Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, named either for his father Nicomachus or his son, or edited by one of them, accounts differ, was likely composed as lecture notes for the Lyceum around 350 BCE and organized into ten books. The work's central question is "what is the good for man?", a question Aristotle distinguishes from the question of what particular goods are worth pursuing by framing it as a question about the highest good, the thing worth pursuing for its own sake. His answer is eudaimonia, typically translated as happiness but more accurately rendered as flourishing or living well: a kind of activity rather than a state, constituted by the exercise of the soul's functions in accordance with virtue.
The doctrine of the mean, that virtues are intermediate states between excess and deficiency, with courage between recklessness and cowardice, generosity between profligacy and miserliness, is the framework Aristotle uses to define the moral virtues, and it has the advantage of being descriptive rather than prescriptive in a way that most moral theory is not. The mean is not a mathematical average but a context-sensitive standard: what courage requires in a particular situation depends on the specific danger and the specific person facing it. The discussion of friendship in Books VIII and IX, distinguishing friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue, is the longest treatment of friendship in ancient philosophy and remains the analysis most worth engaging with in contemporary terms.
The Nicomachean Ethics is the foundational text of virtue ethics, the tradition in contemporary moral philosophy that has grown considerably since the 1950s as an alternative to both Kantian deontology and utilitarian consequentialism. Aristotle's insistence on the role of character formation, the importance of practical wisdom (phronesis) in moral judgment, and the connection between individual virtue and political community addresses aspects of moral life that rule-based and consequence-based theories handle awkwardly. The text requires patience with Aristotle's taxonomic method, but the sustained engagement rewards it.
Nietzsche completed Thus Spoke Zarathustra in just 10 days, describing it as something given to him rather than written.
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