Akin to Metaphysics 12, Nicomachean Ethics 10 (Eth. Nic. 10) remains a crowning achievement in Aristotle's corpus. Despite Aristotle's systematic construction of the preceding books of Eth. Nic. into a series of treatises focusing on the nature of virtue, happiness and pleasure, M. Nussbaum (The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Ancient Greek Tragedy and Philosophy [1986]), C. Natali (Analysis and Commentary of Nicomachean Ethics Book X, Project Archelogos: http://archelogos.com/xml/toc/toc-enx.htm [2005]), A.A. Long (‘Aristotle on Eudaimonia, Nous, and Divinity’, in J. Miller [ed.], Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: a Critical Guide [2011]) and E. Brown (‘Aristotle on the Choice of Lives: Two Concepts of Self Sufficiency’, in P. Destreé and M. Zingano [edd.], Theoria: Studies in the Status and Meaning of Contemplation in Aristotle's Ethics [2013]) have identified a number of perplexing lacunae questioning the relative unity of Eth. Nic. 10, including the abrupt introduction of the contemplative activity of the philosopher as separated from practical human concerns in the closing chapters. In addition, the precise relationship between the themes of pleasure, happiness and the concluding protreptic to becoming good is not without controversy and has provoked multiple interpretations ranging from a functionalist account of the metaphysics of pleasure in C. Shields (‘Perfecting Pleasures: the Metaphysics of Pleasure in Nicomachean Ethics X’, in J. Miller [ed.], Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: a Critical Guide [2011]) to the ring composition hypothesis claiming a methodological unity between Eth. Nic. 1.5 and Eth. Nic. 10.6–8 in T. Lockwood (‘Competing Ways of Life and Ring Composition’, in R. Polansky [ed.], The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics [2014]).

Amidst this debate about the place and unity of Eth. Nic. 10 in Aristotle's corpus, A.'s translation and commentary is a welcome contribution to the existing scholarship in so far as it offers a unique method of reading Aristotle for a diverse audience from novice readers to veteran scholars. Since none of the extant commentaries present an overview of Eth. Nic. 10 in its entirety, A. aims to comment on Eth. Nic. 10 as a whole by dividing the text into units of thought or lemmata (from the Greek lêmma: ‘assumption, premise or argument’) for the sake of comprehensiveness. In doing so, A.'s commentary attempts ‘to trace the flow of Aristotle's thought, to emphasize the continuity between his arguments, and to show how the smaller units feed into the larger structure … not only to illuminate what Aristotle thinks, but also how he thinks’ (p. 1).

A. eschews the traditional approach of many ancient commentators explaining ‘Aristotle through Aristotle’. A. claims that such a tradition of reading Aristotle by comparing passages within his corpus ‘seems to rest on shaky ground’ and ‘presuppose(s) a more or less rigid system of thought in which one can simply use the building blocks from one work to patch up apparent holes in another’ (p. 2). Here one might plausibly call into question A.'s caricature of the traditional view by highlighting its relative merits beginning with the dialectical flexibility it affords for reading and interpreting Aristotle. If one is to remain attentive to what and how Aristotle thinks, the adventure of reading Aristotle resides in the recognition that his corpus retains a dynamism afforded by competing interpretations of his aporiae. Although I concur with A. that one should be hesitant to read Aristotle with an eye towards any kind of internal consistency or inherent systematicity, I would nevertheless conclude that A.'s decision as a translator and commentator to arbitrarily divide Eth. Nic. 10 into 100 lemmata as potential building-blocks bears the imprint of such an inherently systematic approach.

A. concedes that such a lemmatic approach ‘hope[s] to put the reader in a position further to subdivide or to cluster together further units of thought’ (p. xii). However, A. primarily privileges what might be identified as the Platonic method of division (diairesis) through his own fine-grained mereological analysis of Eth. Nic. 10. Perhaps a more robust dialectical approach would give equal weight to collection (sunthêsis) by considering how the lemmata may be conceived as working together to form these further units of thought. In doing so, such an interpretation would presuppose that those texts outside Eth. Nic. directly bear upon the arguments therein. By presuming the relative autonomy of Eth. Nic., A. also dismisses another common approach to reading the text set forth by D. Henry and K.M. Nielsen (Bridging the Gap between Aristotle's Science and Ethics [2015]), namely that Aristotle's ethical treatises are in part constructed from non-ethical foundations. If A.'s interpretative strategy remains sceptical of such traditional approaches, what are the relative advantages of reading each lêmma sequentially? Instead, might one approach Eth. Nic. 10 with an eye towards those aporiae indicating degrees of discontinuity within Eth. Nic. and Aristotle's corpus as a whole?

In contrast to both ancient and contemporary commentators who may question the methodological unity of Eth. Nic. 10, A. hopes to identify a more circumspective approach ‘which derives some support from the methodological claim in EN I that an ethical enquiry has its own kind of precision’ (p. 2). A. concludes that the unity of Eth. Nic. 10 is to be discovered in the concept of telos with its cognate teleios, and the verb teleioô. To justify this claim, A. first turns to the theme of pleasure in Eth. Nic. 10.1 by dividing the chapter into seven lemmata beginning with: ‘After this topic, presumably, the next to go through is pleasure’ (1172a19). A. recounts the historical debate regarding how Aristotle's account of pleasure fits into the overall telos of Eth. Nic. A.'s summary of the first lêmma appropriately returns to the preceding books of Eth. Nic., particularly the issue how Aristotle's proof that a happy person needs friends in 9.9 is dependent on the relationship between pleasure, virtuous conduct and life as later illuminated in 10.4–5. However, A. does not present further evidence to substantiate the continuity. As is often the case, A.'s methodology consistently reads Eth. Nic. 10 retrospectively in conversation with Plato, Eudoxus and Aristotle's immediate interlocutors rather than risking any engagement with the prospective Aristotelian tradition.

If we are to consider A.'s translation of the second lêmma from Eth. Nic. 10.1, ‘For pleasure is thought (dokei) to be most intimately connected (malista sunô(i)keiôsthai) to our kind, which is why people educate the young through steering them by pleasure and pain’ (1172a19–21), one might briefly compare A.'s translation with C.D.C. Reeve (2014), J. Sachs (2002), R. Crisp (2000) and H.G. Apostle (1984):

Reeve:

Sachs:

Crisp:

Apostle:

To echo the common refrain that translation is always an interpretation, A.'s translation occupies a middle ground between the literal terseness of Aristotle's Greek as exemplified by Sachs and Apostle and the readability of Reeve and Crisp. Despite A.'s careful attention to philological detail, which might come at the cost of readability, A.'s prose is eminently fluid and retains a dynamism that is often lost with translating Aristotle into standard English. One mere quibble remains the lack of a glossary most helpful to novice readers at the conclusion of the volume. Despite the above criticisms, A.'s translation and commentary is an impressive work of ancient scholarship replete with multiple pedagogical and practical merits and therefore a most valuable contribution to the Aristotelian commentary tradition.