One of Aristotle's three treatises on ethics. Main topics: The concept of happiness. The goods inside and outside the soul, moral virtue as the activity of the soul. Virtue as a mean. A table of virtues. Intellectual and moral virtues. The faculty of choice. The concept and types of justice. Friendship, its moral, social, and political significance.

Aristotle, son of the physician Nicomachus, was born in Stagira in 384 BC. Information about the early years of his life is scarce. At the age of seventeen, he went to Athens to study at the Platonic Academy. He stayed there for twenty years, from 367 to 348 BC, when Plato died. Then Aristotle left for Assos in Troas and after a three-year stay there he went to Lesbos and then to Macedonia, where he took on the education of the royal child Alexander.

When his student ascended the throne, Aristotle settled in Athens and founded his school, the Lyceum. After the death of Alexander (323 BC), the philosopher's stay in Athens became difficult. He was forced to flee to Chalcis, his mother's homeland, where he died in 322.

A universal spirit, Aristotle produced a vast and valuable philosophical and scientific work. Epistemology, logic, theology, physics, biology, psychology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics are the main fields of knowledge he explored and studied.

The Alexandrian Hermippus counted Aristotle's works at 400. To us, lists have survived that include 143 titles of his works. Diogenes Laertius estimated the number of lines in Aristotelian writings to be 440,000. The influence of his work on the formation of global thought was strong for centuries and remains so.