The foundations of Aristotle's ethics

This thesis is an investigation into the foundations of Aristotle’s ethics. Those foundations consist of two arguments: The Three Lives argument and the ergon argument. These two arguments work together, shaping the structure of the argument as a whole. Firstly, the Three Lives argument explains why certain goods are treated in the ethics and gives the work its structure. Those goods around which the structure is built are the three goods which belong to the soul: phronesis, arete, hedone. Each of the Three Lives is dedicated primarily to one of these goods. Secondly, the ergon argument provides the basis upon which (a) to sustain that structure and (b) to allow the parts of that structure to be able to be brought together in the conclusion. (a) The definition of Happiness provided by the ergon argument is wide enough to include any of the three individual goods of the soul and to take into account the subsequent development of the argument which narrows and combines those goods of the soul into manifestations of one good (viz. phronesis or nous). (b) The ergon argument allows for the conclusion – the common element of all three goods of the soul is that each has or is an ergon. These seem at first to be three separate erga, but become reduced in the end to different manifestations of one ergon: the being-at-work of the nous (or phronesis in its broad sense). This structure is clearly discernible in the Protrepticus, prominently displayed in the Eudemian Ethics, and underlies the Nicomachean Ethics. As a consequence, this thesis is a successive examination of these works, focusing on the form and content of the arguments. The variation between the works will be seen to be not as fundamental as their shared basis.