infers, all the non-substance categories rely upon substance as the core of their being. So, he concludes, being qualifies as a case of core-dependent homonymy.

Now, one may challenge Aristotle’s contentions here, first by querying whether he has established the non-univocity of being before proceeding to argue for its core-dependence. Be that as it may, if we allow its non-univocity, then, according to Aristotle, the apparatus of the categories provides ample reason to conclude that being qualifies as a philosophically significant instance of core-dependent homonymy.

In this way, Aristotle’s philosophy of being and substance, like much else in his philosophy, relies upon an antecedent commitment to his theory of categories. Indeed, the theory of categories spans his entire career and serves as a kind of scaffolding for much of his philosophical theorizing, ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of nature to psychology and value theory.

For this reason, questions regarding the ultimate tenability of Aristotle’s doctrine of categories take on a special urgency for evaluating much of his philosophy.

For more detail on the theory of categories and its grounding, see the entry on Aristotle’s Categories .

Equally central to Aristotle’s thought is his four-causal explanatory scheme . Judged in terms of its influence, this doctrine is surely one of his most significant philosophical contributions. Like other philosophers, Aristotle expects the explanations he seeks in philosophy and science to meet certain criteria of adequacy. Unlike some other philosophers, however, he takes care to state his criteria for adequacy explicitly; then, having done so, he finds frequent fault with his predecessors for failing to meet its terms. He states his scheme in a methodological passage in the second book of his Physics :

One way in which cause is spoken of is that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists, e.g. the bronze of the statue, the silver of the bowl, and the genera of which the bronze and the silver are species. In another way cause is spoken of as the form or the pattern, i.e. what is mentioned in the account ( logos ) belonging to the essence and its genera, e.g. the cause of an octave is a ratio of 2:1, or number more generally, as well as the parts mentioned in the account ( logos ). Further, the primary source of the change and rest is spoken of as a cause, e.g. the man who deliberated is a cause, the father is the cause of the child, and generally the maker is the cause of what is made and what brings about change is a cause of what is changed. Further, the end ( telos ) is spoken of as a cause. This is that for the sake of which ( hou heneka ) a thing is done, e.g. health is the cause of walking about. ‘Why is he walking about?’ We say: ‘To be healthy’—and, having said that, we think we have indicated the cause. ( Phys . 194b23–35)

Although some of Aristotle’s illustrations are not immediately pellucid, his approach to explanation is reasonably straightforward.

Aristotle’s attitude towards explanation is best understood first by considering a simple example he proposes in Physics ii 3. A bronze statue admits of various different dimensions of explanation. If we were to confront a statue without first recognizing what it was, we would, thinks Aristotle, spontaneously ask a series of questions about it. We would wish to know what it is, what it is made of , what brought it about , and what it is for. In Aristotle’s terms, in asking these questions we are seeking knowledge of the statue’s four causes ( aitia ): the formal, material, efficient, and final. According to Aristotle, when we have identified these four causes, we have satisfied a reasonable demand for explanatory adequacy.

More fully, the four-causal account of explanatory adequacy requires an investigator to cite these four causes:

The Four Causes
	that from which something is generated and out of which it is made, e.g. the bronze of a statue.
	the structure which the matter realizes and in terms of which it comes to be something determinate, e.g., the shape of the president, in virtue of which this quantity of bronze is said to be a statue of a president.
	the agent responsible for a quantity of matter’s coming to be informed, e.g. the sculptor who shaped the quantity of bronze into its current shape, the shape of the president.
	the purpose or goal of the compound of form and matter, e.g. the statue was created for the purpose of honoring the president.

In Physics ii 3, Aristotle makes twin claims about this four-causal schema: (i) that citing all four causes is necessary for adequacy in explanation; and (ii) that these four causes are sufficient for adequacy in explanation. Each of these claims requires some elaboration and also some qualification.

As for the necessity claim, Aristotle does not suppose that all phenomena admit of all four causes. Thus, for example, coincidences lack final causes, since they do not occur for the sake of anything; that is, after all, what makes them coincidences. If a debtor is on his way to the market to buy milk and she runs into her creditor, who is on his way to the same market to buy bread, then she may agree to pay the money owed immediately. Although resulting in a wanted outcome, their meeting was not for the sake of settling the debt; nor indeed was it for the sake of anything at all. It was a simple co-incidence. Hence, it lacks a final cause. Similarly, if we think that there are mathematical or geometrical abstractions, for instance a triangle existing as an object of thought independent of any material realization, then the triangle will trivially lack a material cause. [ 17 ] Still, these significant exceptions aside, Aristotle expects the vast majority of explanations to conform to his four-causal schema. In non-exceptional cases, a failure to specify all four of causes, is, he maintains, a failure in explanatory adequacy.

The sufficiency claim is exceptionless, though it may yet be misleading if one pertinent issue is left unremarked. In providing his illustration of the material cause Aristotle first cites the bronze of a statue and the silver of a bowl, and then mentions also ‘the genera of which the bronze and the silver are species’ ( Phys . 194b25–27). By this he means the types of metal to which silver and bronze belong, or more generally still, simply metal . That is, one might specify the material cause of a statue more or less proximately, by specifying the character of the matter more or less precisely. Hence, when he implies that citing all four causes is sufficient for explanation, Aristotle does not intend to suggest that a citation at any level of generality suffices. He means to insist rather that there is no fifth kind of cause, that his preferred four cases subsume all kinds of cause. He does not argue for this conclusion fully, though he does challenge his readers to identify a kind of cause which qualifies as a sort distinct from the four mentioned ( Phys . 195a4–5).

So far, then, Aristotle’s four causal schema has whatever intuitive plausibility his illustrations may afford it. He does not rest content there, however. Instead, he thinks he can argue forcefully for the four causes as real explanatory factors, that is, as features which must be cited not merely because they make for satisfying explanations, but because they are genuinely operative causal factors, the omission of which renders any putative explanation objectively incomplete and so inadequate.

It should be noted that Aristotle’s arguments for the four causes taken individually all proceed against the backdrop of the general connection he forges between causal explanation and knowledge. Because he thinks that the four aitia feature in answers to knowledge-seeking questions ( Phys. 194b18; A Po . 71 b 9–11, 94 a 20), some scholars have come to understand them more as becauses than as causes —that is, as explanations rather than as causes narrowly construed. [ 18 ] Most such judgments reflect an antecedent commitment to one or another view of causation and explanation—that causation relates events rather than propositions; that explanations are inquiry-relative; that causation is extensional and explanation intensional; that explanations must adhere to some manner of nomic-deductive model, whereas causes need not; or that causes must be prior in time to their effects, while explanations, especially intentional explanations, may appeal to states of affairs posterior in time to the actions they explain.

Generally, Aristotle does not respect these sorts of commitments. Thus, to the extent that they are defensible, his approach to aitia may be regarded as blurring the canons of causation and explanation. It should certainly not, however, be ceded up front that Aristotle is guilty of any such conflation, or even that scholars who render his account of the four aitia in causal terms have failed to come to grips with developments in causal theory in the wake of Hume. Rather, because of the lack of uniformity in contemporary accounts of causation and explanation, and a persistent and justifiable tendency to regard causal explanations as foundational relative to other sorts of explanations, we may legitimately wonder whether Aristotle’s conception of the four aitia is in any significant way discontinuous with later, Humean-inspired approaches, and then again, to the degree that it is, whether Aristotle’s approach suffers for the comparison. Be that as it may, we will do well when considering Aristotle’s defense of his four aitia to bear in mind that controversy surrounds how best to construe his knowledge-driven approach to causation and explanation relative to some later approaches.

For more on the four causes in general, see the entry on Aristotle on Causality .

Central to Aristotle’s four-causal account of explanatory adequacy are the notions of matter ( hulê ) and form ( eidos or morphê ). Together, they constitute one of his most fundamental philosophical commitments, to hylomorphism :

Hylomorphism = df ordinary objects are composites of matter and form.

The appeal in this definition to ‘ordinary objects’ requires reflection, but as a first approximation, it serves to rely on the sorts of examples Aristotle himself employs when motivating hylomorphism: statues and houses, horses and humans. In general, we may focus on artefacts and familiar living beings. Hylomorphism holds that no such object is metaphysically simple, but rather comprises two distinct metaphysical elements, one formal and one material.

Aristotle’s hylomorphism was formulated originally to handle various puzzles about change. Among the endoxa confronting Aristotle in his Physics are some striking challenges to the coherence of the very notion of change, owing to Parmenides and Zeno . Aristotle’s initial impulse in the face of such challenges, as we have seen, is to preserve the appearances ( phainomena ), to explain how change is possible. Key to Aristotle’s response to the challenges bequeathed him is his insistence that all change involves at least two factors: something persisting and something gained or lost. Thus, when Socrates goes to the beach and comes away sun-tanned, something continues to exist, namely Socrates, even while something is lost, his pallor, and something else gained, his tan. This is a change in the category of quality, whence the common locution ‘qualitative change’. If he gains weight, then again something remains, Socrates, and something is gained, in this case a quantity of matter. Accordingly, in this instance we have not a qualitative but a quantitative change.

In general, argues Aristotle, in whatever category a change occurs, something is lost and something gained within that category, even while something else, a substance, remains in existence, as the subject of that change. Of course, substances can come into or go out of existence, in cases of generation or destruction; and these are changes in the category of substance. Evidently even in cases of change in this category, however, something persists. To take an example favourable to Aristotle, in the case of the generation of a statue, the bronze persists, but it comes to acquire a new form, a substantial rather than accidental form. In all cases, whether substantial or accidental, the two-factor analysis obtains: something remains the same and something is gained or lost.

In its most rudimentary formulation, hylomorphism simply labels each of the two factors: what persists is matter and what is gained is form . Aristotle’s hylomorphism quickly becomes much more complex, however, as the notions of matter and form are pressed into philosophical service. Importantly, matter and form come to be paired with another fundamental distinction, that between potentiality and actuality . Again in the case of the generation of a statue, we may say that the bronze is potentially a statue, but that it is an actual statue when and only when it is informed with the form of a statue. Of course, before being made into a statue, the bronze was also in potentiality a fair number of other artefacts—a cannon, a steam-engine, or a goal on a football pitch. Still, it was not in potentiality butter or a beach ball. This shows that potentiality is not the same as possibility: to say that x is potentially F is to say that x already has actual features in virtue of which it might be made to be F by the imposition of a F form upon it. So, given these various connections, it becomes possible to define form and matter generically as

form = df that which makes some matter which is potentially F actually F
matter = df that which persists and which is, for some range of F s, potentially F

Of course, these definitions are circular, but that is not in itself a problem: actuality and potentiality are, for Aristotle, fundamental concepts which admit of explication and description but do not admit of reductive analyses.

Encapsulating Aristotle’s discussions of change in Physics i 7 and 8, and putting the matter more crisply than he himself does, we have the following simple argument for matter and form: (1) a necessary condition of there being change is the existence of matter and form; (2) there is change; hence (3) there are matter and form. The second premise is a phainomenon ; so, if that is accepted without further defense, only the first requires justification. The first premise is justified by the thought that since there is no generation ex nihilo , in every instance of change something persists while something else is gained or lost. In substantial generation or destruction, a substantial form is gained or lost; in mere accidental change, the form gained or lost is itself accidental. Since these two ways of changing exhaust the kinds of change there are, in every instance of change there are two factors present. These are matter and form.

For these reasons, Aristotle intends his hylomorphism to be much more than a simple explanatory heuristic. On the contrary, he maintains, matter and form are mind-independent features of the world and must, therefore, be mentioned in any full explanation of its workings.

We may mainly pass over as uncontroversial the suggestion that there are efficient causes in favor of the most controversial and difficult of Aristotle four causes, the final cause. [ 19 ] We should note before doing so, however, that Aristotle’s commitment to efficient causation does receive a defense in Aristotle’s preferred terminology; he thus does more than many other philosophers who take it as given that causes of an efficient sort are operative. Partly by way of criticizing Plato’s theory of Forms, which he regards as inadequate because of its inability to account for change and generation, Aristotle observes that nothing potential can bring itself into actuality without the agency of an actually operative efficient cause. Since what is potential is always in potentiality relative to some range of actualities, and nothing becomes actual of its own accord—no pile of bricks, for instance, spontaneously organizes itself into a house or a wall—an actually operative agent is required for every instance of change. This is the efficient cause. These sorts of considerations also incline Aristotle to speak of the priority of actuality over potentiality: potentialities are made actual by actualities, and indeed are always potentialities for some actuality or other. The operation of some actuality upon some potentiality is an instance of efficient causation.

That said, most of Aristotle’s readers do not find themselves in need of a defense of the existence of efficient causation. By contrast, most think that Aristotle does need to provide a defense of final causation. It is natural and easy for us to recognize final causal activity in the products of human craft: computers and can-openers are devices dedicated to the execution of certain tasks, and both their formal and material features will be explained by appeal to their functions. Nor is it a mystery where artefacts obtain their functions: we give artefacts their functions. The ends of artefacts are the results of the designing activities of intentional agents. Aristotle recognizes these kinds of final causation, but also, and more problematically, envisages a much greater role for teleology in natural explanation: nature exhibits teleology without design. He thinks, for instance, that living organisms not only have parts which require teleological explanation—that, for instance, kidneys are for purifying the blood and teeth are for tearing and chewing food—but that whole organisms, human beings and other animals, also have final causes.

Crucially, Aristotle denies overtly that the causes operative in nature are intention-dependent. He thinks, that is, that organisms have final causes, but that they did not come to have them by dint of the designing activities of some intentional agent or other. He thus denies that a necessary condition of x ’s having a final cause is x ’s being designed.

Although he has been persistently criticized for his commitment to such natural ends, Aristotle is not susceptible to a fair number of the objections standardly made to his view. Indeed, it is evident that whatever the merits of the most penetrating of such criticisms, much of the contumely directed at Aristotle is stunningly illiterate. [ 20 ] To take but one of any number of mind-numbing examples, the famous American psychologist B. F. Skinner reveals that ‘Aristotle argued that a falling body accelerated because it grew more jubilant as it found itself nearer its home’ (1971, 6). To anyone who has actually read Aristotle, it is unsurprising that this ascription comes without an accompanying textual citation. For Aristotle, as Skinner would portray him, rocks are conscious beings having end states which they so delight in procuring that they accelerate themselves in exaltation as they grow ever closer to attaining them. There is no excuse for this sort of intellectual slovenliness, when already by the late-nineteenth century, the German scholar Zeller was able to say with perfect accuracy that ‘The most important feature of the Aristotelian teleology is the fact that it is neither anthropocentric nor is it due to the actions of a creator existing outside the world or even of a mere arranger of the world, but is always thought of as immanent in nature’ (1883, §48).

Indeed, it is hardly necessary to caricature Aristotle’s teleological commitments in order to bring them into critical focus. In fact, Aristotle offers two sorts of defenses of non-intentional teleology in nature, the first of which is replete with difficulty. He claims in Physics ii 8:

For these [viz. teeth and all other parts of natural beings] and all other natural things come about as they do either always or for the most part, whereas nothing which comes about due to chance or spontaneity comes about always or for the most part. … If, then, these are either the result of coincidence or for the sake of something, and they cannot be the result of coincidence or spontaneity, it follows that they must be for the sake of something. Moreover, even those making these sorts of claims [viz. that everything comes to be by necessity] will agree that such things are natural. Therefore, that for the sake of which is present among things which come to be and exist by nature. ( Phys . 198b32–199a8)

The argument here, which has been variously formulated by scholars, [ 21 ] seems doubly problematic.

In this argument Aristotle seems to introduce as a phainomenon that nature exhibits regularity, so that the parts of nature come about in patterned and regular ways. Thus, for instance, humans tend to have teeth arranged in a predictable sort of way, with incisors in the front and molars in the back. He then seems to contend, as an exhaustive and exclusive disjunction, that things happen either by chance or for the sake of something, only to suggest, finally, that what is ‘always or for the most part’—what happens in a patterned and predictable way—is not plausibly thought to be due to chance. Hence, he concludes, whatever happens always or for the most part must happen for the sake of something, and so must admit of a teleological cause. Thus, teeth show up always or for the most part with incisors in the front and molars in the back; since this is a regular and predictable occurrence, it cannot be due to chance. Given that whatever is not due to chance has a final cause, teeth have a final cause.

If so much captures Aristotle’s dominant argument for teleology, then his view is unmotivated. The argument is problematic in the first instance because it assumes an exhaustive and exclusive disjunction between what is by chance and what is for the sake of something. But there are obviously other possibilities. Hearts beat not in order to make noise, but they do so always and not by chance. Second, and this is perplexing if we have represented him correctly, Aristotle is himself aware of one sort of counterexample to this view and is indeed keen to point it out himself: although, he insists, bile is regularly and predictably yellow, its being yellow is neither due simply to chance nor for the sake of anything. Aristotle in fact mentions many such counterexamples ( Part. An. 676b16–677b10, Gen. An. 778a29–b6). It seems to follow, then, short of ascribing a straight contradiction to him, either that he is not correctly represented as we have interpreted this argument or that he simply changed his mind about the grounds of teleology. Taking up the first alternative, one possibility is that Aristotle is not really trying to argue for teleology from the ground up in Physics ii 8, but is taking it as already established that there are teleological causes, and restricting himself to observing that many natural phenomena, namely those which occur always or for the most part, are good candidates for admitting of teleological explanation.

That would leave open the possibility of a broader sort of motivation for teleology, perhaps of the sort Aristotle offers elsewhere in the Physics , when speaking about the impulse to find non-intention-dependent teleological causes at work in nature:

This is most obvious in the case of animals other than man: they make things using neither craft nor on the basis of inquiry nor by deliberation. This is in fact a source of puzzlement for those who wonder whether it is by reason or by some other faculty that these creatures work—spiders, ants and the like. Advancing bit by bit in this same direction it becomes apparent that even in plants features conducive to an end occur—leaves, for example, grow in order to provide shade for the fruit. If then it is both by nature and for an end that the swallow makes its nest and the spider its web, and plants grow leaves for the sake of the fruit and send their roots down rather than up for the sake of nourishment, it is plain that this kind of cause is operative in things which come to be and are by nature. And since nature is twofold, as matter and as form, the form is the end, and since all other things are for sake of the end, the form must be the cause in the sense of that for the sake of which. ( Phys . 199a20–32)

As Aristotle quite rightly observes in this passage, we find ourselves regularly and easily speaking in teleological terms when characterizing non-human animals and plants. It is consistent with our so speaking, of course, that all of our easy language in these contexts is rather too easy: it is in fact lax and careless, because unwarrantedly anthropocentric. We might yet demand that all such language be assiduously reduced to some non-teleological idiom when we are being scientifically strict and empirically serious, though we would first need to survey the explanatory costs and benefits of our attempting to do so. Aristotle considers and rejects some views hostile to teleology in Physics ii 8 and Generation and Corruption i. [ 22 ]

Once Aristotle has his four-causal explanatory schema fully on the scene, he relies upon it in virtually all of his most advanced philosophical investigation. As he deploys it in various frameworks, we find him augmenting and refining the schema even as he applies it, sometimes with surprising results. One important question concerns how his hylomorphism intersects with the theory of substance advanced in the context of his theory of categories.

As we have seen, Aristotle insists upon the primacy of primary substance in his Categories . According to that work, however, star instances of primary substance are familiar living beings like Socrates or an individual horse ( Cat . 2a11014). Yet with the advent of hylomorphism, these primary substances are revealed to be metaphysical complexes: Socrates is a compound of matter and form. So, now we have not one but three potential candidates for primary substance: form, matter, and the compound of matter and form. The question thus arises: which among them is the primary substance? Is it the matter, the form, or the compound? The compound corresponds to a basic object of experience and seems to be a basic subject of predication: we say that Socrates lives in Athens, not that his matter lives in Athens. Still, matter underlies the compound and in this way seems a more basic subject than the compound, at least in the sense that it can exist before and after it does. On the other hand, the matter is nothing definite at all until enformed; so, perhaps form, as determining what the compound is, has the best claim on substantiality.

In the middle books of his Metaphysics , which contain some of his most complex and engaging investigations into basic being, Aristotle settles on form ( Met . vii 17). A question thus arises as to how form satisfies Aristotle’s final criteria for substantiality. He expects a substance to be, as he says, some particular thing ( tode ti ), but also to be something knowable, some essence or other. These criteria seem to pull in different directions, the first in favor of particular substances, as the primary substances of the Categories had been particulars, and the second in favor of universals as substances, because they alone are knowable. In the lively controversy surrounding these matters, many scholars have concluded that Aristotle adopts a third way forward: form is both knowable and particular. This matter, however, remains very acutely disputed. [ 23 ]

Very briefly, and not engaging these controversies, it becomes clear that Aristotle prefers form in virtue of its role in generation and diachronic persistence. When a statue is generated, or when a new animal comes into being, something persists, namely the matter, which comes to realize the substantial form in question. Even so, insists Aristotle, the matter does not by itself provide the identity conditions for the new substance. First, as we have seen, the matter is merely potentially some F until such time as it is made actually F by the presence of an F form. Further, the matter can be replenished, and is replenished in the case of all organisms, and so seems to be form-dependent for its own diachronic identity conditions. For these reasons, Aristotle thinks of the form as prior to the matter, and thus more fundamental than the matter. This sort of matter, the form-dependent matter, Aristotle regards as proximate matter ( Met. 1038b6, 1042b10), thus extending the notion of matter beyond its original role as metaphysical substrate.

Further, in Metaphysics vii 17 Aristotle offers a suggestive argument to the effect that matter alone cannot be substance. Let the various bits of matter belonging to Socrates be labeled as a , b , c , …, n . Consistent with the non-existence of Socrates is the existence of a , b , c , …, n , since these elements exist when they are spread from here to Alpha Centauri, but if that happens, of course, Socrates no longer exists. Heading in the other direction, Socrates can exist without just these elements, since he may exist when some one of a , b , c , …, n is replaced or goes out of existence. So, in addition to his material elements, insists Aristotle, Socrates is also something else, something more ( heteron ti ; Met. 1041b19–20). This something more is form , which is ‘not an element…but a primary cause of a thing’s being what it is’ ( Met. 1041b28–30). The cause of a thing’s being the actual thing it is, as we have seen, is form. Hence, concludes Aristotle, as the source of being and unity, form is substance.

Even if this much is granted—and to repeat, much of what has just been said is unavoidably controversial—many questions remain. For example, is form best understood as universal or particular? However that issue is to be resolved, what is the relation of form to the compound and to matter? If form is substance, then what is the fate of these other two candidates? Are they also substances, if to a lesser degree? It seems odd to conclude that they are nothing at all, or that the compound in particular is nothing in actuality; yet it is difficult to contend that they might belong to some category other than substance.

For an approach to some of these questions, see the entry on Aristotle’s Metaphysics .

However these and like issues are to be resolved, given the primacy of form as substance, it is unsurprising to find Aristotle identifying the soul, which he introduces as a principle or source ( archê ) of all life, as the form of a living compound. For Aristotle, in fact, all living things, and not only human beings, have souls: ‘what is ensouled is distinguished from what is unensouled by living’ ( DA 431a20–22; cf. DA 412a13, 423a20–6; De Part. An. 687a24–690a10; Met. 1075a16–25). It is appropriate, then, to treat all ensouled bodies in hylomorphic terms:

The soul is the cause and source of the living body. But cause and source are meant in many ways [or are homonymous]. Similarly, the soul is a cause in accordance with the ways delineated, which are three: it is (i) the cause as the source of motion [=the efficient cause], (ii) that for the sake of which [=the final cause], and (iii) as the substance of ensouled bodies. That it is a cause as substance is clear, for substance is the cause of being for all things, and for living things, being is life, and the soul is also the cause and source of life. ( DA 415b8–14; cf. PN 467b12–25, Phys . 255a56–10)

So, the soul and body are simply special cases of form and matter:

soul : body :: form : matter :: actuality : potentiality

Further, the soul, as the end of the compound organism, is also the final cause of the body. Minimally, this is to be understood as the view that any given body is the body that it is because it is organized around a function which serves to unify the entire organism. In this sense, the body’s unity derives from the fact it has a single end, or single life directionality, a state of affairs that Aristotle captures by characterizing the body as the sort of matter which is organic ( organikon ; DA 412a28). By this he means that the body serves as a tool for implementing the characteristic life activities of the kind to which the organism belongs ( organon = tool in Greek). Taking all this together, Aristotle offers the view that the soul is the ‘first actuality of a natural organic body’ ( DA 412b5–6), that it is a ‘substance as form of a natural body which has life in potentiality’ ( DA 412a20–1) and, again, that it ‘is a first actuality of a natural body which has life in potentiality’ ( DA 412a27–8).

Aristotle contends that his hylomorphism provides an attractive middle way between what he sees as the mirroring excesses of his predecessors. In one direction, he means to reject Presocratic kinds of materialism; in the other, he opposes Platonic dualism. He gives the Presocratics credit for identifying the material causes of life, but then faults them for failing to grasp its formal cause. By contrast, Plato earns praise for grasping the formal cause of life; unfortunately, as Aristotle sees things, he then proceeds to neglect the material cause, and comes to believe that the soul can exist without its material basis. Hylomorphism, in Aristotle’s view, captures what is right in both camps while eschewing the unwarranted mono-dimensionality of each. To account for living organisms, Aristotle contends, the natural scientist must attend to both matter and form.

Aristotle deploys hylomorphic analyses not only to the whole organism, but to the individual faculties of the soul as well. Perception involves the reception of sensible forms without matter, and thinking, by analogy, consists in the mind’s being enformed by intelligible forms. With each of these extensions, Aristotle both expands and taxes his basic hylomorphism, sometimes straining its basic framework almost beyond recognition.

For more detail on Aristotle’s hylomorphism in psychological explanation, see the entry on Aristotle’s Psychology .

Aristotle’s basic teleological framework extends to his ethical and political theories, which he regards as complementing one another. He takes it as given that most people wish to lead good lives; the question then becomes what the best life for human beings consists in. Because he believes that the best life for a human being is not a matter of subjective preference, he also believes that people can (and, sadly, often do) choose to lead sub-optimal lives. In order to avoid such unhappy eventualities, Aristotle recommends reflection on the criteria any successful candidate for the best life must satisfy. He proceeds to propose one kind of life as meeting those criteria uniquely and therefore promotes it as the superior form of human life. This is a life lived in accordance with reason.

When stating the general criteria for the final good for human beings, Aristotle invites his readers to review them ( EN 1094a22–27). This is advisable, since much of the work of sorting through candidate lives is in fact accomplished during the higher-order task of determining the criteria appropriate to this task. Once these are set, it becomes relatively straightforward for Aristotle to dismiss some contenders, including for instance hedonism, the perennially popular view that pleasure is the highest good for human beings.

According to the criteria advanced, the final good for human beings must: (i) be pursued for its own sake ( EN 1094a1); (ii) be such that we wish for other things for its sake ( EN 1094a19); (iii) be such that we do not wish for it on account of other things ( EN 1094a21); (iv) be complete ( teleion ), in the sense that it is always choiceworthy and always chosen for itself ( EN 1097a26–33); and finally (v) be self-sufficient ( autarkês ), in the sense that its presence suffices to make a life lacking in nothing ( EN 1097b6–16). Plainly some candidates for the best life fall down in the face of these criteria. According to Aristotle, neither the life of pleasure nor the life of honour satisfies them all.

What does satisfy them all is happiness eudaimonia . Scholars in fact dispute whether eudaimonia is best rendered as ‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’ or ‘living well’ or simply transliterated and left an untranslated technical term. [ 24 ] If we have already determined that happiness is some sort of subjective state, perhaps simple desire fulfillment, then ‘happiness’ will indeed be an inappropriate translation: eudaimonia is achieved, according to Aristotle, by fully realizing our natures, by actualizing to the highest degree our human capacities, and neither our nature nor our endowment of human capacities is a matter of choice for us. Still, as Aristotle frankly acknowledges, people will consent without hesitation to the suggestion that happiness is our best good—even while differing materially about how they understand what happiness is. So, while seeming to agree, people in fact disagree about the human good. Consequently, it is necessary to reflect on the nature of happiness ( eudaimonia ):

But perhaps saying that the highest good is happiness ( eudaimonia ) will appear to be a platitude and what is wanted is a much clearer expression of what this is. Perhaps this would come about if the function ( ergon ) of a human being were identified. For just as the good, and doing well, for a flute player, a sculptor, and every sort of craftsman—and in general, for whatever has a function and a characteristic action—seems to depend upon function, so the same seems true for a human being, if indeed a human being has a function. Or do the carpenter and cobbler have their functions, while a human being has none and is rather naturally without a function ( argon )? Or rather, just as there seems to be some particular function for the eye and the hand and in general for each of the parts of a human being, should one in the same way posit a particular function for the human being in addition to all these? Whatever might this be? For living is common even to plants, whereas something characteristic ( idion ) is wanted; so, one should set aside the life of nutrition and growth. Following that would be some sort of life of perception, yet this is also common, to the horse and the bull and to every animal. What remains, therefore, is a life of action belonging to the kind of soul that has reason. ( EN 1097b22–1098a4)

In determining what eudaimonia consists in, Aristotle makes a crucial appeal to the human function ( ergon ), and thus to his overarching teleological framework.

He thinks that he can identify the human function in terms of reason, which then provides ample grounds for characterizing the happy life as involving centrally the exercise of reason, whether practical or theoretical. Happiness turns out to be an activity of the rational soul, conducted in accordance with virtue or excellence, or, in what comes to the same thing, in rational activity executed excellently ( EN 1098a161–17). It bears noting in this regard that Aristotle’s word for virtue, aretê , is broader than the dominant sense of the English word ‘virtue’, since it comprises all manner of excellences, thus including but extending beyond the moral virtues. Thus when he says that happiness consists in an activity in ‘accordance with virtue’ ( kat’ aretên ; EN 1098a18), Aristotle means that it is a kind of excellent activity, and not merely morally virtuous activity.

The suggestion that only excellently executed or virtuously performed rational activity constitutes human happiness provides the impetus for Aristotle’s virtue ethics. Strikingly, first, he insists that the good life is a life of activity; no state suffices, since we are commended and praised for living good lives, and we are rightly commended or praised only for things we ( do ) ( EN 1105b20–1106a13). Further, given that we must not only act, but act excellently or virtuously, it falls to the ethical theorist to determine what virtue or excellence consists in with respect to the individual human virtues, including, for instance, courage and practical intelligence. This is why so much of Aristotle’s ethical writing is given over to an investigation of virtue, both in general and in particular, and extending to both practical and theoretical forms.

For more on Aristotle’s virtue-based ethics, see the entry on Aristotle’s Ethics .

Aristotle concludes his discussion of human happiness in his Nicomachean Ethics by introducing political theory as a continuation and completion of ethical theory. Ethical theory characterizes the best form of human life; political theory characterizes the forms of social organization best suited to its realization ( EN 1181b12–23).

The basic political unit for Aristotle is the polis , which is both a state in the sense of being an authority-wielding monopoly and a civil society in the sense of being a series of organized communities with varying degrees of converging interest. Aristotle’s political theory is markedly unlike some later, liberal theories, in that he does not think that the polis requires justification as a body threatening to infringe on antecedently existing human rights. Rather, he advances a form of political naturalism which treats human beings as by nature political animals, not only in the weak sense of being gregariously disposed, nor even in the sense of their merely benefiting from mutual commercial exchange, but in the strong sense of their flourishing as human beings at all only within the framework of an organized polis . The polis ‘comes into being for the sake of living, but it remains in existence for the sake of living well’ ( Pol . 1252b29–30; cf. 1253a31–37).

The polis is thus to be judged against the goal of promoting human happiness. A superior form of political organization enhances human life; an inferior form hampers and hinders it. One major question pursued in Aristotle’s Politics is thus structured by just this question: what sort of political arrangement best meets the goal of developing and augmenting human flourishing? Aristotle considers a fair number of differing forms of political organization, and sets most aside as inimical to the goal human happiness. For example, given his overarching framework, he has no difficulty rejecting contractarianism on the grounds that it treats as merely instrumental those forms of political activity which are in fact partially constitutive of human flourishing ( Pol . iii 9).

In thinking about the possible kinds of political organization, Aristotle relies on the structural observations that rulers may be one, few, or many, and that their forms of rule may be legitimate or illegitimate, as measured against the goal of promoting human flourishing ( Pol . 1279a26–31). Taken together, these factors yield six possible forms of government, three correct and three deviant:


	Kingship	Tyranny
	Aristocracy	Oligarchy
	Polity	Democracy

The correct are differentiated from the deviant by their relative abilities to realize the basic function of the polis : living well. Given that we prize human happiness, we should, insists Aristotle, prefer forms of political association best suited to this goal.

Necessary to the end of enhancing human flourishing, maintains Aristotle, is the maintenance of a suitable level of distributive justice. Accordingly, he arrives at his classification of better and worse governments partly by considerations of distributive justice. He contends, in a manner directly analogous to his attitude towards eudaimonia , that everyone will find it easy to agree to the proposition that we should prefer a just state to an unjust state, and even to the formal proposal that the distribution of justice requires treating equal claims similarly and unequal claims dissimilarly. Still, here too people will differ about what constitutes an equal or an unequal claim or, more generally, an equal or an unequal person. A democrat will presume that all citizens are equal, whereas an aristocrat will maintain that the best citizens are, quite obviously, superior to the inferior. Accordingly, the democrat will expect the formal constraint of justice to yield equal distribution to all, whereas the aristocrat will take for granted that the best citizens are entitled to more than the worst.

When sorting through these claims, Aristotle relies upon his own account of distributive justice, as advanced in Nicomachean Ethics v 3. That account is deeply meritocratic. He accordingly disparages oligarchs, who suppose that justice requires preferential claims for the rich, but also democrats, who contend that the state must boost liberty across all citizens irrespective of merit. The best polis has neither function: its goal is to enhance human flourishing, an end to which liberty is at best instrumental, and not something to be pursued for its own sake.

Still, we should also proceed with a sober eye on what is in fact possible for human beings, given our deep and abiding acquisitional propensities. Given these tendencies, it turns out that although deviant, democracy may yet play a central role in the sort of mixed constitution which emerges as the best form of political organization available to us. Inferior though it is to polity (that is, rule by the many serving the goal of human flourishing), and especially to aristocracy (government by the best humans, the aristoi , also dedicated to the goal of human flourishing), democracy, as the best amongst the deviant forms of government, may also be the most we can realistically hope to achieve.

For an in-depth discussion of Aristotle’s political theory, including his political naturalism, see the entry on Aristotle’s Politics .

Aristotle regards rhetoric and the arts as belonging to the productive sciences. As a family, these differ from the practical sciences of ethics and politics, which concern human conduct, and from the theoretical sciences, which aim at truth for its own sake. Because they are concerned with the creation of human products broadly conceived, the productive sciences include activities with obvious, artefactual products like ships and buildings, but also agriculture and medicine, and even, more nebulously, rhetoric, which aims at the production of persuasive speech ( Rhet . 1355b26; cf. Top. 149b5), and tragedy, which aims at the production of edifying drama ( Poet . 1448b16–17). If we bear in mind that Aristotle approaches all these activities within the broader context of his teleological explanatory framework, then at least some of the highly polemicized interpretative difficulties which have grown up around his works in this area, particularly the Poetics , may be sharply delimited.

One such controversy centers on the question of whether Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics are primarily descriptive or prescriptive works. [ 25 ] To the degree that they are indeed prescriptive, one may wonder whether Aristotle has presumed in these treatises to dictate to figures of the stature of Sophocles and Euripides how best to pursue their crafts. To some extent—but only to some extent—it may seem that he does. There are, at any rate, clearly prescriptive elements in both these texts. Still, he does not arrive at these recommendations a priori . Rather, it is plain that Aristotle has collected the best works of forensic speech and tragedy available to him, and has studied them to discern their more and less successful features. In proceeding in this way, he aims to capture and codify what is best in both rhetorical practice and tragedy, in each case relative to its appropriate productive goal.

The general goal of rhetoric is clear. Rhetoric, says Aristotle, ‘is the power to see, in each case, the possible ways to persuade’ ( Rhet . 1355b26). Different contexts, however, require different techniques. Thus, suggests Aristotle, speakers will usually find themselves in one of three contexts where persuasion is paramount: deliberative ( Rhet . i 4–8), epideictic ( Rhet . i 9), and judicial ( Rhet . i 10–14). In each of these contexts, speakers will have at their disposal three main avenues of persuasion: the character of the speaker, the emotional constitution of the audience, and the general argument ( logos ) of the speech itself ( Rhet . i 3). Rhetoric thus examines techniques of persuasion pursuant to each of these areas.

When discussing these techniques, Aristotle draws heavily upon topics treated in his logical, ethical, and psychological writings. In this way, the Rhetoric illuminates Aristotle’s writings in these comparatively theoretical areas by developing in concrete ways topics treated more abstractly elsewhere. For example, because a successful persuasive speech proceeds alert to the emotional state of the audience on the occasion of its delivery, Aristotle’s Rhetoric contains some of his most nuanced and specific treatments of the emotions. Heading in another direction, a close reading of the Rhetoric reveals that Aristotle treats the art of persuasion as closely akin to dialectic (see §4.3 above). Like dialectic, rhetoric trades in techniques that are not scientific in the strict sense (see §4.2 above), and though its goal is persuasion, it reaches its end best if it recognizes that people naturally find proofs and well-turned arguments persuasive ( Rhet . 1354a1, 1356a25, 1356a30). Accordingly, rhetoric, again like dialectic, begins with credible opinions ( endoxa ), though mainly of the popular variety rather than those endorsed most readily by the wise ( Top . 100a29–35; 104a8–20; Rhet . 1356b34). Finally, rhetoric proceeds from such opinions to conclusions which the audience will understand to follow by cogent patterns of inference ( Rhet . 1354a12–18, 1355a5–21). For this reason, too, the rhetorician will do well understand the patterns of human reasoning.

For more on Aristotle’s rhetoric, see the entry on Aristotle’s Rhetoric .

By highlighting and refining techniques for successful speech, the Rhetoric is plainly prescriptive—but only relative to the goal of persuasion. It does not, however, select its own goal or in any way dictate the end of persuasive speech: rather, the end of rhetoric is given by the nature of the craft itself. In this sense, the Rhetoric is like both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics in bearing the stamp of Aristotle’s broad and encompassing teleology.

The same holds true of the Poetics , but in this case the end is not easily or uncontroversially articulated. It is often assumed that the goal of tragedy is catharsis —the purification or purgation of the emotions aroused in a tragic performance. Despite its prevalence, as an interpretation of what Aristotle actually says in the Poetics this understanding is underdetermined at best. When defining tragedy in a general way, Aristotle claims:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious and complete, and which has some greatness about it. It imitates in words with pleasant accompaniments, each type belonging separately to the different parts of the work. It imitates people performing actions and does not rely on narration. It achieves, through pity and fear, the catharsis of these sorts of feelings. ( Poet . 1449b21–29)

Although he has been represented in countless works of scholarship as contending that tragedy is for the sake of catharsis , Aristotle is in fact far more circumspect. While he does contend that tragedy will effect or accomplish catharsis, in so speaking he does not use language which clearly implies that catharsis is in itself the function of tragedy. Although a good blender will achieve a blade speed of 36,000 rotations per minute, this is not its function; rather, it achieves this speed in service of its function, namely blending. Similarly, then, on one approach, tragedy achieves catharsis, though not because it is its function to do so. This remains so, even if it is integral to realizing its function that tragedy achieve catharsis—as it is equally integral that it makes us of imitation ( mimêsis ), and does so by using words along with pleasant accompaniments (namely, rhythm, harmony, and song; Poet . 1447b27).

Unfortunately, Aristotle is not completely forthcoming on the question of the function of tragedy. One clue towards his attitude comes from a passage in which he differentiates tragedy from historical writing:

The poet and the historian differ not in that one writes in meter and the other not; for one could put the writings of Herodotus into verse and they would be history none the less, with or without meter. The difference resides in this: the one speaks of what has happened, and the other of what might be. Accordingly, poetry is more philosophical and more momentous than history. The poet speaks more of the universal, while the historian speaks of particulars. It is universal that when certain things turn out a certain way someone will in all likelihood or of necessity act or speak in a certain way—which is what the poet, though attaching particular names to the situation, strives for ( Poet . 1451a38–1451b10).

In characterizing poetry as more philosophical, universal, and momentous than history, Aristotle praises poets for their ability to assay deep features of human character, to dissect the ways in which human fortune engages and tests character, and to display how human foibles may be amplified in uncommon circumstances. We do not, however, reflect on character primarily for entertainment value. Rather, and in general, Aristotle thinks of the goal of tragedy in broadly intellectualist terms: the function of tragedy is ‘learning, that is, figuring out what each thing is’ ( Poet . 1448b16–17). In Aristotle’s view, tragedy teaches us about ourselves.

That said, catharsis is undoubtedly a key concept in Aristotle’s Poetics , one which, along with imitation ( mimêsis ), has generated enormous controversy. [ 26 ] These controversies center around three poles of interpretation: the subject of catharsis, the matter of the catharsis, and the nature of catharsis. To illustrate what is meant: on a naïve understanding of catharsis—which may be correct despite its naïveté—the audience (the subject) undergoes catharsis by having the emotions (the matter) of pity and fear it experiences purged (the nature). By varying just these three possibilities, scholars have produced a variety of interpretations—that it is the actors or even the plot of the tragedy which are the subjects of catharsis, that the purification is cognitive or structural rather than emotional, and that catharsis is purification rather than purgation. On this last contrast, just as we might purify blood by filtering it, rather than purging the body of blood by letting it, so we might refine our emotions, by cleansing them of their more unhealthy elements, rather than ridding ourselves of the emotions by purging them altogether. The difference is considerable, since on one view the emotions are regarded as in themselves destructive and so to be purged, while on the other, the emotions may be perfectly healthy, even though, like other psychological states, they may be improved by refinement. The immediate context of the Poetics does not by itself settle these disputes conclusively.

Aristotle says comparatively more about the second main concept of the Poetics , imitation ( mimêsis ). Although less controversial than catharsis, Aristotle’s conception of mimêsis has also been debated. [ 27 ] Aristotle thinks that imitation is a deeply ingrained human proclivity. Like political association, he contends, mimêsis is natural . We engage in imitation from an early age, already in language learning by aping competent speakers as we learn, and then also later, in the acquisition of character by treating others as role models. In both these ways, we imitate because we learn and grow by imitation, and for humans, learning is both natural and a delight ( Poet . 1148b4–24). This same tendency, in more sophisticated and complex ways, leads us into the practice of drama. As we engage in more advanced forms of mimêsis , imitation gives way to representation and depiction , where we need not be regarded as attempting to copy anyone or anything in any narrow sense of the term. For tragedy does not set out merely to copy what is the case, but rather, as we have seen in Aristotle’s differentiation of tragedy from history, to speak of what might be, to engage universal themes in a philosophical manner, and to enlighten an audience by their depiction. So, although mimêsis is at root simple imitation, as it comes to serve the goals of tragedy, it grows more sophisticated and powerful, especially in the hands of those poets able to deploy it to good effect.

Aristotle’s influence is difficult to overestimate. After his death, his school, the Lyceum, carried on for some period of time, though precisely how long is unclear. In the century immediately after his death, Aristotle’s works seem to have fallen out of circulation; they reappear in the first century B.C.E., after which time they began to be disseminated, at first narrowly, but then much more broadly. They eventually came to form the backbone of some seven centuries of philosophy, in the form of the commentary tradition , much of it original philosophy carried on in a broadly Aristotelian framework. They also played a very significant, if subordinate role, in the Neoplatonic philosophy of Plotinus and Porphyry . Thereafter, from the sixth through the twelfth centuries, although the bulk of Aristotle’s writings were lost to the West, they received extensive consideration in Byzantine Philosophy , and in Arabic Philosophy, where Aristotle was so prominent that be became known simply as The First Teacher (see the entry on the influence of Arabic and Islamic philosophy on the Latin West ). In this tradition, the notably rigorous and illuminating commentaries of Avicenna and Averroes interpreted and developed Aristotle’s views in striking ways. These commentaries in turn proved exceedingly influential in the earliest reception of the Aristotelian corpus into the Latin West in the twelfth century.

Among Aristotle’s greatest exponents during the early period of his reintroduction to the West, Albertus Magnus , and above all his student Thomas Aquinas , sought to reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian thought. Some Aristotelians disdain Aquinas as bastardizing Aristotle, while some Christians disown Aquinas as pandering to pagan philosophy. Many others in both camps take a much more positive view, seeing Thomism as a brilliant synthesis of two towering traditions; arguably, the incisive commentaries written by Aquinas towards the end of his life aim not so much at synthesis as straightforward exegesis and exposition, and in these respects they have few equals in any period of philosophy. Partly due to the attention of Aquinas, but for many other reasons as well, Aristotelian philosophy set the framework for the Christian philosophy of the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, though, of course, that rich period contains a broad range of philosophical activity, some more and some less in sympathy with Aristotelian themes. To see the extent of Aristotle’s influence, however, it is necessary only to recall that the two concepts forming the so-called binarium famosissimum (“the most famous pair”) of that period, namely universal hylomorphism and the doctrine of the plurality of forms, found their first formulations in Aristotle’s texts.

Interest in Aristotle continued unabated throughout the renaissance in the form of Renaissance Aristotelianism . The dominant figures of this period overlap with the last flowerings of Medieval Aristotelian Scholasticism, which reached a rich and highly influential close in the figure of Suárez, whose life in turn overlaps with Descartes. From the end of late Scholasticism, the study of Aristotle has undergone various periods of relative neglect and intense interest, but has been carried forward unabated down to the present day.

Today, philosophers of various stripes continue to look to Aristotle for guidance and inspiration in many different areas, ranging from the philosophy of mind to theories of the infinite, though perhaps Aristotle’s influence is seen most overtly and avowedly in the resurgence of virtue ethics which began in the last half of the twentieth century. It seems safe at this stage to predict that Aristotle’s stature is unlikely to diminish anytime in the foreseeable future. If it is any indication of the direction of things to come, a quick search of the present Encyclopedia turns up more citations to ‘Aristotle’ and ‘Aristotelianism’ than to any other philosopher or philosophical movement. Only Plato comes close.

This bibliography limits itself to translations general works on Aristotle, and works cited in this entry. Please see the subjective-specific bibliographies in the entries under General and Special Topics for references to works pertinent to more specific areas of Aristotle’s philosophy.

The Standard English Translation of Aristotle’s Complete Works into English is:

Barnes, J., ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle , Volumes I and II, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

An excellent translation of selections of Aristotle’s works is:

Irwin, T. and Fine., G., Aristotle: Selections, Translated with Introduction, Notes, and Glossary , Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995.

The best set of English translations with commentaries is the Clarendon Aristotle Series:

Ackrill, J., Categories and De Interpretatione , translated with notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.
Annas, J., Metaphysics Books M and N , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Balme, D., De Partibus Animalium I and De Generatione Animalium I , (with passages from Book II. 1–3), translated with an introduction and notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Barnes, J., Posterior Analytics , second edition, translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Bostock, D., Metaphysics Books Z and H , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Charlton, W., Physics Books I and II , translated with introduction, commentary, Note on Recent Work, and revised Bibliography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Graham, D., Physics, Book VIII , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Hamlyn, D., De Anima II and III, with Passages from Book I , translated with a commentary, and with a review of recent work by Christopher Shields, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Hussey, E., Physics Books III and IV , translated with an introduction and notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983; new impression with supplementary material, 1993.
Judson, L., Metaphysics Book Λ , edited, translated with an introduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Keyt, D., Politics, Books V and VI Animals , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Kirwan, C., Metaphysics: Books gamma, delta, and epsilon , second edition, translated with notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Kraut, R., Politics Books VII and VIII , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Lennox, J., On the Parts of Animals , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Madigan, A., Aristotle: Metaphysics Books B and K 1–2 , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Makin, S., Metaphysics Theta , translated with an introduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Pakaluk, M., Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII and IX , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Robinson, R., Politics: Books III and IV , translated with a commentary by Richard Robinson; with a supplementary essay by David Keyt, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Saunders, T., Politics: Books I and II , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Shields, Christopher, De Anima , translated with an introduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Smith, R., Topics Books I and VIII , With excerpts from related texts, translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Striker, G., Prior Analytics , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Taylor, C., Nicomachean Ethics, Books II-IV , translated with an introduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Williams, C., De Generatione et Corruptione , translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Woods, M., Eudemian Ethics Books I, II, and VIII , second edition, edited, and translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

1. Comprehensive Introductions to Aristotle

Ackrill, J., Aristotle the Philosopher , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Jaeger, W., Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of his Development , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934.
Lear, J., Aristotle: the Desire to Understand , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Ross, W. D., Aristotle , London: Methuen and Co., 1923.
Shields, C., Aristotle 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2014.

2. General Guide Books to Aristotle

Barnes, J., The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Anagnostopoulos, G., The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle , Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
Shields, C., The Oxford Handbook on Aristotle , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

3. Aristotle’s Life

Natali, C., Aristotle: His Life and School , D. Hutchinson (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Annas, J., 1982, ‘Aristotle on inefficient causes,’ Philosophical Quarterly , 32: 311–326.
Bakker, Paul J. J. M., 2007, ‘Natural Philosophy, Metaphysics, or Something in Between: Agostino Nifo, Pietro Pompanazzi, and Marcantonio Genua on the Nature and Place of the Science of Soul,’ in J. J. M. Bakker and Johannes M. M. H. Thijssen (eds.), Mind, Cognition, and Representation: The Tradition of Commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima , London: Ashgate, pp. 151–177.
Barnes, Jonathan, 1994, Posterior Analytics , second edition, translated with a commentary, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Biondi, Paolo C. (ed. and trans.), (2004), Aristotle: Posterior Analytics ii 19 , Paris: Librairie-Philosophique-J-Vrin.
Bostock, David, 1980/2006, ‘Aristotle’s Account of Time,‘ in Space, Time, Matter, and Form: Essays on Aristotle’s Physics , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 135–157.
Charles, David, 2001, “Teleological Causation in the Physics ,” in L. Judson (ed.), Aristotle’s Physics: A Collection of Essays , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 101–128.
Cleary, John, 1994, ‘ Phainomena in Aristotle’s Philosophic Method,’ International Journal of Philosophical Studies , 2: 61–97.
Coope, Ursula, 2005, Time for Aristotle: Physics IV 10–14 , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Duarte, Shane, 2014, ‘Aristotle’s Theology and its Relation to the Science of Being qua Being,’ Apeiron , 40: 267–318
Frede, M., 1980, ‘The Original Notion of Cause,’ in M. Schofield, M. Burnyeat, and J. Barnes (ed.), Doubt and Dogmatism , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 217–249.
Furley, D. J., ‘What Kind of Cause is Aristotle’s Final Cause?,’ in M. Frede and G. Stricker (eds.), Rationality in Greek Thought , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 59–79.
Gill, M. L., ‘Aristotle’s Metaphysics Reconsidered,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy , 43 (2005): 223–251.
Gotthelf, A., 1987, ‘Aristotle’s Conception of Final Causality,’ in A. Gotthelf and J. G. Lennox (eds.), Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 204–242.
Grote, George, 1880, Aristotle , London: Thoemmes Continuum.
Halliwell, Stephen, 1986, Aristotle’s Poetics , Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Hocutt, M., 1974, ‘Aristotle’s Four Becauses.’ Philosophy , 49: 385–399.
Irwin, Terence, 1981, ‘Homonymy in Aristotle,’ Review of Metaphysics , 34: 523–544.
–––, 1988, Aristotle’s First Principles , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, Monte Ransom, 2005, Aristotle on Teleology , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kraut, Richard, 1979, ‘Two Conceptions of Happiness, Philosophical Review , 88: 167–197.
Lewis, Frank A., 2004, ‘Aristotle on the Homonymy of Being,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 68: 1–36.
Loux, Michael, 1973, ‘Aristotle on the Transcendentals,’ Phronesis , 18: 225–239.
Moravcsik, J., 1975, ‘“ Aitia ” as generative factor in Aristotle’s philosophy,’ Dialogue , 14: 622–638.
Owen, G. E. L., 1960, ‘Logic and Metaphysics in Some Earlier Works of Aristotle,’ in I. During and G. E. L. Owen (eds.), Plato and Aristotle in the Mid-Fourth Century , Göteborg: Almquist and Wiksell, pp. 163–190.
–––, 1961/1986, ‘ Tithenai ta phainomena ,’ Logic, Science and Dialectic , London: Duckworth, pp. 239–251.
Owens, Joseph, 1978, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics , 3 rd edition, Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
Patzig, Gunther, 1979, ‘Theology and Ontology in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in J. Barnes, M. Schofied, and R. Sorabji (eds.), Articles on Aristotle , Volume 3: Metaphysics, London: Duckworth, pp. 33–49.
Pellegrin, Pierre, 1996/2003, ‘Aristotle,’ in J. Brunschwig and G. E. R. Lloyd (eds.), A Guide to Greek Thought , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 32–53.
Ross, W. D., 1923, Aristotle , London: Methuen and Co.
Sauvé Meyer, S., 1992, ‘Aristotle, Teleology, and Reduction,’ Philosophical Review , 101: 791–825.
Shields, Christopher, 1999, Order in Multiplicity: Homonymy in the Philosophy of Aristotle , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
–––, 2014, Aristotle , London: Routledge.
Shute, Richard, 1888, On the Process by which the Aristotelian Writings Arrived at their Present Form , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ward, Julie K., 2008, Aristotle on Homonymy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zeller, Eduard, 1883/1955, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy , rev. by W. Nestle, trans. L. Palmer, London: Routledge.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Aristotle , maintained by Marc Cohen (Philosophy/University of Washington).
Aristotle , a podcast in the History of Philosophy without Gaps project, overseen by Peter Adamson.

Acknowledgments

I thank Thomas Ainsworth, John Cooper, Fred Miller, Nathanael Stein, Edward Zalta, and an anonymous reader for SEP for their valuable assistance in the preparation of this entry. Additionally, I thank the twenty or so undergraduates in Cornell and Oxford Universities who provided instructive feedback on earlier drafts.

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

How Aristotle Views Happiness Essay

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Aristotle views happiness from various perspectives. For instance, the science of politics is perceived to possess the highest good according to Nichomachean Ethics in book one, section two.

Aristotle notes that “the attainment of the good for one man alone is, to be sure, a source of satisfaction; yet to secure it for a nation and for states is nobler and more divine.” In order to be a bit reasonable and fair enough in his assertion, he apparently does not give too much attention to this claim because he later notes that happiness can be considered to be a destination on its own.

He also clarifies that “the good of man is an activity of the soul in conformity with excellence or virtue”. Hence, attaining happiness requires an individual to be virtuous and also be in good terms with others. This implies that happiness can be attained by living a life full of virtues. The latter statement is apparently sensible even when judged from various perspectives of happiness.

Nonetheless, section nine of the book injects a different view altogether when politics is correlated with happiness. He observes that “our results also tally with what we said at the outset: for we stated that the end of politics is the best of ends; and the main concern of politics is to engender a certain character in the citizen and to make them good.”

At this point, Aristotle seems to be offering a contradicting statement in comparison to his earlier assertion. For instance, how can safeguarding good for a country be a more gallant and divine undertaking if the highest good of an individual is to obtain happiness? The desire to make citizens to feel fine is the key role of the state.

Therefore, it is better to improve the state than secure the well being of an individual. In addition, common beliefs have also been presumed by Aristotle to be integral in the process of achieving happiness. He elucidates that there are several wise people who share certain ideological beliefs that eventually make them happy.

Whether such beliefs are formidable or not is a completely different concern altogether. He expounds by noting that the various belief systems may as well be dialectic in nature and therefore significant to just a small fragment of a given population. In this case, Aristotle tends to approach the concept of happiness according to the Socratic’s perspectives bearing in mind that there are myriads of questions that he tends to come up with in the common beliefs.

Finally, Aristotle brings out the significance of justice in achieving happiness by commenting that “between friends there is no need for justice, but people who are just still need the quality of friendship; and indeed friendliness is considered to be justice in the fullest sense”. Although Aristotle’s list of virtues does not contain the aspects of justice and friendship, he posits in book eight that justice is the most important virtue needed by an individual in order to attain happiness.

He adds that justice can be improved or enhanced in cases where good friendship prevails among people. Needless to say, Aristotle has managed to convince the readers of his work that justice should always prevail if individual happiness or the overall well being of a state is to be realized.

Aristotle, His Life and Philosophical Ideas
The Soul Ideas by Aristotle
Aristotle’s Account of Pleasure
Aristotle and Modern Work Relationships
Aristotle on Civic Relationships
Aristotle and Relationship at Work: Outline
Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
Theory between Economics and Ethics. Adam Smith 'Problem'
John Locke: His Ideas in The Second Treatise and Contemporary Development
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Analysis of Aristotle’s Concept of Virtue Ethics and Happiness

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Action, Contemplation, and Happiness

An Essay on Aristotle

C. D. C. Reeve

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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.

The title of this book might suggest that it is an essay dealing exclusively with themes in Aristotle’s Ethics , but this study by Reeve is actually a comprehensive analysis of themes in Aristotle’s biology, psychology, physics, metaphysics, and more. It encompasses Aristotle’s remarks on the generation of animals, through his teleological and hylomorphic physics, into his analysis of desiderative and rational (practical and theoretical) functions of human souls. Reeve weaves all of these themes together toward the final end and purpose of all things, namely, union with and contemplation of pure form—God. The end of all actions and activities of hylomorphic, sublunary substances is ultimately to shed their matter and be absorbed into ‘thought itself’ (God). When looking in this way at happiness, the human end, the apparent dichotomy of ‘action’ and ‘contemplation’ dissolves into one. Aristotle’s Physics , Ethics , and Metaphysics become united. Reeve displays awareness of all the most recent scholarship on Aristotle. His translations, interpretations, and explanations of difficult passages are lucid and convincing. This is one of the finest recent publications on Aristotle. —P. A. Streveler, Choice

I like this book a lot. Reeve covers lots of Aristotle, gets the reader involved and wanting to see how it all goes together, and in the end takes us back to the beginning, so that we see everything again in a new way. —Julia Annas, University of Arizona

Reeve’s marvelous new book— Action, Contemplation, and Happiness —takes up the notions central to Aristotle’s ethics and political philosophy and embeds them appropriately and deeply in Aristotle’s epistemology, metaphysics, physics, psychology, and theology. Reeve’s analyses are far-reaching and subtle, and he brings new illumination to longstanding controversies. This book will be essential reading for any student of Aristotle’s ethics or of Aristotle and, more generally, for any student of ancient ethics. —Christopher Bobonich, Stanford University

Action, Contemplation, and Happiness is an important contribution to Aristotelian studies, lively, accessible, well-informed and up to date, with independent readings of particular passages and a distinctive overall perspective, placing Aristotle’s ethical views in the wider context of his metaphysical and theological ideas. It deserves, and will fully repay, close attention. —David Charles, University of Oxford

Reeve’s new book will be extraordinarily helpful and influential for any number of different sorts of readers, including non-specialists with a serious philosophical interest in Aristotle (like me). Everything of importance in Aristotle’s discussions of what sorts of things human beings can do, and what sorts of beings they are (especially what counts for them as happiness and the greatest happiness), is laid out in lapidary prose, systematically interconnected, interpreted with great concision as well as remarkable breadth, and with a focus always on the deepest philosophical issues. The book is a masterful achievement. —Robert B. Pippin, University of Chicago

Reeve’s new engagement with Aristotelian ethics is, characteristically, as ambitious in scope as it is skillful in execution. With such diverse domains as biology, epistemology, ontology, theology and political theory fused into a single illuminating narrative, Aristotle’s focal values are here showcased, as they too rarely are, in their full philosophical context. —David Sedley, University of Cambridge

A comprehensive account of Aristotle’s thought, masterful and philosophically astute, this book could have come only from a scholar who has spent much of his life contemplating the texts of this great philosopher. It is clear and elegant, welcoming to beginners and informative to old Aristotle hands. —Paul Woodruff, The University of Texas at Austin

C. D. C. Reeve is Delta Kappa Epsilon Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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📚 Happiness According to Aristotle
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Happiness According to Aristotle: Explanation and Examples
Learn how Aristotle defined happiness as eudaimonia, a state of flourishing and well-being that comes from practicing virtues and using reason. Explore the types, examples, and controversies of his happiness theory, and how it relates to virtue ethics and the Golden Mean.
Happiness According to Aristotle
A new interpretation of Aristotle's theory of happiness, which claims that theoretical contemplation is the highest human activity, but requires practical wisdom and virtuous engagement. The article addresses the problems of reconciling theoretical and practical activities in the ideal human life and of distinguishing human and divine contemplation.
What can Aristotle teach us about the routes to happiness?
Aristotle argued that happiness (eudaimonia) is not a state of mind or a sequence of pleasures, but the fulfilment of human potential through virtuous action. Learn how his ethical system of peripatetic philosophy can guide you to live well in the modern world.
Aristotle Ethics Of Happiness Philosophy Essay
Aristotle Ethics Of Happiness Philosophy Essay. In Ethics, Aristotle argues the highest end is the human good, and claims that the highest end pursued in action is happiness. Aristotle also claims that happiness is achieved only by living a virtuous life - "our definition is in harmony with those who say that happiness is virtue, or a ...
The Philosophy of Happiness in Life (+ Aristotle's View)
Learn how Aristotle defined happiness as eudaimonia, or "activity expressing virtue", and how he distinguished four levels of happiness based on the degree of virtue and reason. Explore the philosophy of happiness in life, from ancient to modern times, and get practical tips to boost wellbeing.
Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle's Nicomachean
The fundamental subject of the Nicomachean Ethics is human happiness, i.e., eudaimonia. From the very beginning of the treatise Aristotle links happiness with the ends of human action and therefore also with human goodness. He proposes early on that finality and self-sufficiency are two defining features of happiness.
Aristotle's Concept of Happiness
The essay makes proof of how the flow state's conception of happiness is similar to Aristotle's conception of happiness. Aristotle's concept of happiness is an expression of virtue that is similar to the flow state, happiness is a combination of the baseline level where basic needs are fulfilled and a broader area managed by an individual.
Action, Contemplation, and Happiness: An Essay On Aristotle
In Action, Contemplation, and Happiness, C. D. C. Reeve presents an ambitious, three-hundred-page capsule of Aristotle's philosophy organized around the ideas of action, contemplation, and happiness.He aims to show that practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom are very similar virtues, and therefore, despite what scholars have often thought, there are few difficult questions about how virtuous ...
"Happiness and Aristotle's Definition of" Eudaimonia
The paper analyzes Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia, which is often translated as happiness, and argues that it is a good guide for living well. It shows how eudaimonia is an activity of virtue, not a state of mind, and how it requires external goods and a complete life.
Happy Lives and the Highest Good: an essay on Aristotle's Nicomachean
Most of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics discusses the life of moral virtue, exercised in accordance with practical reasoning, a life taken in the opening passages to be necessary for happiness or eudaimonia, though not sufficient, since some measure of external goods is also required.This is the position regarded as Aristotelian in ancient ethical debate throughout the following period.
Happiness
There are roughly two philosophical literatures on "happiness," each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses 'happiness' as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to 'depression' or 'tranquility'.
PDF Aristotle on Happiness
Learn how Aristotle defines happiness as the ultimate purpose of human existence and the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. Explore his theory of happiness, the hierarchy of nature, and the role of reason and virtue in human flourishing.
Action, Contemplation, and Happiness: an Essay on Aristotle
The focus of this carefully structured monograph is Aristotle's philosophy of human action, especially in its normative dimension. Much like in his previous monographs on Aristotle's metaphysics ( Substantial Knowledge, 2000) and Aristotle's ethics ( The Practices of Reason, 1992), Reeve strives to situate his main topics within the widest possible Aristotelian framework.
Aristotle: Pioneer of Happiness
Learn how Aristotle defined happiness as the ultimate purpose of human life and the meaning of eudaimonia. Explore his views on virtue, friendship, the golden mean, and the role of education in achieving happiness.
Aristotle's View of Ethics and Happiness Essay
Happiness is characterized as the constant consideration of generally accepted facts as indicated by the philosopher (Aristotle et al., 2004). It is the most noteworthy great and the end toward which all human action is coordinated. Aristotle recognizes that such factors can influence it as material conditions, place in the public eye, and even ...
Aristotle
Given that we prize human happiness, we should, insists Aristotle, prefer forms of political association best suited to this goal. Necessary to the end of enhancing human flourishing, maintains Aristotle, is the maintenance of a suitable level of distributive justice. ... Time, Matter, and Form: Essays on Aristotle's Physics, Oxford: Oxford ...
How Aristotle views happiness
How Aristotle Views Happiness Essay. Aristotle views happiness from various perspectives. For instance, the science of politics is perceived to possess the highest good according to Nichomachean Ethics in book one, section two. Aristotle notes that "the attainment of the good for one man alone is, to be sure, a source of satisfaction; yet to ...
Aristotle And Concept Of Happiness Philosophy Essay
Aristotle proposes that the single idea of good must establish these three claims: Idea of Good Claim 1) We have ends which we choose for themselves. Idea of Good Claim 2) That there is only one such end. Idea of Good Claim 3) That end is happiness. He argues for Idea of Good Claim 1) as follows (Irwin 173): 1.1.
Analysis of Aristotle's Concept of Virtue Ethics and Happiness
Happiness is a world that is often characterized as subjective and or synonymous with success which too can be just as personal as the word happiness. However, Aristotle would describe happiness with an activity. An activity that pushes us toward a state of Eudaimonia.
Action, Contemplation, and Happiness
The title of this book might suggest that it is an essay dealing exclusively with themes in Aristotle's Ethics, but this study by Reeve is actually a comprehensive analysis of themes in Aristotle's biology, psychology, physics, metaphysics, and more.It encompasses Aristotle's remarks on the generation of animals, through his teleological and hylomorphic physics, into his analysis of ...

Happiness According to Aristotle

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The Philosophy of Happiness in Life (+ Aristotle’s View)

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