Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

Gabriel Richardson Lear presents a bold new approach to one of the enduring debates about Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: the controversy about whether it coherently argues that the best life for humans is one devoted to a single activity, namely philosophical contemplation. Many scholars oppose this reading because the bulk of the Ethics is devoted to various moral virtues—courage and generosity, for example—that are not in any obvious way either manifestations of philosophical contemplati...