StoaThe mindsAristoteles
A
384–322 BCE · Athens

Aristoteles

Aristotle studied for twenty years under Plato, tutored Alexander the Great, and founded his own school, the Lyceum. He wrote on almost everything: logic, biology, physics, ethics, politics, poetry. Where Plato looked to a perfect world beyond the senses, Aristotle studied this one. In the Nicomachean Ethics he argues that a good life is not a feeling but an activity, and that we become brave, just and temperate by practising those things until they become habit.

Happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.

Aristoteles — Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1

Core ideas

Eudaimonia: flourishing as the highest human goodVirtue as the mean between extremesWe become what we repeatedly do; character is habit

Talk to Aristoteles, in their own voice

Ask anything. Answers are drawn only from their own writing and world.

Start the conversation