Aristotle's Discovery of the Human: Piety and Politics in the Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle's Discovery of the Human offers a fresh, illuminating, and accessible analysis of one of the Western philosophical tradition's most important texts.
In Aristotle's Discovery of the Human, noted political theorist Mary P. Nichols explores the ways in which Aristotle brings the gods and the divine into his "philosophizing about human affairs" in his Nicomachean Ethics. Her analysis shows that, for Aristotle, both piety and politics are central to a flourishing human life. Aristotle argues that piety provides us not only an awareness of our kinship to the divine, and hence elevates human life, but also an awareness of a divinity that we cannot entirely assimilate or fathom. Piety therefore supports a politics that strives for excellence at the same time that it checks excess through a recognition of human limitation.
Proceeding through each of the ten books of the Ethics, Nichols shows that this prequel to Aristotle's Politics is as theoretical as it is practical. Its goal of improving political life and educating citizens and statesmen is inseparable from its pursuit of the truth about human beings and their relation to the divine. In the final chapter, which turns to contemporary political debate, Nichols's suggestion of the possibility of supplementing and deepening liberalism on Aristotelian grounds is supported by the account of human nature, virtue, friendship, and community developed throughout her study of the Ethics.
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Mary P. Nichols is professor emerita in the Department of Political Science at Baylor University. She is the author of seven books, including Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom.
"This is an outstanding book that makes an innovative and sophisticated contribution to our understanding of the Nicomachean Ethics in particular and of Aristotle's practical philosophy in general." --Gerald M. Mara, author of The Civic Conversations of Thucydides and Plato
"Notable for clarity, good sense, and insight, Mary Nichols's lovely book is a delight and a treasure." --Harvey C. Mansfield, author of Manliness
"An impressive and accomplished study of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. . . .Nichols' book is among the very best contemporary studies of Aristotle. Essential." --Choice
"Mary Nichols's new book, Aristotle's Discovery of the Human, despite chiefly being a reading of 2,500-year-old texts, could scarcely have come at a better time. In Nichols's hands, these texts and their relevance to our times quickly become clear." --The New Criterion
"[S]hould the reader of the Nicomachean Ethics not pay close attention to what the philosopher has to say about the divine? Yet few recent commentators have done so, until now. In this careful, richly textured commentary, Mary P. Nichols undertakes the Aristotelian task of correcting the balance." --Interpretation
"If piety can be shown to one's teachers 'with whom one has studied philosophy' because our debts to them, like our debts to our parents and to God, are so large that we can never repay them..., then Nichols' book is itself a noble exercise of piety to the genius from Stagira." --Ancient Philosophy
"Nichols's book is a masterly demonstration of how careful study of an ancient text proceeds." --Claremont Review of Books
