Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the line to jump to another position:
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
- bekker page : bekker line
- book : chapter : section
Table of Contents:
That pleasure is the Good was held by Eudoxus, on the following grounds. He saw that all
creatures, rational and irrational alike, seek to obtain it; but in every case
(he argued) that which is desirable is good, and that which is most
desirable is the best; therefore the fact that all creatures ‘move in the
direction of’1 the same
thing indicates that this thing is the Supreme Good for all (since everything
finds its own particular good, just as it finds its own proper food); but that
which is good for all, and which all seek to obtain, is the Good.
His arguments owed their acceptance however more to the excellence of his character than
to their own merit. He had the reputation of being a man of exceptional temperance, and
hence he was not suspected of upholding this view because he was a lover of pleasure, but
people thought it must really be true.
1 As we should say, ‘gravitate towards.’ Eudoxus, an unorthodox pupil of Plato, was a astronomer, and seems to have imported physical terminology into Ethics.
Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 19, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1934.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
show
Browse Bar
hide
Places (automatically extracted)
View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.
Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.
hide
Search
hideStable Identifiers
hide
Display Preferences