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Intellectual Virtue In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

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Aristotle in his best-known work Nicomachean Ethics, discusses many fundamental things like happiness, friendship, pleasure, justice, human good. He gives us an image of the good (and even best) life and tells how to achieve it, he shows us the difference between false and true happiness, explains how friendship works and why we need to seek for the impossible. After two millenniums his works are still extremely popular and fundamental to every philosopher or anyone interested in this discipline. Like Socrates and Plato, Aristotle chooses virtues to be his main objects of discussion.
The first thing that comes to mind when one is asked ‘what is it you want most of all?’ Is human happiness. It is the ultimate purpose of life which can be only …show more content…

The intellectual virtue is phronesis (practical wisdom), sophia (theoretical wisdom), knowledge, intuition and our skills, everything that can be taught, gained or developed during our life by instruction. It’s what tells us how to act or what to choose. Generally speaking, Intellectual virtue gives us understanding of what is just and desirable, while moral virtue helps us do just and desirable things. Moral virtue is what we are given by birth. Just like this, we form and follow the right life principles for ourselves.
Apart from moral and intellectual virtues there are also ones we can’t really achieve. Happiness means living in accordance with virtue, so the highest happiness, the best life would mean living in accordance to the highest virtue, the divine one. “But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but most, so far as we can make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us...”(book 10, chapter 7)
Here Aristotle means that the only way to live a best live is to live it like gods do, to seek immortality (not the physical one). Best life can’t be human like, as it is the perfect state, only divine things are worth seeking

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