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Bryan Reece, Aristotle on Happiness, Virtue, and Wisdom, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 240pp., $99.99 (hbk), ISBN 9781108762403.
Reviewed by Patricia Marechal, University of California-San Diego
In the first nine books of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (NE) happiness appears to centrally involve acting virtuously—that is, justly, courageously, temperately, and so on. In contrast, the tenth and final book seems to argue that happiness just is the activity of theoretical reason, or contemplation. Consequently, some interpreters argue that Aristotelian happiness itself involves ethically virtuous activities, while others maintain that it simply amounts to contemplation. Bryan Reece’s monograph surprisingly argues that both claims are, in some sense, correct while contending that, for Aristotle, there is a single kind of happiness. According to Reece, we can take all of Aristotle’s claims about happiness at face value by attending to a distinction in his logical works between essential predication and predication of idia, i.e., necessary but not…
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