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Last Updated: 2025-05-25
If you are an intellectually curious person who continually strives to become a better, wiser human being, this book was written with you in mind.
Although Aristotle lived some 2400 years ago, his works can still help us on the path to happiness and fulfillment. Yet Aristotle is decidedly not a self-help author. His thinking can be deep, heavy, dense, and hard to decipher. Scholars endlessly debate his theories, but only rarely do they relate his insights to the great task of living well.
Indeed, many years ago, when I was a budding student of ancient Greek philosophy at Columbia University, one of my mentors said to me: "It doesn't matter what's true, it matters what you can get published." That was excellent career advice, because it led me to abandon academia in favor of a successful career as a technologist. However, it was lousy philosophy, because nothing matters more than the truths that free us to be, not merely highly accomplished in our careers, but highly accomplished as human beings.
This is the promise of what Socrates called the examined life, and it is a promise that Aristotle's philosophy fulfills in spades, if only we can come to understand it.
How to do so? Ideally we'd like to have a long, deep conversation with Aristotle himself about human fulfillment. Of course that's impossible, so second best would be to read a written dialogue that emulates such a conversation; Aristotle wrote a few of those, but unfortunately only fragments survived the collapse of classical civilization. Third best is to trace the dialectical flow of his formal writings on the highest good attainable by human beings, with an eye to what can best be termed soulcraft.
Although there are countless scholarly books and papers about Aristotle (I've read hundreds of them), the vast majority are produced by professors who, for better or for worse, must focus on what they can get published by academic journals and presses. By contrast, my focus is on actionable truth and how to live. The interpretations I set forth, while sometimes unconventional, are grounded in philosophical scholarship and a lifelong encounter with Aristotle's thought; yet above all I try to show how Aristotle's insights can be applied to the real world we live in today.
Let's get started!