Competing Ways of Life and Ring Composition
Thornton Lockwood
In Polansky, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
Cambridge, 2014

"The passage [1178b7-23] concludes that happiness itself is a sort of theoria and that other activities are happy insofar as they possess something similar (homoioma ti [1178b27]) to theoria. [fn31: As Broadie and Rowe 2002, 78, notes, 'resemblance is the key to the fact that both [lives] are forms of happiness.']" (LOCKWOOD, p. 362) [PSA: see also LEAR-2004, p. 92.]

Citing both EN X.1 1172b3-7 and 1179a18-22, Lockwood notes: "Both passages - with their references to the way people live their lives - seem to echo the contest of lives in I.5 1095b15." (LOCKWOOD, p. 364)

"[T]he claim that the life of the mind is that which by nature 'properly belongs' (oikeion) to a person and is most pleasant for such a person (EN X.7 1178a4-8) is grounded in the claim that activities and ways of life have their own 'proper pleasures' (oikeia hedone [1176a3-5])." (LOCKWOOD, p. 365) [PSA: I prefer 'inherent' to 'proper' as a translation of oikeia.]

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