Nicomachean Ethics

The Nicomachean Ethics is a classic. Aristotle tackles the problems of ethics with coherence, elegance, and loads of sprezzatura. Here's a distillation of some important ideas:

1. Ethics is to the good as metaphysics is to being.

2. The good is determined by the end.

3. The end for humans is to become rational beings.

4. Happiness lies in realizing the end; it is what you desire for its own sake.

5. What determines happiness is not choice: We may choose what makes us miserable.

6. Happiness is becoming who we are, realizing the seed within the self, fulfilling teleology. The end of the child is to develop into an adult. The end of the flute player is playing the flute excellently.

7. Happiness is the result of practiced excellence; it lies in the performance of certain actions.

8. Happiness is success. Only the man who lives well can be a candidate for happiness: one cannot be happy in a state of destitution.

9. Happiness is the activity of the rational soul in accordance with virtue.

10. Virtue is what allows us to achieve happiness.

11. Virtue is being good at being human: It is doing what an excellent human being does.

12. Virtue is taking pleasure in doing virtuous acts.

13. Virtue is a habit, not a state of being; it is an acquired skill, even an acquired taste.

14. Virtue is as much contingent upon practice as lute-playing is.

15. Virtue cannot exist without the proper instruments.

16. Virtue is not a peak, an extreme, but a mean, a proportioning, a disposition fashioned by action.

17. Virtue is feeling the right thing at the right time with the right people in the right circumstances and in the right proportion.

Aquinas always referred to Aristotle as 'The Philosopher' as a mark of respect (just as he referred to Averroes as 'The Commentator').

T.S. Eliot's Conversion to Skepticism

T.S. Eliot might have become as famous as a philosopher as he did as a poet. (If you enjoy his poetry, you'd know it really is a kind of sensuous philosophy, especially the Four Quartets.) His first--and I think true--conversion was from philosophy to poetry. His doctoral dissertation, which was never presented, is a testament to that. These ideas are the soil from which much of Eliot’s poetry springs; here's a 13-point primer:

1. Reality is a convention, a theory we all choose to believe in.

2. There is no objective, absolute, ultimate reality, but only realities.

3. Knowledge has no object; there are no real, stable objects to know; knowledge begins with faith.

4. Outside a context there are no answers; within a context there are no questions.

5. The proper study of reality is the study of words.

6. Philosophers ought to be poets.

7. Philosophy should be an analysis of words, not an analysis of things.

8. Language does not describe reality, it is continuous with it.

9. The description of an object depends upon perspective.

10. Words connote, they do not denote.

11. Words are coterminous with what they connote.

12. The explainer asks questions about what she calls reality, not realizing that she invents and constructs reality as she asks those questions.

13. The best kind of describer goes around the object she is describing and asks others what they see.

Philosophy, Eliot considered, should become a genre of prose writing. The proper study of philosophy is the study of fictions at work; it should not be a quest for ultimate reality; it ought to describe not explain.

Eliot admired Aristotle for being the philosopher most careful with words.

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