Aristotle Audiobooks

Nicomachean Ethics: the founding enquiry into what a good life is made of

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Who is Aristotle?

Nearly everything the West went on to argue about, Aristotle got to first. Born in Stagira in northern Greece in 384 BC, he arrived at Plato’s Academy in Athens at around eighteen and stayed for two decades. He later tutored the young Alexander the Great at the request of Philip II of Macedon, then returned to Athens to found his own school, the Lyceum, whose habit of teaching while walking gave the Peripatetics their name.

His surviving work, perhaps a third of what he produced and mostly lecture notes rather than polished books, covers biology, physics, logic, rhetoric, poetry, politics and ethics. He effectively invented formal logic, and his method of patient observation and classification laid groundwork that modern science still stands on. Medieval Islamic scholars called him the First Teacher; Aquinas simply called him the Philosopher. His ethics, for a long time the least fashionable part of the corpus, now sits at the centre of a broad revival of virtue ethics.

Aristotle in audiobooks

Nicomachean Ethics is the work available here, and it is his enquiry into what a good life actually consists of. Virtue, he argues, is a habit rather than a feeling; it lies between excess and deficiency; and happiness is an activity, something you do, rather than a mood that visits you. Friendship, courage, justice and self-control each get their own patient examination.

This is a complete edition in a new modern English translation, annotated, and read by Adam Nelson across a little over twelve hours. That matters more than it sounds. Aristotle’s prose is compressed and can be forbidding on the page, and hearing it in contemporary English, paragraph by paragraph, makes the argument far easier to follow. Listeners here have been unreserved in their praise. If you have always meant to reach the foundation text of virtue ethics and never quite started, this is the version to try. It is below.