How The Nicomachean Ethics drew on The Republic
A documented line of influence: Aristotle demonstrably engaged Plato’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Republic
Plato · c. 375 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
The Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle · c. 330 BCE
Ancient GreeceRelevance
9/10
On The Nicomachean Ethics’s page
- The Ethics defines itself against the Republic from its opening pages
- Aristotle, Plato's pupil of twenty years, names the Republic's 'Idea of the Good' in Book 1.6 and takes it apart — the good is too many different things to be a single Form, and no use to a doctor or carpenter even if it were
- Read the Republic first to meet the claim Aristotle is refuting: his empirical, this-worldly ethics is a direct answer to Plato's transcendent one
On The Republic’s page
- The book Aristotle spent twenty years in Plato's Academy absorbing — and then opened the Ethics by attacking
- The Republic's central metaphysics, the Form of the Good, is the exact target: Aristotle names it in Book 1.6 and dismantles it, arguing the good is too many different things to be one Idea
- His teacher built ethics on a transcendent Form; Aristotle, in answering him, grounds it empirically instead — useless to a doctor or carpenter even if it existed, he says