This collection brings together eleven new papers on a range of topics in Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, making a significant and timely contribution to the growing literature on the treatise. The volume’s coverage ranges evenly through the topics Aristotle treats in that work, except for the dedicated treatments of friendship and luck, which, the introduction explains, have been subjects of recent scholarly interest elsewhere. Overall, the collection focuses needed attention on neglected topics and contains contributions worthy of further engagement and scrutiny.
Why consider the Eudemian Ethics (EE), not just the better-known Nicomachean Ethics (EN), which most commentators now regard to be Aristotle’s most authoritative and mature ethical work? This question hangs over the collection. The volume adopts no single answer. Each contribution focuses on a topic or argument in the EE, in the service of some broader, often comparative conclusion about its relation to the EN.
Six of the papers (some more, others less explicitly) approach the relation of the two treatises through a familiar developmentalist lens, according to which the EN represents Aristotle’s mature or considered view on an ethical topic, while the EE is an earlier stage lacking the detail and depth characteristic of the mature presentation. So, implicitly, studying the EE is valuable more for its ability to reveal the course of Aristotle’s development as a thinker than for its promise to uncover some aspect of his considered views.
Dwelling on the first such chapter will be instructive. In Chapter 3 F. Buddensiek argues that the Eudemian function argument lacks, while the Nicomachean argument includes, an identification of happiness as a specifically rational activity. In the EE the restriction to the part of the soul with reason occurs after the function argument (1219b28–41), and the notion of function (ἔργον) is not mentioned to support this restriction. Since the EN argues for the specification of happiness as a rational activity within its function argument, the Nicomachean function argument emerges as the mature presentation.
Buddensiek’s contribution follows a pattern common among such developmentalist chapters: begin by observing differences between the two treatments of a given topic; then, notice gaps in the Eudemian treatment and advantages of or details unique to the Nicomachean treatment; finally, conclude in favour of a developmentalist explanation for these differences. The gaps of the EE and advantages of the EN serve as evidence that the EE is earlier and the EN is later. Yet Buddensiek gives no sustained argument for why the Nicomachean specification of the human good as rational activity makes its function argument philosophically stronger and more mature, and not just more specific. Indeed, Aristotle’s stated reason for this specification is notoriously troubled in the literature: why should the fact that some capacity is peculiar to humans entail that it should be part of their highest good? If this inference is bad, then would not the better version of Aristotle’s argument be the version that does without it?
This points to a perennial problem for developmentalists: establishing which of two treatments of the same topic is more mature is a tricky business. After all, what would constitute evidence that one treatment is more mature than another? The more distinctive view? Distinctive in which respects? The philosophically stronger view? Stronger by whose lights? And why think the more distinctive or stronger treatment is the later one? Finally, could there be other explanations for these differences? In the introduction the editor Di Basilio describes a possible alternative to developmentalism: the two treatises were written for different audiences. Could differences in the articulations of a doctrine or the inclusion or omission of details be explained by the needs of each treatise’s intended audience? This alternative is not seriously developed, weighed, compared or excluded in the developmentalist chapters.
The other papers pursuing this developmentalist line are structurally similar to the first. In Chapter 4 M. Zingano notes that the last definition of virtue in EE 2.10 includes, but the last definition of virtue in EN 2.6 excludes, references to pleasure and pain. Given the Nicomachean treatments of pleasure and criticisms of definitions lacking qualifications (1104b24–26) – qualifications absent from the EE –, Zingano concludes that the Nicomachean definition of virtue is more mature.
In Chapter 5 Di Basilio argues that the EN contains, but the EE lacks, an argument that virtue and vice, as states, are voluntary. Di Basilio cautiously concludes that the EN is more mature.
Three chapters on topics in EE 4–6 (identical to EN 5–7) argue that these common books are better integrated into the EN than the EE, so that the former is the more mature and complete work. In Chapter 7 M. Lee argues that the uniquely Eudemian books lack awareness of and use different vocabulary from most of the EE 4 (= EN 5) treatment of justice, but Lee concedes that the EE 4.8 (= EN 5.8) account of voluntariness is closer to the Eudemian treatment.
In Chapter 8 C. Rowe argues that the uniquely Eudemian books do not treat sophia as distinct from phronêsis (contrary to EE 5/EN 6). The Eudemian references to sophia appear to refer broadly to intellectual accomplishment without specifically picking out theoretical contemplation. EE 8.3 is problematic for Rowe’s thesis, since it seems to make the theoretical contemplation (θεωρία) of god a standard for certain actions (1249b19), but Rowe cites EE 2.10, 1226b26–7 for a practical, not theoretical, sense of the word θεωρητικόν.
In Chapter 10 D. Frede notes that, although EN 2 repeats that there are pleasures and pains concerning actions and affections, the EE 2 account only associates pleasures and pains with affections. The EN contains the mature view, since its unique Book 10 discussion treats pleasure as an activity rather than a process and associates pleasure with actions, not just affections. Frede conjectures that EN 7.11–15 (= EE 6.11–15) was a standalone treatment initially written not for inclusion in either treatise. Frede’s documentation of peculiarities of each treatise’s treatment of pleasure is illuminating but incomplete. Frede takes it to be a significant difference between the treatises that the EE only discusses the pleasures and pains of affections, not also of actions (p. 166). Yet this would be a difference merely of emphasis, not doctrine, if Aristotle generally presupposed that actions typically begin or co-occur with affections (cf. De motu an. 8, 702a15–19). More plainly, Aristotle’s statement that οὐ γίνεται δὲ ἡδονὴ μὴ ἐν πράξει (1249a20) is a problem for Frede’s claim. This brief discussion of pleasure in EE 8.3 (1249a18–22) is central to the treatise’s framing interest in correcting the Delian inscription (1214a1–7), yet is omitted in Frede’s discussion, which considers the Nicomachean treatment of that inscription. Additionally, Frede’s generalisation that ‘in the EE pleasure and pain are assigned only to the soul’s non-rational part, not to the controlling rational part’ (p. 165) may need qualification in the light of Aristotle’s statement that αἱ πρόσφατοι θεωρίαι καὶ μαθήσεις αἰσθηταὶ μάλιστα τῷ ἡδεῖ (1237a23–25). Frede mostly passes over the lengthy description of pleasure’s relation to goods in EE 7.2, which is unfortunate because this discussion is unique to the treatise and underexplored in the literature.
The other five chapters seek to understand Eudemian passages and arguments largely on their own terms, outside of the developmentalist paradigm. In Chapter 2 C. Natali carefully compares proems of Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle’s two ethical treatises, noting stylistic similarities and differences. Natali argues that EE 1.6 unites elements of both the scientific method of the Posterior Analytics and the dialectical method of the Topics and addresses a philosophical audience. The Nicomachean proem is written to be easier for a lay audience to follow.
In Chapter 11 G. Bonasio argues that kalokagathia is Aristotle’s name for complete virtue, rejecting other candidates such as megalopsychia, dikaiosunê, phronêsis and sophia.
Two contributions revisit previously settled textual questions, mounting formidable cases against commonly accepted textual emendations. In Chapter 6 K.M. Nielsen focuses on the text of an initial account of prohairesis at EE 2.10, 1226b6–8: ἡ γὰρ προαίρεσις αἵρεσις μὲν ἐστιν, οὐχ ἁπλῶς δέ, ἀλλ᾽ ἑτέρου … The primary manuscript L has πρὸς ἑτέρον, while the primary manuscripts PC (and, in fact, the recently discovered B) have πρὸς ἑτέρου [τοῦτο]. Most editions, including the OCT, emend the PC text to make it grammatical, printing πρὸ ἑτέρου. Historically, the motivation for the emended PC text over the already grammatical L text seems to have been a desire to assimilate the Eudemian text to the parallel Nicomachean discussion at 1112a13–17 (πρὸ ἑτέρου). But changing the text to establish a Nicomachean parallel is unjustifiable if there is an already grammatical, philosophically coherent reading from L. So, Nielson reads πρὸς ἑτέρον, concluding that the Eudemian account implies a teleological (πρός) notion of prohairesis, which adds a new option to the long-standing interpretive debate over the Nicomachean notion of prohairesis.
In Chapter 12 T.H. Irwin focuses on Aristotle’s criticism of Spartan virtue in EE 8.3. According to all the primary manuscripts, Aristotle says that, since the Spartans think they should have virtue for the sake of natural goods, they are ἄγριοι (1249a1); but editors and commentators almost all read ἀγαθοί instead, introducing further textual changes at 1249a2 and a13 to make the argument work. Such significant meaning-changing emendations could only be justified if the passage had no coherent argument otherwise, but Irwin proposes to read the argument of EE 8.3 to make sense of the manuscript reading, so that Aristotle is not offering Spartan virtue as a merely-good intermediate between the vicious and the kaloi k’agathoi, but rather simply as wild or untamed, as they are in Politics 7–8.
Irwin’s elegant proposal is sure to be controversial. In Chapter 9 J. Müller offers a study of self-control/lack of control (ἐγκράτεια/ἀκρασία) in the EE, especially EE 2.7–8. Even though the self-controlled agent decides correctly and for praiseworthy reasons, Müller argues that they nevertheless lack the correct concept of the good life, drawing an analogy to the Spartan of EE 8.3. Whereas the Spartan pursues honour as their ultimate goal, strictly within the confines of virtue, Müller proposes that the self-controlled agent pursues bodily pleasure as an ultimate goal, though also strictly according to virtue. This reading understands the Spartans as somewhat good though not fully virtuous, requiring the emendation to ἀγαθοί at 1249a1, for which Müller offers arguments at p. 154 n. 21 – a starting-point for assessing Irwin’s interpretation.
The volume’s careful treatments make important observations and raise interesting questions about the two treatises that deserve further scholarly attention. The volume, while contributing to the dominant developmentalist paradigm in understanding Aristotle’s ethical treatises, also shows how inquiry into the EE could be fruitful outside of it.
