This is a key text for the discipline of ethics because it is asking the broader question of how to be virtuous what is virtue.
The reader will start to notice that how Aristotle goes about his philosophical practice differs in methodology from that of Plato. It is a display of teleological thinking.
Interesting to see that when the student looks to the master, in this case, Plato, and asks how can my work be more scientific.
This happens over and over again in the history of philosophy. If Philosophy is the Queen of the Sciences; why do philosophers display a constant anxiety that its not scientific enough? These are really questions of method, and the relation between philosophy and science is not a question that goes away.
Aristotle approaches important questions of political science, happiness, and virtue.
It returns to the question of the compatibility or not of the philosophical and political ways of life.
This book is a must to understand because every later philosopher on ethics is somehow responding to it.
Its a touchstone when we get into the distinction between virtue and virtuosity which comes up in the Renaissance and stays.
Reading the Nicomachean Ethics helps to understand what Alasdair MacIntyre is saying in After Virtue.
