The Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle asks what the good life is and answers that it is happiness, understood not as pleasure but as living well and acting well over a whole lifetime. Virtue, he argues, is a settled habit formed by practice, and it usually lies in a mean between two extremes, as courage lies between cowardice and rashness and generosity between meanness and waste. The ten books go on to justice, practical wisdom, weakness of will, pleasure, and two long, warm books on friendship, before ending with the life of contemplation as the highest happiness.

The work grew from Aristotle's lectures at the Lyceum in Athens in the fourth century BC and is named after his son Nicomachus; through Arabic translations and the commentaries of Ibn Rushd it shaped ethics in the Islamic world and in Europe alike. Geoffrey Edwards reads all ten books alone, in about ten hours.