Aristotle on the Goods of Fortune

In this paper I discuss one aspect of Aristotle's theory in the Nicomachean Ethics of eudaimonia (happiness, or, more illuminatingly, humanly flourishing life or simply good life). The question I want to raise concerns the relation Aristotle establishes in the Nicomachean Ethics between eudaimonia and those goods that he describes as external (ta ektos agatha). Though this is little remarked on by commentators, Aristotle's theory of eudaimonia in the Nicomachean Ethics differs importantly from what one finds in the corresponding passages of the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia. All three accounts agree in making eudaimonia consist in completely virtuous living (MM) or (what comes to the same) in completely virtuous activity (EE, NE) over a complete lifetime.' This is what is sometimes referred to as the definition that Aristotle reaches in the NE as the conclusion of his famous argument starting from the idea that human beings, as such, have an ergon or essential work (NE I 7, 1098a 16-18). But only in the NE does he go on to say (in the next chapter, Chapter 8) that eudaimonia requires in addition2 being sufficiently equipped