PHIL 902 Aristotle's Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics
Several ethical treatises have come down to us in the Aristotelian corpus, including two that are widely agreed to be authentic. Since the middle ages, scholars have focused their attention on the Nicomachean Ethics. There is good evidence, however, that in antiquity the Eudemian Ethics enjoyed a certain pride of place. In view of this discovery, recent decades have seen renewed scholarly attention to the EE, having been somewhat neglected in the modern period. Today, by contrast, all serious scholarship in Aristotle's moral philosophy presupposes some familiarity with the EE and questions about its fraught relationship with the EN, not least of which concerns the place of the three "common books." We shall consider some recent scholarship on these questions, but the bulk of the course will be a careful reading of the whole of both treatises, including the five books proper to the EE, the seven proper to the EN, and the three books common to both. This course, then, will attend to an important ethical treatise of Aristotle's that has been - and at least in some quarters continues to be - neglected.