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Last Updated: 2024-12-21
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 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.
Ideally what we'd like is to have is a long, deep conversation with Aristotle himself about how to find fulfillment as a human being. 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 conversational flow of his thoughts on the highest good attainable by human beings, which is what I attempt here, grounded in scholarship and applied to the real world we live in today.
The main body of this book is a succinct epitome that provides a clear and actionable synopsis of Aristotle's conception of human fulfillment. Because my presentation is necessarily quite condensed, it rewards slow, reflective reading.
For those who wish to know more, I have also included copious notes that spell out the philosophical reasoning and textual evidence behind my interpretation of Aristotle's worldview.
Throughout the text, capitalized words such as Wisdom and Fulfillment provide consistent renderings of key terms in Aristotle's philosophical vocabulary; these terms are defined on first use and gathered together in the glossary at the back of the book.
Enjoy!