Ethics after Aristotle by Brad Inwood (review)

The past half-century has seen a surge of interest in Aristotle’s ethics. For participants in this revived neo-Aristotelian tradition, Aristotle’s writings and distinctive ethical approach provide an important touchstone and inspiration for their own ideas. But this has happened before. In the classical world, from his own students and colleagues to the great commentator, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Aristotle’s followers adapted, debated, and reworked their master’s ideas, often in the context of debate with rival schools. Inwood’s short book outlines the trajectory and main developments of this tradition, tracing a history of active and often innovative philosophers working to make sense of and defend their founding genius’s insights.

In this respect, of course, the peripatetic tradition is not much different from other Hellenistic schools. But a review of the ethical claims of peripatetic philosophers over the centuries reveals a surprising diversity. Early peripatetic scholiarch Strato of Lampsacus emphasized happiness as activity, “the best actualization of characteristically human capacities” (38); Lycon embraced a sort of hedonism (39–41); Critolaus rejected both, defining happiness in terms of possessing goods (55–57). So how is the peripatetic school a unified ethical tradition? Inwood explains: Aristotle’s texts, though brilliant and detailed, leave many unanswered questions and unresolved tensions. For example, what is pleasure, and what is its role in a good life? How do external goods and fortune impact a virtuous man’s happiness? What is the role of passions in an excellent life? Such questions became focal points of debate for Hellenistic and Imperial philosophy, but Aristotle’s own answers are messy or indeterminate. Therefore, a philosopher in the peripatetic tradition must choose a position and, subsequently, must defend his resulting theory against opposition from rivals.

As an illustration, consider Aristotle’s colleague, Theophrastus. Aristotle himself seems genuinely torn about whether external and bodily misfortune can ruin a virtuous man’s happiness (27–28). Theophrastus, by contrast, “was wonderfully consistent on this question—external and bodily misfortunes can ruin happiness. . . . Fortune, not wisdom, is in charge of life” (28). As Inwood explains, “Aristotle left a genuine problem; Theophrastus resolved the issue by taking a position that would have been too starkly consistent for his master” (28). Something similar, Inwood argues, occurs later with figures who appear to embrace even more idiosyncratic and apparently non-Aristotelian views, like Hieronymous of Rhodes, who held that the telos “consists in a life free of disturbance” (42). Even here, says Inwood, “a neo-Aristotelian takes up a position of his own from among the options left open or at least unclear by the founder” (46).

Since Inwood’s is a short book covering many centuries of philosophy, its survey is necessarily selective. Inwood therefore focuses on a topic he thinks has significant relevance for modern neo-Aristotelianism: How did Aristotle’s followers take on and extend Aristotle’s ethical naturalism, his attempt to ground ethical inquiry in an account of human nature and human continuity with the rest of the natural world, especially other animals? As Inwood explains, Aristotle himself failed to pursue this idea consistently (19–21), but as later peripatetics confronted the more firmly naturalistic positions of rival schools, it became necessary to develop a more robust account.

Inwood finds attempts at such an account scattered throughout the tradition—in the ideas of the early peripatetic leader, Lycon (40–41); in Cicero’s account of Aristotelian ethics in De Finibus (66–70); and in the early Imperial text called “Doxography C” (88). According to Inwood, however, a powerful naturalistic synthesis of Aristotelian ethics finally emerges in the work of Alexander of Aphrodisias. Drawing on predecessors as well as his own voluminous knowledge of Aristotle’s texts, Alexander constructs an ethical framework in which humans, like other animals, desire to be, to live, which in Aristotelian terms means to actualize one’s distinctive capacities in activity (109–11). Each being desires unimpeded activity corresponding to what it is (117), so, as a human matures, intellectual activity becomes...