Version: 0.7
Last Updated: 2026-02-20
Aristotle lived almost 2500 years ago, yet he can still help us find happiness and fulfillment. Granted, he is not a self-help author: his thinking can be deep, heavy, dense, and hard to decipher. Scholars endlessly debate his writings, but rarely do they relate his insights to the great task of becoming a better, wiser person.
Indeed, when I was a budding student of ancient 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 set us free 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.
However, understanding Aristotle isn't always easy. Ideally but impossibly we'd have a long, deep conversation with Aristotle himself about human fulfillment! 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 I call soulcraft; that’s what I do here in concentrated meditations that reward slow reading and sustained reflection.
Although there are countless scholarly books and papers about Aristotle (I've read hundreds of them), the vast majority are produced by professors who must focus on what they can get published by academic presses and journals. 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 my own lifelong encounter with Aristotle. Above all I strive to show how Aristotle's insights can be applied to the real world we live in today.
Let's get started!