SECTION IV: What is it worth?

Aristotle (384-322BCE) was an Ancient Greek philosopher, contemporary with Socrates and Plato. He was a wide-ranging thinker, commenting on everything from physical bodies and motion to the motions of the planets and stars, from the nature of plants to the nature of the human mind, from metaphysics and epistemology to logic and language, and from political science to the ethics of individual human action. This last is our topic in these readings. Aristotle develops an account of human morality intended to reveal the nature of human happiness and the best possible human life.

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"But we must add 'in a complete life.' For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy. "

A bust of Aristotle, from a bronze by Lysoppos, 4th C. BCE

Did you know: Aristotle was at one time the private tutor of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian warrior king whose empire ranged from Greece to India.

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