Nicomachean Ethics (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) »

Aristotle was born in 384 BC at Stagira in Thrace. He was the son of Nicomachus, a physician to the king of Macedonia. At about the age of seventeen, Aristotle went to Athens to study and become a member of the Academy of Plato. After Plato's death, Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great before founding his own school, the Lyceum.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the first systematic treatise on ethics, and two millennia after it was written, it is still among the best. It speaks to human beings about themselves and their relations to others as clearly, forcefully, and systematically today as it did when it was written. It would also be hard to over estimate its historical importance. Virtually every moral philosopher has to deal with the issues grappled with in the Nicomachean Ethics, and many of the positions argued for by Aristotle have been adopted, sometimes in an almost wholesale fashion, by other philosophers.