Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, Roger Crisp, Karl Ameriks, Desmond M. Clarke ISBN: 0-521-63221-8 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 30 March, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.93 (15 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Foundation of Western ethical thought
Comment: It seems rather foolish to 'review' Aristotle, THE Philosopher. Nothing in the Western intellectual tradition isn't touched by Aristotle's works. The Nichomachean Ethics, unlike say, the largely irrelevant Physics, or extremeley esoteric Metaphysics, is a very accessible. It's also the work that probably best sums up Aristotle's practical philosophy. To summerize in a way that is completely insulting to the work, Aristotle applies his idea of moderation, the Golden mean, to numerous ethical situatlions, in an attempt to discover what constitutes the Good life and the Good man. AS previous reviewers have said, there isn't a chapter of Aristotle that does not produce some revalation or insight. And with over 100 chapters...well, you get the idea. Anyway, in addition to providing a basis for understanding the very workings of ethics and morals in a timeless sense, reading Aristotle changes the way in which you think. Literally. He has a distinctive, ordered, logical philosophy that anyone who want to be taken seriously in argument needs to learn. Simply, this is only of the most important books ever written, and anyone, philosophy scholar or not, owes it to him or her self to read it.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Pleasures of Contemplation
Comment: More than any other of Aristotle's writings, the Nicomachean Ethics speaks in a powerful voice to our own age; not only as an artifact of thought, or as a key to the historical interpretation of "Western Metaphysics", but as a challenge to our values, our assumptions, and, above all else, the complacency with which we approach the task of living life. Yet precisely because of its apparent immediacy, we must remain vigilant regarding the prejudices that we bring to the act of reading. Even the title, in this regard, presents difficulties. Ethics, for Aristotle, is not the same as "morality" or "right conduct": rather it means the cultivation of habit of the soul, --- a disposition towards the passions --- that is conducive to virtuous action. The very notion of virtuous action is itself misleading. Aristotle is not so much concerned with individual "actions" - let alone with the "moral dilemmas" so many so-called "ethicists" - as with the activity that, as the proper work or function (ergon) of human beings, grants a unifying purpose to all the "doings" that constitute life. This "work," - which must be nothing else that the work of our entire lives -, is either the political life or the life of contemplation. The first is the highest purely human life; the latter, in contrast, is divine. Perhaps the strangest notion of the Nicomachean Ethics, however, is pleasure: pleasure is neither a passive sensation, nor some sort of activity, but rather that which brings the activity to perfection, supervening on the activity like "the bloom of health in the young and vigorous."
If we have learned our lessons from Darwin, and have the strength of mind to behold a nature without purpose and a human race with no proper and essential function, what can then remain for us of an ethics grounded upon a natural and immanent teleology? Must we insist upon the fact/value distinction in all its rigor and exile ethics into the stars? Or are we left only with an act of pure, groundless will - a will that exists only through the act of positing values, of assigning to things their worth and thus giving human kind its end and meaning? Perhaps Aristotle's "pleasure" points towards another possibility: the joyful contemplation of this life in the blossom of its ephemerality and contingency.
Rating: 1
Summary: Modern translation eschews original meaning
Comment: Not worth the read. Many phrases misleadingly translated. Reflects the large and un-Aristotelian preoccupation with rules of modern moral philosophy.
Alternative recommendation: J.A.K. Thomson's translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics by Penguin Classics.
 |
Title: The Republic by Plato ISBN: 0486411214 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 18 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $2.50 |
 |
Title: The Politics by Aristotle, T.A. Sinclair, Trevor J. Saunders ISBN: 0140444211 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: June, 1992 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
 |
Title: Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill, George Sher ISBN: 087220605X Publisher: Hackett Pub Co Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $3.95 |
 |
Title: Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: With on a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns by Immanuel Kant, James W. Ellington ISBN: 087220166X Publisher: Hackett Pub Co Pub. Date: June, 1993 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
 |
Title: The Republic of Plato by Plato, Allan Bloom ISBN: 0465069347 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: September, 1991 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
