Nicomachean Ethics, translated by W.D. Ross (1908),
public domain. All English quotations on this site, unless
marked otherwise, are from the Ross translation. Read it at the
MIT Internet Classics Archive,
or at the
Perseus Digital Library,
which sets the Greek and English in parallel.
All Greek epigraphs are from the Bekker edition, taken via
Perseus. Citations follow standard Bekker numbering (e.g.,
1094a 1–2), and polytonic orthography is preserved.
Terence Irwin's translation (Hackett, 2nd ed. 1999) is the
modern scholarly standard and is consulted throughout, but not
quoted at length — it is in copyright.
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an
act, but a habit." This is one of the most-quoted
"Aristotle" lines on the internet, but Aristotle did not write
it — it is Will Durant, paraphrasing in The Story of
Philosophy (1926), p. 76. Aristotle's nearest formulation,
in Book II, is: "…we become just by doing just acts,
temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave
acts."1103b 1. The section on
virtue as habit on this site uses Aristotle's own line, not
Durant's.
In Protagoras 358c–d, Plato has Socrates argue that no
one knowingly does what they believe to be worse. Aristotle
takes up this position in Eth. Nic. VII.3 and
disagrees: the akratic person does know, in one sense
— in another, the knowledge is "asleep" or "drunk" at the
moment of action. The site's framing follows Aristotle's
account; the mention of Socrates is for contrast.
On eudaimonia: the translation "happiness" is
conventional and convenient but thin. "Flourishing" — a whole
life going well — is closer to what Aristotle means, and is
preferred on this site. Cf. Cooper, Reason and Human Good
in Aristotle (1975).
The Aristotle in the Lyceum is not Aristotle. The
conversational endpoint streams from Anthropic's Claude — the
Opus 4.7 model — given a system prompt instructing it to reason
as Aristotle does, and the complete text of the
Nicomachean Ethics (the Ross translation above) inside
its context. Because the actual text is before it, its
quotations from the Ethics are verbatim and its Book
and Bekker citations to the Ethics are real. Its
interpretation — and anything it says of works it was not given,
the Politics, the Metaphysics, and the rest —
remains the model's own reconstruction. Verify anything you
would cite.
Built with Astro, Tailwind, Lenis, GSAP, and Three.js. The
Lyceum chat streams from Claude — Opus 4.7 — via the official
Anthropic SDK, with the full Ethics held in the
model's context and prompt-cached. Set in EB Garamond and
Cormorant Garamond (Google Fonts). Diagrams and ornament are
drawn in SVG, in-document; the rotating bust between chapters
is rendered with Three.js.
The chapter on akrasia uses three images. Raphael's The
School of Athens (1509–11, Stanza della Segnatura,
Vatican) is a public-domain fresco. The two figures that frame
the title — a photograph of a statue of Socrates and an
engraving of Aristotle — are decorative reproductions whose
authorship has not been traced.
Further reading:
Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (1991).
Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (1988).
John M. Cooper, Reason and Emotion (1999).
Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (1993).
Anthony Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life (1992).