Protreptic Aspects of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
D.S. Hutchinson and Monte Ransome Johnson
In Polansky, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
Cambridge, 2014

"We can thus get a fairly clear idea of the kind of students to whom Aristotle addressed his Protrepticus and his Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics, and for what purpose he addressed them: they were relatively older students, not young boys, with some life experience already; and Aristotle's purpose was to motivate them to acquire some of his philosophical tools of analysis, so that they would be able to develop their own practical philosophies based on his outline account, not to motivate them to become morally better." (HUTCHINSON-JOHNSON, p. 389)

"[T]he pleasure of intellectual activity is the only true enjoyment (or at least is the most authentic one), by means of the premises that intellectual activity is the most authentic expression of human vitality, and that the pleasure that intrinsically accompanies authentic human vitality is ipso facto the intrinsically authentic pleasure." (HUTCHINSON-JOHNSON, p. 400)

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