Nicomachean Ethics

⚖The case for it

The doctrine of the mean is what readers carry out and actually use: virtue as the point between too much and too little, which they rate above most of what the self-help shelf offers. Two of the ten books are on friendship, and that stretch is where the framework stops being logic and starts being observed life. Aristotle builds from how people behave rather than from first principles. Bartlett and Collins is the edition readers name, outlined by virtue with footnotes glossing the Greek, and Pakaluk’s companion teaches you to read philosophy at all. “Climbing a high and difficult mountain.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

These are lecture notes rather than a book, and readers report that “the writing is absolutely terrible” in every translation they try. The middle books catalogue virtues one after another until momentum dies, and Book V on justice is the wall everybody names, handled dryly enough to lose readers who were fine until then. The turn to contemplation in Book X undercuts nine books of practical virtue. Most people need a professor or a commentary beside them to follow it. And some conclude “the Stoics or the Buddhists write much more practically and eloquently.”

— the honest librarian

7h

honest hours

10

sittings