Abstract

This book is a concise, lucid and helpful discussion of some themes that Anthony Kenny has been exploring for many years. He published an excellent essay, one still worth reading, about Aristotle on eudaimonia in the 1965–66 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Then in 1978, he created a sensation with The Aristotelian Ethics, in which he challenged the widespread assumption of the philosophical and scholarly world that the Nicomachean Ethics is a much improved revision of the Eudemian Ethics, and that the latter need be read only by specialists. That book was principally devoted to historical and stylometric matters, Although in two chapters he discussed the treatment of wisdom and happiness in the books shared by the NE and the EE. Aristotle’s Theory of the Will pursued further philosophical comparisons between the two treatises, focusing on Aristotle’s views about voluntariness, choice and practical reasoning.