Colloquium 1: Michael of Ephesus’s Commentary on Chapters 6 to 9 of the Tenth Book of the Nicomachean Ethics

A study of the Byzantine twelfth-century composite commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics cannot pass over Michael of Ephesus' contribution to it. Since there is no detailed study of any of Michael's comments, this chapter focuses on these comments, and in particular on the comments on book X of the Nicomachean Ethics . It discusses three issues which arise from Michael's comments: 1. The use of medical examples 2. The distinction between two kinds of eudaimonia 3. The issue whether non-rational animals can achieve eudaimonia . The chapter chooses these issues because it themselves are philosophically interesting. The fact that we have no other ancient or Byzantine commentary on book X of the Nicomachean Ethics makes it very difficult to judge whether Michael here just copies and rephrases old material, as Ebbesen and Preus have claimed in the case of his logical and zoological comments, or whether he has something new to say. Keywords: book X; Byzantine commentary; Michael of Ephesus' comments; Nicomachean Ethics

A passage from Michael of Ephesus’ Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, book V (p. 50, 6–10 Hayduck), gives some information on the Anonymous Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, books II–IV. Michael cites a series of ancient annotations to the third book, written by ancient exegetes and which have come down to him. It can therefore be assumed that Michael had the Anonymous Commentary in front of him when he wrote these lines. It is thus possible to assume that it was Michael of Ephesus himself who organised the entire commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics and inserted the Anonymous Commentary on Books II-IV after Eustratius’ commentary on Book I and before his own commentary on Book V.

Michael of Ephesus, when commenting on the last book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics , gives lengthy consideration to the empirical man and to a lesser extent the degree how this figure relates to the world of education/culture. This chapter concentrates on the structure and the possible coherence of Michael's ideas. It presents a series of translations that the author had made of passages from Michael's commentary. The references in the text are to the CAG edition of Michael's commentaries. Before discussing Michael's analysis of the relations between the empirical man, the scientist and the educated man, the chapter deals with two questions: what is modern scholarship's opinion regarding both Michael's commentaries In Ethica Nicomachea (EN) and his wider activity as a commentator; and, are the different positions proposed in the different commentaries logically consequent. Keywords: Aristotle; In Ethica Nicomachea ; Michael of Ephesus; Nicomachean Ethics

The Greek commentary tradition devoted to explicating Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics ( NE ) was extensive. It began in antiquity with Aspasius and reached a point of immense sophistication in the twelfth century with the commentaries of Eustratius of Nicaea and Michael of Ephesus, which primarily served educational purposes. The use of Aristotle’s ethics in the classroom continued into the late Byzantine period, but until recently scholastic use of the NE was known mostly through George Pachymeres’ epitome of the NE (Book 11 of his Philosophia ). This volume radically changes the landscape by providing the editio princeps of the last surviving exegetical commentary on the NE stricto sensu , also penned by Pachymeres. This represents a new witness to the importance of Aristotelian studies in the cultural revival of late Byzantium. The editio princeps is accompanied by an English translation and a thorough introduction, which offers an informed reading of the commentary’s genre and layout, relationship to its sources, exegetical strategies, and philosophical originality. This book also includes the edition of diagrams and scholia accompanying Pachymeres’ exegesis, whose paratextual function is key to a full understanding of the work.

The present paper concentrates on the comments of Michael of Ephesus to the 10th book of the Nicomachean Ethics. In particular it investigates the way in which Michael of Ephesus conceived the relationship between political and theoretical happiness. Doing so allows to evidence the theoretical ties that connect Michael of Ephesus with the Peripatetic philosopher Aspasius and demonstrates the influence of Proclus on Michael of Ephesus.

In a letter of 1404 to the Sienese professor Francesco Casini, the Italian humanist Coluccio Salutati expressed appreciation for the addressee's commentary on Aristotle'sNicomachean Ethics, comparing it favorably with the Greek (XI/XII century) commentaries of Eustratius and Michael of Ephesus, and with the Latin ones of Albert the Great, Albert of Saxony, Gerard of Odo, Walter Burley, and Jean Buridan. He invited Casini not to neglect the works of Henry of Friemar, a minor fourteenth-century figure. Furthermore, Salutati remarked that Casini had even surpassed Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome, whose commentaries were doubtless the most widespread in the Latin West of Salutati's time. As Luca Bianchi has pointed out, Salutati's letter highlights the degree to which Italian humanists depended on the scholastic tradition (whether Byzantine or Latin) when approaching Aristotle'sEthics; even Donato Acciaiuoli's famous commentary, published in 1478, draws heavily on Eustratius, Albert the Great, and St. Thomas. This was actually seen as one of its greatest merits by later commentators.3 However, Salutati's comments invite yet another observation: namely, that Salutati is unable to point to any specificallyItaliantradition connected with this work. In fact, although Salutati does name two Italians (Thomas and Giles of Rome), they too, like all the other commentators mentioned, spent most of their lifetimes in northern Europe; for most of them, the center was not Italy but Paris. This is why Salutati heaped so much praise on Francesco Casini — finally an indigenous Italian tradition might develop; its beginnings were promising indeed.

BOOK REVIEWS 408 longer and more cautious, but the quality of these first two efforts warrants hopeful anticipation of future work. LaSalle College Philadelphia, Pa. MICHAEL J. KERLIN The Greek Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. In the Latin T1·anslation of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (t 1253). Critical edition with an introductory study by H. PAUL F. MERCKEN. Vol. I. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973. Pp. XII+ 135* + 371. Guilders 108. This is the first volume of a three-volume edition of the Latin version by Robert Grosseteste of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (NE) plus several partial commentaries. Paul Mercken (Sarah Lawrence) has worked a long time on this important collection of ethical treatises. His excellent training and patient research at Louvain and Oxford are guarantees of the quality of scholarship evident in this book. The second and third volumes (Corpus Latinum Commentariorum in Aristotelem Graecorum) will be edited with the assistance of J. P. Reilly, Jr. (Yale) and will contain the last six books, plus scholia and indexes. Mercken published in 1964 (Brussels) a preliminary edition of the first two books of this collection, under the Flemish title, Aristoteles over de menselijke Volkomenheid (my review appeared in The Modern Schoolman XLIII, 1966, 198). The present volume adds two more books. Bishop Grosseteste perfected his knowledge of Greek in his mature years and seems also to have used the services of several Greek scholars in England to produce a number of Latin versions (many were revisions of earlier imperfect translations) of Greek works of science, philosophy, and theology. It is difficult to determine how much Grosseteste contributed personally to these translations and how much was done by assistants such as Robertus Graecus, Nicholas Graecus, John of Basingstoke, and possibly Adam Marsh. However, D. A. Callus, 0. P., who probably knew this field better than anyone, considered Grosseteste a very good Greek scholar-and Mercken agrees. At some point Grosseteste had procured a Greek codex of the NE, to which had been added several sets of annotations which formed a Greek commentary on all ten books. This collection is still extant in two Greek MSS at Oxford, where Mercken spent three years of research. Besides the text of Aristotle, the collection included a remarkable gloss on Books I and VI written by the Byzantine theologian, E\lstratius, who died in the 404 BOOK REVIEWS early twelfth century. Although he was learned in Aristotelian philosophy, especially logic, Eustratius' comments show him to have been a Christian Platonist in his personal convictions. The compiler of the collection filled the commentary gap with older Greek scholia on Books II, III, IV and V, probably dating from the end of the second Christian century. These anonymous glosses are inferior in quality to the work of Eustratius but historically of interest. So, this first volume prints a Latin version of NE, plus Eustratius on Book I, plus anonymous scholia on the next three books. Subsequent volumes will contain the main text and the anonymous scholia on Book V, commentaries by Michael of Ephesus (11th c.) on Books V, IX and X, another anonymous commentary on Book VII (possibly by a Greek physician (12th-early 13th c.) and finally a commentary on Book VIII by the Greek master, Aspasius, who taught in Athens at the start of the second century A. D. The whole compilation is important for the history of ethics, from classical, through Byzantine and Latin medieval scholarship. Grosseteste's translation of this gathering of moral treatises provided the only complete Latin text of NE, translated directly from the Greek, for thirteenth-century students at the universities and monastic houses of study. Aristotle's Ethics was eagerly studied all through this century. From the work of R. A. Gauthier, 0. P., and others, it now seems quite clear that there was never a version of NE made by William of Moerbeke, 0. P. Furthermore, the Bishop of Lincoln added his own notes (notulae) to these commentaries: they are printed within parentheses right in the text of Mercken's edition. Many of Grosseteste's comments are philological (after all, he was adapting Latin to a new terminology ), but some notes are longer and...

This commentary situates Louis Rodrigue’s paper “Michael of Ephesus’s Commentary on Chapters 6 to 9 of the Tenth Book of the Nicomachean Ethics ” in the context of recent scholarship. It looks at several factors in Michael’s intellectual environment which may have played a role in his reading of the Nicomachean Ethics . It suggests that a more differentiated account of Neoplatonic anthropology might bring out key aspects of Michael’s position and proposes that a more explicit confrontation with the question of Michael’s argument on the immortality of soul (particularly in light of his intellectual debt to Alexander of Aphrodisias) might contribute to a more complete account of Michael’s view of the good life. Finally, it finds Rodrigue’s arguments important and compelling.

In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre develops a theory of virtue based on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics which has been quite influential. This chapter examines the way in which MacIntyre's own ethics is related to his interpretation of Aristotle. The charge of relativism is derived from MacIntyre's historical and social understanding of morality and rationality. Such an understanding, however, is a characteristic Aristotelian standpoint. More important, MacIntyre's insistence that an appropriate account of virtue must put it in the human life as a whole is clearly inspired by Aristotle's point that virtue must be related to the function of human life. In the contemporary revival of virtue ethics, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics has been hailed as the most important classic in Western ethics. The charge of relativism that MacIntyre faces seems to be rooted in his very project to reject Aristotle's teleology while retaining only his theory of moral virtue.

Because Robert Grosseteste's translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is now seen as having provided the framework for a dynamic study of Aristotle's moral philosophy, more significance must be attached to what itself became the standard translation in the Middle Ages. That Grosseteste was responsible both for the full translation of Aristotle's text and for the translation of the Greek commentaries which accompany the Ethics in twenty-one known manuscripts modern scholars are now in agreement. Grosseteste's work on the Nicomachean Ethics has been dated confidently to the 1240s, arguably to 1246–47, and scholars have tended to stress the rapidity with which the Aristotelian ethics were assimilated in the thirteenth century, in contrast, for example, with the slow progress recorded by John of Salisbury on the Posterior Analytics in the twelfth. These results of recent research seem, it should be notd in passing, strangely at odds with the verdict of Roger Bacon, that there was comparatively little work on the Ethics in his period. He, Grosseteste's most ardent admirer, appears not to have known that this master translated the text and comments: ‘Tardius communicata est Ethica Aristotelis et nuper lecta a magistris et raro.’

BOOK REVIEWS 511 or anything like it, but is a rhetorical device for inducing what Thayer calls "reflexive reference" to whatever is currently under discussion. If this is true, it might be little short of absurd to "rationally reconstruct" something called a "Platonic Theory of Forms," unless ontological commitments cling to rhetorical devices more tenaciously than I presume they do. I hope that the research program advocated here is vigorously pursued so that issues like these can be more explicitly and intensely debated, and I highly commend this volume to those who wish to pursue it productively. Davin J. DzPEw California State University,Fullerton Francis Sparshott. Taking Life Seriously: A Study of the Argument of the "Nicomachean Ethics." Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Pp. xviii + 461. Cloth, $60.oo. Georgios Anagnostopoulos. Aristotleon the Goalsand Exactnessof Ethics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Pp. xiii + 468. Cloth, $50.oo. These are both large books, written by mature scholars in the analytic tradition; each takes a word as the key to Aristotle's theory: Sparshon begins from ouov6ctk0g (seriously ), Anagnostopoulos works with a• (exactness). Sparshott's explicit goal is to make sense of the NicomacheanEthics as a systematic whole, rather than as a collection of individually interesting but somewhat disconnected arguments. He presents a persuasive image of an overall argument in EN, and clarifies many relationships between widely separated passages. The book is thus a running commentary with a purpose. It may also be seen as a master course on the Nicomachean Ethics in one volume, the product of a lifetime of study and teaching this treatise. Sparshott avoids getting entangled in the secondary literature; his interpretations usually have plenty of support, but most of the scaffolding is hidden in the footnotes. He does sometimes digress to talk about "sexism in Aristotle," "the common books," "leisure," or the like; these digressions are printed in italics. Spoudaios means "serious," and being good is serious business, takes practice, concern , attention. "It is the people who are careless and negligent about what they do who make a mess of their lives, and these same poeple who are socially worthless and vicious" (51). "One starts to become moral when and if one starts taking life seriously" (85). Those who are not spoudaioi"do not take life seriously because it has not occurred to them that any such attitude to life is possible" (111). It's easy to think of Aristotle as a personally serious person, but not as easy to think that the concept of seriousness is as central as Sparshott makes it. Still, it has the virtue of unifying the many disparate themes of the Ethics, and that's Sparshott's goal. Sparshott occasionally criticizes Aristotle's tendency to suppose that one sort of life, or a narrow range of possible lives, is best, without recognizing the values of alternative lifestyles. For example, Sparshott says, "... our generic account of the good must not only make general provision for the dimensions of diversity [which Aristotle does, more or less], but must recognize the maximizing of diversity in individual develop- 512 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:3 JULY 1995 ment as an important aspect of human function. This is what Aristotle fails to do" (335). It seems to me that Sparshott here captures an aspect of the Aristotelian ethic that makes us (and our students) uneasy as we read the text. We may easily be struck by the idea that Aristotle really believes that the best sort of lifestyle is one very similar to his own, and that not many other lifestyles have significant value. But none of the lifestyles envisaged by the Nicomachean Ethics is possible for us; the world in which they were possible is gone. Could Aristotle believe that historical change would make eudaimonia or a virtuous life impossible? Hardly. But Sparshott is absolutely right to point out that Aristotle seems to modern readers to have an excessively narrow view of the variability of good (serious) human lives. No doubt students most quickly catch on to this disturbing aspect of Aristode's thought when they read what Aristotle has to say about slaves and women in the first book of the...

Aristotelian ethics is widely accepted by many scholars as a practical science. However, this study showed that it is not after all a practical science but a speculative or theoretical science. Having employed textual analysis on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, it was found out that eudaimonia the Highest Good/Chief Good which is the ultimate goal of Ethics is achieved not through action but through contemplation. Contemplation is the act not of the will but of intellect. Hence, the highest virtue or excellence of man is the fulfilment of highest faculty which is reason in contemplation of the Chief Good. The Chief Good, which is characterized by Aristotle as final, complete, and Self-Sufficient End is not physical and concrete but rather incorporeal and abstract because such qualities cannot be found among corporeal entities. Thus, Aristotelian ethics is metaphysics; it is neither concrete nor practical. Moreover, happiness cannot be the Chief Good because happiness is merely an activity, a quality, and a disposition and an activity cannot be identified as end which is desired for its own sake. Therefore, the Chief Good must be a substance and this substance is the Final Cause/the Necessary Being which is the End of all ends and the Good of all goods. KEYWORDS: Philosophy, Aristotle, Ethics, Nicomachean Ethics, Moral Philosophy, Metaphysics,Theoretical Science, Speculative Science, Descriptive Textual Analysis, Philippines

Some recent commentators on Aristotle's ethics that have claimed that Aristotle believed that values of theorizing and moral action were incommensurable. J. L. Ackrill and David Keyt, e.g., both state this flatly. Theoria, Ackrill says, incommensurably more valuable [sic] activity.' On interpretation of Aristotle's view of happiness that Keyt proposes the value that moral action has in itself is incommensurable with value of activity, although theoretical activity is more desirable than moral activity.' Such views are confused: if two values are incommensurable, one cannot be better than another, because that comparison presupposes a common scale. A standard problem in reading Aristotle's ethics is to determine what is correct mix of theorizing and moral action in best life. To claim that values of these activities are incommensurable, however, is to make this question unanswerable. For if values are indeed incommensurable, then there can be no grounds for preferring one to other. The traditional worry Ackrill and Keyt wish to discuss, that Aristotle subordinates moral action to theorizing and describes an implausibly single-minded and intellectual account of happiness, cannot even arise; since values are incommensurable, Aristotle cannot reasonably argue for superiority of one or other activity.

In one of his works of literary criticism, the Syrian scholar Ṣalāh al-Dīn Khalīl Ibn Aybak al- Ṣafadī included a short passage which has attracted the attention of modern scholars studying the Greek legacy of Arabic intellectual culture. In the medieval sources and these modern historical investigations, the Arabic translation of the Nicomachean Ethics (N.E.) does not figure prominently. Unlike Galen's works on medicine or Aristotle's logic, the impact of the N.E. in the medieval Islamic world was also fairly small. Miskawayh was a key mediator in the Arabic and Islamic reception of Aristotelian ethics. This chapter analyzes whether the religious minded threaten those writing philosophical ethics, especially perhaps because philosophers like al-Fārābī presented ideas from Aristotle's N.E. in a political framework. An oppressive environment may have encouraged the study of political philosophy for apologetic purposes.

The discourse surrounding Luke 15.11–32 — commonly titled “the parable of the prodigal son” — in early modern England is a major site of convergence for Aristotelian and Christian ethics. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the perceived role of “prodigality” (in the sense of excessive expenditure) in the parable of the prodigal son became deeply bound up with Aristotelian ethics; the parable's evolving title and its increasingly prominent role in casus summarii both contributed to and were affected by these changes. Despite the importance of both Aristotelian ethics and the parable of the prodigal son to early modern culture, scant research exists on the vital intersection between the two. By tracing the evolution of biblical paratexts, this article explicates how the parable gained its title. It then explores how the shared use of ἀσωτία (prodigality) in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Luke 15.13 affected the interpretation of Luke 15.11–32 in early modern England, and the repercussions this had for early modern philosophy and theology. It concludes that Aristotelian ethics were hugely influential in both the early modern interpretation of Luke 15.11–32 and the concept of “prodigality” that the parable was so often used to explore.