I found a copy of the Nicomachean Ethics in a used bookstore last month. The Athenaeum Book Club starts reading it next week. I wanted to get a feel before the readings begin.
The book in my hands came close to not existing at all, like most of Aristotle’s works. Not because of book burnings, war, or deliberate destruction.
Because of a cellar in a provincial Turkish town and a chain of accidents so improbable it reads like fiction.
The Aristotle who shaped the modern world survives mostly by accident.
“If Plato’s prose was silver, Aristotle’s was a flowing river of gold.”
Ancient sources list over 150 works by Aristotle. Roughly a third survive today. What we’re missing isn’t the rough drafts. It’s the finished work. That’s a tragedy.
