Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics has engaged the serious interest of readers across centuries and civilizations—of peoples ancient, medieval, and modern; pagan, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish. For at the heart of the Ethics is a perennial and paramount question: what is the human good, or—it turns out to be the same question—what is happiness? For Aristotle, the question of how to be happy is the question of how to live well as a human being, and living well is inseparable from attaining the moral and intellectual virtue that constitute the best life. In investigating virtue, the Ethics explores the full scope of human happiness and the various compelling opinions about the matter—opinions about pleasure, honor, and virtue, for example, or about chance, the afterlife, and the gods.


Drawing on their intimate knowledge of Aristotle’s thought, Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins have produced an English translation of the Ethics that is as remarkably faithful to the original as it is graceful in its rendering. Aristotle is well known for the precision with which he chooses his words, and in this elegant translation his work has found its ideal match. Bartlett and Collins provide copious notes and a glossary providing context and further explanation for students, as well as an introduction and a substantial interpretive essay that sketch central arguments of the work and the seminal place of Aristotle’s Ethics in his political philosophy as a whole.