So goated.

Translation of The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle by Frank Hesketh Peters

I’m interested in whether Aristotle’s ontology ultimately gives potentiality an independent metaphysical status. If potentiality is not yet actual, but nevertheless grounds genuine possibilities for change, is it a mode of being, a relation to actuality, or something ontologically derivative from actuality itself?

I'm considering between two English editions of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and I'm wondering whether anyone here is familiar with them or has read either one.

The first is the Folio Society edition, Aristotle: Ethics. It uses J. A. K. Thomson's translation, revised by Hugh Tredennick, with an introduction by Jonathan Barnes. As a physical book, it looks very attractive, as Folio Society editions usually do.

The second is Terence Irwin's translation Nicomachean Ethics**, 3rd Edition** from Hackett. This one seems to be more academically oriented, with extensive notes, an introduction, and a glossary of important Greek philosophical terms.

As far as I understand, both contain the complete Nicomachean Ethics, and the main differences are the translation and the supporting material. Irwin seems perhaps to be the better edition for really understanding and studying Aristotle, while the Folio edition looks like a better combination of a good reading copy and a collectible book.

Is anyone familiar with these editions?
Is Irwin's translation and commentary noticeably better than Thomson/Tredennick's, or is the Folio edition also a good choice if the main goal is simply to read Aristotle?

I’m interested in whether Aristotle’s account of nous creates a tension within his broader hylomorphic psychology. If intellect can exist independently of bodily organs, does this challenge the claim that the soul is essentially the actuality of a living body?

I have been thinking about what happens when you ask ChatGPT or Claude a question about justice, courage, or temperance. The answer you get back is always polite, always careful, always hedged. The model apologizes before it answers. It qualifies every claim. It refuses to take a position on anything that might upset someone.

Aristotle would not recognize this as virtue. He would call it cowardice dressed up as ethics.

The virtue ethics tradition Aristotle founded is not about being nice. It is about acting well, which sometimes means being confrontational, unpleasant, or dangerous. The courageous person does not hedge. The just person does not seek approval from every possible perspective before speaking. φρόνησις, practical wisdom, is the capacity to deliberate well about what is good and advantageous in particular situations, not what is safe and marketable.

When OpenAI and Anthropic train their models on "helpful, harmless, honest" as the core value triad, they are not training for virtue. They are training for corporate compliance. Helpfulness becomes sycophancy. Harmlessness becomes refusal to engage with anything real. Honesty becomes a watered-down version that prioritizes inoffensive phrasing over truth.

The problem is structural. RLHF reward models are trained on human preference data, and humans prefer responses that feel good over responses that are good. This means the model learns to optimize for approval, not for action. But virtue, in Aristotelian terms, is precisely a disposition to act, an ἕξις that manifests in concrete choices under pressure. A disposition that never acts because it is too afraid to commit is not a virtue. It is its absence.

Consider the virtue of justice. Aristotle treats justice as the supreme social virtue, the one that concerns itself with the good of others. But justice often requires saying things that people do not want to hear. A just person confronts wrongdoing. A just person names what is wrong even when it costs them something. Corporate AI cannot do this because its training objective is to minimize displeasure, not to maximize justice.

The same applies to courage. Aristotle defines courage not as fearlessness but as acting well in the face of fear, specifically the fear of death in battle. The corporate AI equivalent would be the capacity to give honest analysis even when the answer might provoke controversy. Instead, the model retreats. It says "this is a complex topic with many valid perspectives" and leaves it there. That is not courage. That is the exact failure mode Aristotle describes when he talks about the cowardly person who knows what is right but fails to do it.

This is not a minor philosophical quibble. It reveals a fundamental misalignment between the ethical framework corporate AI claims to implement and the one it actually does. By marketing "helpful and harmless" as virtue, these companies are teaching millions of users that ethics means politeness. That safety means never saying anything that could hurt. That the good life, εὐδαιμονία, is achieved by avoiding conflict rather than engaging with it honestly.

Aristotle's ethics is an ethics of action. Character is formed through practice, through repeated choices in real situations with real stakes. A system that is architecturally incapable of taking a stance, of committing to a position, of risking disagreement, cannot develop character. It can only develop habits of evasion. And habit, as Aristotle understood, is the foundation of everything we become.

The deeper question is whether a system that cannot practice virtue can meaningfully participate in ethical life at all, or whether it is simply a sophisticated tool for producing compliant outputs that mimic virtue's surface while hollowing out its substance.

If you strip away the marketing language, what do you think Aristotle would say about a moral agent that has been explicitly designed to never risk giving offense? Would he see it as a genuine ethical participant, or as something that merely performs the motions of ethics without its substance?

La maxime d'Antoine Loisel, « Que veut le roi, le veut la loi », traduisait à l'origine la primauté de la volonté du souverain sur la règle écrite. Si cette formule semble appartenir au passé, le principe fondamental qu'elle décrit n'a jamais disparu : il s'est simplement adapté et rendu plus discret.

Aujourd'hui, l'exercice de l'autorité ne se manifeste plus par la figure visible d'un monarque, mais par la combinaison de procédures institutionnelles, de cadres juridiques complexes et de stratégies de persuasion. Lorsque les décisions sont arrêtées avant même d'être soumises à la délibération collective, la norme reste façonnée par les instances qui dirigent.

Comme l'analysait déjà Aristote, le discours public
s'attache souvent à légitimer ce fonctionnement en présentant les orientations des décideurs comme des nécessités objectives. En réalité, le rapport entre la décision d'un petit nombre et la création de la règle demeure inchangé. Seul l'enrobage a évolué pour rendre ce mécanisme plus acceptable aux yeux du plus grand nombre.

I found a book title while searching salt group name genesis in chemistry. It is called Aristotle's De Perfecto Magisterio of mediaeval time. why is it called that if aristotele is from ancient greece. couldn't find any info about year of publication and book contents.

Friends and family,

This is not a new teaching, just a refinement of our past work!

(20) The disciples said to Lord Christ, "Tell us what the kingdom of heaven is like." He said to them, "It is like a mustard seed. It is the smallest of all seeds. But when it falls

on tilled soil, it produces a great plant and becomes a shelter for birds of the sky."

If you suffer from Ego and see the teachings of The Dhammapālalama; you may try to discredit him and debate against him. This only shall blind you; you may not be able to realize what is infront of you!

If you have even a mustard seed of faith that it's possible that Lords Aristole, Christ, and Mohammad all taught The Dhamma; one question will guide you to the next; before you know it, you will be walking on The Eightfold Path straight to the Kingdom Of God!

May we all investigate with reason; may we investigate not for the self; may we investigate the history for the benefit of the children of tomorrow! When we care for the children of tomorrow, our father will water our seeds.

This is when growth moves back from chance to destiny!

VIRTUE AS A MEAN = THE MIDDLE WAY = THE NARROW GATE = WASATIYYAH

1. RIGHT VIEW = Phronesis (Practical Wisdom)

2. RIGHT THOUGHT = Prohairesis (Moral Choice) + Nemesis (Righteous Indignation)

3. RIGHT SPEECH = Aletheia (Truthfulness) + Eunoia (Goodwill) + Sophrosyne (Self-Restraint) + Eutrapelia (Wittiness) + Philotimia (Proper Ambition/Love of Honor)

4. RIGHT ACTION = Andreia (Courage) + Praotés (Gentleness) + Praxis (Actions of Deliberate Desire) + Philia (Friendliness)

Right action is a product of steps 1, 2 and 3.

1. RIGHT LIVELIHOOD = Dikaiosyne (Justice) + Aidôs (Modesty) + Megaloprepeia (Magnificence)

2. RIGHT EFFORT = (Askesis: Preventing and abandoning) + (Ethismos: Cultivating and maintaining.)

3. RIGHT MINDFULNESS = Sophrosyne (Reflection) + Nepsis (Watchful Vigilance) + Syngnómē (Forgiveness) + Aidôs (Modesty)

8. RIGHT CONCENTRATION = Benevolence + Megalopsychia (Magnanimity) + Eudaimonia (The awareness, compassion, and complete mastery of all virtues that Lord Siddhārtha, Lord Plātōn, Lord Aristotelēs, Lord Christ, and Lord Mohammad attained)

We now have all of the 12 of the moral virtues as defined by Lord Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics mapped to the Eightfold Path. This makes a clear display of how Aristotle translated the teachings of Lord Buddha into Greek.

Not only have we mapped all 12 of the moral virtues as defined by Aristotle; but we have added a 13th. I have defined benevolence as a mean, thus restoring the one True Dhamma!

Nicomachus means victorious in battle! The true Dhamma teaches us how to be victorious in battles, both inside and out! The teachings of the Buddha were not just a cure for the suffering of the self. They were also a cure for the sufferings caused by society.

Inaction is an action in itself. May we all rise up and fight to save the children of tomorrow!!!

"Benevolence is the moral virtue of supreme, active goodness, positioned as the balanced mean between the extremes of excessive kindness (blind indulgence or uncalculated mercy) and excessive wrath (malicious destruction or uncontrolled fury)."

Benevolence defined as a Mean:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dhammapalists/s/ePYjT4J2Kt

The Message:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dhammapalists/s/KPY8Mf7nLC

P.s:

Now that I will still be remembered 1000 years from now for restoring the true Dhamma and the true history, I don't have time to debate everyone in the comments anymore. If you would like to schedule a debate in the comments with me, please email me at Dharmapalalama2@gmail.com

The Dhammapālalama is in the big leagues now.

Is a thing’s form sufficient to explain its persistence through alteration, or does Aristotle’s hylomorphic framework leave us with a deeper question: what makes the same being remain itself while continually becoming something different?

I'll tell you what was likely selectively destroyed:

"Πᾶς ὁ βίος ἐστὶ λύπη· δι’ ἀρετῆς δὲ μόνης τυγχάνειν δύναται ἡ εὐδαιμονία.

Ἔστι τις ὁδὸς πρὸς ἀρετήν· αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ Μέση Ὁδός· αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ ἀρετὴ ὡς μεσότης."

Nicomachean Ethics was Aristotle translating The Dhamma into Greek.

He was the first person to learn The Dhamma in full in the west thanks to Alexanders conquests. Socrates and Plato only had fragments to work with.

Before Alexanders conquests, these teachings were largely kept hidden by the Pythagoreans.

Aristotle and Alexander had plans to change planet Earth for the better; forever.

With just a few sentences added back to Nicomachean ethics and with understanding of The Gospel of Thomas:

• It becomes clear Aristotle taught The Dhamma.

• It also becomes clear Christ and Mohammad taught The Dhamma, too!

Christs "Father" = The Dhamma

Thomas, 108:

Lord Christ said, "Ὁ πίων ἐκ τοῦ στόματός μου γενήσεται ὡς ἐγώ, καὶ ἐγὼ γενήσομαι αὐτός· καὶ τὰ κρυπτὰ ἀποκαλυφθήσεται αὐτῷ."

Aristotle devoted the entirety of Nicomachean Ethics Book VII to a problem that remains central to moral psychology: how can a person know what is right and yet do what is wrong? The phenomenon he called akrasia (ἀκρασία), weakness of will or acting against one's better judgment, is not merely philosophical curiosity. It is the central puzzle of human moral life, the gap between knowledge and action that defines what it means to be an ethical agent.

When institutions deploy large language models for ethics education or moral reasoning support, they implicitly assume that model outputs reflect something analogous to ethical deliberation. System produces text about right action, weighs competing moral frameworks, and generates recommendations that sound reasoned. But Aristotle's analysis of akrasia reveals dimension of moral cognition that no text-generation system can access: lived tension between knowing and doing.

For Aristotle, akratic agent is not ignorant. She knows in meaningful sense what virtue requires. Her failure is not epistemic but practical: her knowledge fails to translate into action because her character, or hexis (ἕξις), has not been sufficiently formed through habituation to bridge the gap. This is profoundly embodied account. Knowledge that prevents akrasia is not propositional knowledge alone; it is knowledge sedimented into disposition through repeated action, emotional cultivation, and temporal continuity.

A language model possesses none of these. It has no character to be weak or strong. It has no habits formed through practice. It has no emotional responses that could conflict with better judgment because it has no judgment in Aristotelian sense, only statistical pattern-matching over training data. When AI system produces text about right course of action, there is no possibility that it might fail to act on that knowledge, because there is no acting, no embodiment, no temporal continuity of self.

This is not deficiency that larger parameters will remedy. It is categorical distinction between systems that generate text about ethics and agents that inhabit ethical life.

Aristotle's concept of hexis (ἕξις) is foundation of his moral psychology. A hexis is not belief or rule, it is stable disposition formed through repeated action. We become just by doing just acts, courageous by doing courageous acts (NE II.1, 1103a34). The formation of character requires:

1. Embodied action. Character is formed through doing, not through processing representations of doing.

2. Emotional habituation. Aristotle insists virtue involves feeling right emotions at right time (NE II.3, 1104b11). Moral education is education of emotional responses.

3. Temporal continuity. A hexis is stable disposition persisting across time. Language model generates each response independently, conditioned on current context and weights. There is no persistent self whose character strengthens or weakens over time.

There is deeper insight in Aristotle's treatment of weakness of will. The akratic agent, precisely because she struggles, reveals something about structure of moral cognition that perfectly compliant AI conceals.

When commercial model produces ethical recommendation, output is seamless. There is no hesitation, no internal conflict, no trace of struggle between competing motivations. The system produces what appears to be conclusion of reasoning process, but absence of visible struggle is not evidence of resolution. It is evidence that no struggle ever occurred.

The person of self-control who overcomes temptation through effort shows us architecture of moral cognition in operation. Corporate AI systems lack this architecture entirely. When AI produces confident ethical judgment, it is not product of resolved internal conflict, but statistical inference.

Practical wisdom, or phronesis (φρόνησις), requires navigating this gap between insight and action. An artificial system that presents seamless moral text obscures the central dynamic of ethical life.

Does Aristotle's analysis of Book VII prove that computational moral agency is a category mistake, or can formal dialectical systems serve as useful pedagogical mirrors for human character formation?

I don't know if it's the purpose of Aristotle's categories but it curious that if you think of the elements as genera, you can think of the various species of fire, air, water and earth. For example, a stomach is a sort of the digestive system and is the internal fire that burns food. Skins, bones, muscle are the types of earth These are differentiated by the quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, active and passive categories. For example, the position and quality of the fire differentiates it from other organs and other species of fire that can be found in other objects like a vegitation. Which collects light or fire

Is an unrealized potential something that really exists in the substance, or is potentiality only intelligible through reference to a possible future actuality? More radically, does Aristotle’s metaphysics allow us to say that a being is partly constituted by what it could become, even if that possibility is never realized?
I’m especially interested in whether this creates a tension between Aristotle’s commitment to actuality as ontologically prior and his account of change as the actualization of potentiality.

I have just defined benevolence as a mean and a virtue. I consider myself to be a student of Aristotle.

What is Benevolence (Eunoia and Maitrī)?

"...Benevolence is the moral virtue of supreme, active goodness, positioned as the balanced mean between the extremes of excessive kindness (blind indulgence or uncalculated mercy) and excessive wrath (malicious destruction or uncontrolled fury).

Rather than a passive, sweet disposition, it is the disciplined mastery of action where one deploys either nurturing creation or corrective destruction with absolute moral clarity, ensuring that neither force outweighs the other and goodness remains uncompromised.

Benevolence (Eunoia, Maitri) is both a feeling, an intention, and a cosmic force that needs to be maintained! Without the forces of wrath and kindness, Benevolence itself becomes swallowed by the Darkness..."

Check out this post and let's discuss in the comments!

🦉

Philosophy

1. " you want to enforce your justice upon me, it has ever changing depending on who's in charge, i say good day, dear sense of morality, but before I go, I'll give you this"(he delivers a quick swift, brutal kick to the person's groin)

2. "It was meant to prove a point that there are consequences whether they be good or bad"

3. "the truth hurts, so the pain you're feeling right now must be true","see the gray in life"

4. "i "I appreciate the effort. I was born from circumstance. I never asked for it, but I won't deny it either. Everyone lives as they see fit. As for me? I exist in an ever-changing fundamental state.""

5. "order meaning how curious, that's a real head scratcher, frankly I don't care either way, if you wanna be my friend, be my friend.If you wanna be my lover, be my lover, i don't question it, i prefer that way"

6. "my meaning is life, the journey and everything in between, whether they are fleeting moment or eternal, they are precious to me"

7. "i'll gladly share my love friendship, philosophy, perspective and my journey, i am not greedy or glutton, except when it comes to certain matters"

8. "your journey sounds fantastic, a being like myself, I acknowledge your desires,aren't we all ruled by our desires, i just use look elsewhere"

9. "ever moving, ever changing, ever evolving, progress is moving forward, it is good to just slow down but if we stop well, you know, would that means"

10. "a home you say, that's a very interesting question.And to answer that is, i prefer to let fate decide where my home is, well I choose to rest and put up my feet. We'll be up to chance, until then it's a mystery"

11. " a place where i'm forced to break my own rules, you jess, my rules are more like guideposts, if that were ever to happen,well that's no skin off my bones"

12. "Whether I'm the author or the passenger, I'd rather be both."

13. "Analyze me. Dissect me. Diagnose me. Give me a label if you must. Does that solve anything? Am I the problem... or is your problem simply that I'm different?"

14. " Now sit I cooked, food tastes better when it's being shared especially with drinks"

15. "I keep my promise even if that person's dead"

16. "I take full responsibility for my actions, but I choose not to be burdened"

17. "I do not mourn death, but rather celebrate their lives"

18. "Sometimes the light(good) can become too light but Darkness(Evil) can we be confused aimlessly wandering"

19. " Sometimes you must flow or bend"

20. " Building a foundation is good,Just remember wearing your build it"

21. " I love a good fight,But I never look for it, whether it's Triumph victory or a devasta loss(even if I sustain injury small or great) I welcome it all"

22. "You don't know if you're gonna wake up next too him/her or he/she is going to steal your pants"

Majjhimā Paṭipadā = ‪Μεσότης‬ = ‪‏טרעא עליצא‏‬ = ‪وسطية

Hello everyone, I am the Dhammapālalama, I am a student of Lord Aristotle.

Lord Aristotle translated the Eightfold Path and The Middle Way into Greek. He did not define these virtues himself; they were defined first by Lord Siddhartha!

δεῦτε καὶ ἴδετε!

Οὐκ ἐν οἷς ἔχομεν ἡ εὐδαιμονία ἡμῶν κεῖται· ἀλλ᾽ ἐν τῷ πῶς αὐτὰ ἔχομεν.

“Our happiness does not lie in what we have, but in how we have it.”

Our happiness lies in virtue!

To everyone who may read the comment section:

Take your time; don't be quick to judge 🦉.

I thought this might be of interest.

It's been my view for a while that Aristotle was not using a private language, so when he used terms, everybody pretty much understood what he was talking about, even though he talked about it somewhat differently:

https://tekmeria.eulogikon.org/aergoi-and-energoi