Preface

Summary

I vividly remember my first encounter with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in my first semester of college. I was assigned the text as part of an introductory course in the history of philosophy. My professor, Ed McCann, had said in lecture that it was widely accepted that Aristotle and Kant towered above all other philosophers, on account of their depth and comprehensiveness. So I had the highest expectations as I went off to the library, the text of the Nicomachean Ethics in hand, to grapple with Aristotle's thought.

But lulled perhaps by the soft hum of the heating system in the library, or by the plush comfort of the leather chair into which I had sunk, I simply could not stay awake while reading. I would read a chapter or two of the Ethics; then nod off to sleep; then wake up and read another chapter; and then fall asleep again; and so on. During my brief periods of wakefulness, it was my impression that I was following the argument, and that what Aristotle was saying was, after all, commonsensical – a very common first impression of the Ethics, as it turns out. And yet really I was hardly understanding the text. What was happening was that the seeming obviousness of Aristotle's claims allowed me to run my eyes over the text fairly quickly, and yet the density and concentration of the underlying argument, to the extent that I did grasp it, caused a kind of intellectual overload, from which I would then escape by falling asleep.