The Nicomachean Ethics (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Aristotle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140455477 ISBN 13: 9780140455472

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2020

Synopsis

A new Penguin Classics translation by Adam Beresford

About this title

About the Author

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stagira in the northern Aegean. His father, Nicomachus, was personal physician to King Amyntas of Macedon. Aged about seventeen, he moved to Athens and became a student in Plato's Academy, where he remained for the next twenty years. Around the time of Plato's death in 347 he moved to Assos (in modern-day Turkey). In Assos, and then in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, he pursued research in marine biology. In 343 he returned to his native Macedonia to serve as tutor to King Philip's young son, the future Alexander the Great. After Alexander succeeded to the throne in 336, Aristotle returned to Athens and established his own school, the Lyceum. He attracted a large number of young scholars, and he taught on a huge range of philosophical and scientific questions for the next twelve years. The 'Peripatetic' (i.e. Aristotelian) school of philosophy takes its name from the peripatos, the Lyceum's covered walkway where he gave his lectures. Following Alexander's death in 323, there was a surge of anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens. Aristotle was formally charged with impiety. He went into voluntary exile in Chalcis in Euboea, just over the border of Attica, and died there the following year at the age of sixty-two. The philosophical dialogues he published during his lifetime have been lost. But his students preserved extensive writings, derived from research notes and their records of his lectures, on a huge variety of topics - metaphysics, theology, physics, astronomy, biology, zoology, psychology, epistemology, logic, rhetoric, aesthetics, politics and ethics - that profoundly shaped the course of ancient, medieval and Renaissance thought, and continue to be widely read and appreciated by philosophers today. 

Adam Beresford (translator) is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He previously translated Plato's Protagoras and Meno for Penguin Classics.

From the Back Cover

Adam Beresford's freshly researched translation sets aside the familiar renderings that scholars have artificially sustained for centuries only because they are traditional, even when they obviously fail to convey the right sense. It presents Aristotle's key terms and idioms in standard English.

If you're committed to using a familiar and traditional (but technically inaccurate) version, then you should look elsewhere.

This version often deviates from the old norms. It thereby achieves a much more technically accurate rendering, and much greater precision and clarity in conveying the details of Aristotle's sense.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140455477
• ISBN 13: 9780140455472
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528