Nicomachean Ethics — who's who

Born 384 BCE in Stagira. Student at Plato's Academy for twenty years, tutor to Alexander, founder of the Lyceum. The Nicomachean Ethics is the longest and most mature of his three sets of ethical lectures. He is the empirical observer of the moral life — the same temperament that catalogued 158 constitutions and classified hundreds of animal species is here cataloguing the virtues and the kinds of friendship. Died 322 BCE.

Aristotle's son by his consort Herpyllis. The treatise is named for him — either because he edited the lecture notes after his father's death or because the work was dedicated to him. Said to have died young in war. His name on the title is a reminder that these ten books were not published by Aristotle in his lifetime but assembled by those who came after.

The recurring touchstone of the Ethics. A real person one recognises rather than an ideal abstraction — one whose habits are good, whose emotional responses track what is genuinely worth responding to, and whose actions provide a measure when the mean is hard to locate. "What would the spoudaios do?" is not a circular question but a perceptual one, for those who have spent enough time in the company of such people to have a sense of who they are.

Sketched in Book 4 as the person who claims great honours and deserves them. Deliberate of gait, slow to act unless something worthy is at stake, candid in judgment, reluctant to confer benefits because doing so acknowledges a superior. The portrait is one of the most sharply etched in the Ethics and has divided readers for centuries: Aristotle's ideal, or a cautionary type the doctrine of the mean only barely saves from arrogance?

The figure at the centre of Book 7's analysis. The akratic person knows that what they are doing is wrong — unlike the vicious person, who does not — and regrets it afterward. They act at the instigation of passion while the general moral knowledge they possess remains notionally in place but functionally idle. Aristotle's analysis distinguishes them carefully from the vicious person (who lacks good values) and from the merely intemperate person (who does not even recognise excess as excess).

The person who has phronesis — practical wisdom — as their defining intellectual virtue. They deliberate well about what is good for human beings in general and are capable of acting on that deliberation in particular circumstances. Distinct from the merely clever (who find means to any end, good or bad) and from the merely virtuous in character (who have the right dispositions but may misjudge situations). The phronimos is Book 6's answer to the question of what a fully realised moral agent looks like.

Aristotle's teacher for twenty years at the Academy in Athens. Appears in Book 1 as the primary target of the argument against a single Form of the good: "though it is better to be respectful of friends, the philosopher loves truth more." The disagreement — that there is no transcendent Form of the good, only goods specific to the kind of thing in question — is the founding move of the Ethics and the most consequential break between teacher and student in Western philosophy.

The astronomer-philosopher who argued, on the basis of general observation, that pleasure is the chief good — since all rational and irrational creatures alike pursue it, it must be the best for all. Aristotle gives his argument more than usual respect in Book 10, partly because of Eudoxus's personal reputation for self-mastery (which made the theory more credible) and partly because the argument is genuinely strong. Aristotle ultimately rejects it, but uses it as the serious version of the hedonist position worth addressing.