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.

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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

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