A Topical Bibliography of Scholarship on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: 1880 to 2004

Scholarship on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter “the Ethics”) flourishes in an almost unprecedented fashion. In the last ten years, universities in North America have produced on average over ten doctoral dissertations a year which discuss the practical philosophy which Aristotle espouses in his Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and Politics. Since the beginning of the millennium there has been three new translations of the entire Ethics into English alone, several more which translate parts of the work into English and other modern languages, and half a dozen collections of new articles discussing Aristotle’s Ethics. Such an outpouring of scholarship has produced an almost unmanageable wave of books, articles, and reviews. Through my topical bibliography, I seek to organize this wealth of scholarly writing so as to make it manageable both to scholars working across the disciplines of philosophy, classics, history, and politics, and to scholars pursing theses on specific topics within the Ethics. The bibliography takes as its model and is much indebted to that compiled by Barnes, Schofield, and Sorabji in their Articles on Aristotle, Volume 2: Ethics and Politics (1977), which was further updated and incorporated into the complete bibliography to all of Aristotle’s writings in Barnes’ Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (1995). Although I have taken guidance from their model, my bibliography differs in one main respect. Whereas Barnes et alia were more selective and annotated their bibliography, I have been more comprehensive in my inclusion of items. I have sought to include all books and journal articles concerned with the Ethics written in English over the last 120 years; additionally, I have sought to include representative and central works of scholarship written on the Ethics in French, German, and Italian during the same period of time. With respect to the date to commence compiling the bibliography: It would require another time and place to document and defend a thesis concerning the beginning of modern scholarship on the Ethics; nonetheless, I have chosen the year 1880 so as to include the flurry of scholarship produced at the end of the nineteenth century, much of which remains insightful and relevant. In the last twenty years of that century were published in English commentaries on the Ethics by Grant (4th ed. 1885), Stewart (1882), and Burnet (1900); during the same time were published Greek textual editions of the Ethics by Ramsauer (1878), Susemihl (1887), and Bywater (1894). No doubt there are major watersheds in Aristotle scholarship throughout the twentieth century—one thinks of the works of Jaeger, Aubenque, Anscombe, Kenny, MacIntyre, and Annas—but the bibliography begins in 1880 so as to include these initial works which shape many of the scholarly discussions on the Ethics up to the present day.