Reeve’s translation of Aristotle’s Greek achieves an admirable balance of readability and accuracy. Few, I suspect, will be inspired to abandon their copies of Broadie and Rowe or Irwin, but equally few will fail to find Reeve’s edition a source of insight and a distinctively useful reference. The translation itself compares favorably to Irwin’s and Rowe’s, but Reeve’s notes and index are the volume’s most impressive contribution. Yet while it is least suitable for beginners, advanced students and non-specialists will find it a useful guide, and no serious scholar of Aristotle will want to be without it. It would be difficult for a single edition to satisfy all these audiences equally, and Reeve’s will likely not. Teachers introducing undergraduates to Aristotle for the first time, advanced students engaging independently with the text, and professional scholars reasonably look for different things in a translation. A more comprehensive assessment, however, will account for the diverse needs of different sorts of reader. A narrow approach to this question might focus on the relative merits of the translations in terms of accuracy and readability.

With so many translations of the Nicomachean Ethics already available, one could reasonably wonder whether there is need for yet another. Reeve’s translation, supplemented with an interpretive introduction, copious notes, and an exhaustive index. 4 Numerous other versions likewise remain serviceable for many purposes, and readers now have another outstanding option with the publication of C. Philosophers of an analytic disposition have fruitful resources in the excellent editions by Terence Irwin 1 and by Sarah Broadie and Christopher Rowe, 2 while those with more continental or Straussian sympathies may turn to the translations of Joe Sachs 3 or of Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is one of the most widely studied works in the history of philosophy, and it is therefore no surprise that readers have an ample variety of translations from which to choose.

Aristotle nichomachean