1. For the differences among practical, productive, and theoretical disciplines, see below.

2. See Eustratius, In Ethica Nicomachea I Commentaria , in G. Heylbut (ed.), Eustratii et Michaelis et Anonyma in Ethica Nicomachea Commentaria (Berlin: Reimer, 1892), p. 19; Aspasius, In Ethica Nicomachea Commentaria , in G. Heylbut (ed.), Aspasii in Ethica Nicomachea Commentaria (Berlin: Reimer, 1889), p. 7; and Heliodorus, In Ethica Nicornachea Paraphrasis , in G. Heylbut (ed.), Heliodori in Ethica Nicomachea Paraphrasis (Berlin: Reimer, 1889), pp. 4-5. See also the comments on these matters by J. A. Stewart, Notes on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), vol. 1, pp. 26-27; J. Burner, The Ethics of Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1900), p. 11; A. Grant, The Ethics of Aristotle (New York: Arno Press, 1973), p. 427.

3. D.J. Allan, "Aristotle's Account of the Origin of Moral Principles," Actes du Xle Congress Internationale de Philosophie XII (1953), p. 124. By "practical reason" Allan understands ethics and, although he goes on to argue that practical reason is a type of knowledge, when he attempts to explain the difference between theoretical and nontheoretical disciplines he seems to disregard altogether the cognitive goals of ethics, which, Aristotle claims, are not any different from the cognitive goals of any other discipline—i.e., the attainment of truth (see below).

4. That Plato understands the transitivity principle in this way is also made evident in his discussion of friendship and love in the Lysis and the Symposium , where he again argues that we desire or love only the final object and that the only desire we have is that for the final object.

5. See N.E. 1094a where Aristotle states that the end of medicine is health, of shipbuilding a vessel, of economic management wealth, of strategy victory, and so forth (see also 1097a15 for similar claims). All of these arts are, according to Aristotle, subordinate to the political art or science—"Strategy, economic management, oratory, are subordinate to political science" (1094b3).

6. See Met. (1027a) where Aristotle argues that, although someone can produce health accidentally, there is a faculty or art (medicine) that is productive of health. Aristotle's views on this matter echo those of Plato in the Gorgias (464E-465E) and the Republic (438C-439). The view that medicine is to be differentiated from all other ways of producing or restoring health is defended in the treatise "The Science of Medicine" that is part of the Hippocratic writings. And as G. E. R. Lloyd observes, this view of medicine as a specific art or discipline evolved rather slowly in the Greek tradition. See his introduction to his edition of the Hippocratic Writings (London: Penguin Books, 1978), pp. 13-14.

7. I shall use the term "discipline" in the present context in order to avoid any commitment to a particular view of the epistemological character of medicine. I do not, for example, wish to assume that medicine is a demonstrative science like geometry.

8. See also Top. (141a10) where the definition of medicine as "science [ ] of matters of health for animals and humans" is criticized only on the grounds that the inclusion of humans in the definition is redundant since what the term "human" designates falls under or is included in what "animal" designates. That medicine is a science was the prevalent view in antiquity has been recently defended by M. Frede; see his ''Philosophy and Medicine in Antiquity," in A. Donagan, A. Perovich, Jr., and M. V. Wedin (eds.), Human Nature and Natural Knowledge (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986), pp. 211-232.

9. W. F. R. Hardie, Aristotle's Ethical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 30.

10. D.J. Allan, op. cit. , p. 76. Allan in this discussion is quite critical of Jaeger's views on practical wisdom. Jaeger took Aristotle to be advocating the view that practical wisdom is solely concerned with the means and the particulars; see Jaeger, op. cit. , pp. 83, 84, 88, 242.

11. See also 1141b8: "Practical wisdom, on the other hand, is concerned with things human and things about which it is possible to deliberate; we say this is above all the work of the man of practical wisdom, to deliberate well."

12. See J. D. Monan, Moral Knowledge and Its Methodology in Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). Monan argues that the view of moral knowledge as theoretic in character is to be found in the Protrept. and that, with the exception of a few isolated passages in N.E. I and X, it is not to be found in the later treatises on conduct. Monan's discussion of the problems about practical wisdom and the views of Jaeger and Allan on its nature is most informative.

13. See his introduction to his commentary on the N.E., op. cit.

14. See D.J. Allan, op. cit. , pp. 73-75; also, W. F. R. Hardie, op. cit. , p. 30, and T. Ando, Aristotle's Theory of Practical Cognition (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1971), especially pp. 21 Off., and J. D. Monan, op. cit. , pp. 48-59.

15. Julius Walter argues for the position outlined here in his Die Lehre yon der praktischen Vernunft in der Griechischen Philosophie (Jena, 1874), especially pp. 189-190, 537-555.

16. See R. A. Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif, Aristote: L'Ethique a Nicomaque (Louvain: Publicationes Universitaires, 1970), vol. 1, pp. 267-283.

17. D. Wiggins, "Deliberation and Practical Reason," Proceedings of the Aristo-

telian Society 76 (1975-1976), pp. 29-51; also R. Sorabji, "Aristotle on the Role of Intellect in Virtue," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 (1973-1974), pp. 107-129; M. Nussbaum, Aristotle's "De Motu Animalium" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 170ff.; and N. O. Dahl, Practical Reason, Aristotle, and Weakness of the Will (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 73-83.

18. J. Cooper, Reason and the Human Good in Aristotle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 19-22, 58-72.

19. T. Irwin, "First Principles in Aristotle's Ethics," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 3 (1978), pp. 252-272, especially 262-263. See also his comments in his translation of the N.E. Irwin, in fact, translates as "intelligence" instead of as "practical wisdom,'' "practical thought," "practical reason," or "prudence," and thus makes the connection to theoretical thought even closer.

20. N.E. X.vi-ix.

21. W. F. R. Hardie, op. cit. , p. 30, uses the passage just quoted (3.10) to support the view that Aristotle takes ethics and politics to be "an exercise of practical intellect." This, however, does not explain either what the nature of ethical inquiry is or how we are supposed to distinguish between the two kinds of practical wisdom Aristotle himself identifies in this passage.

22. For a discussion of this, see C.J. Rowe, The Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics: A Study in the Development of Aristotle's Thought (Cambridge: Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 1971), especially pp. 63-73.

23. Or we make all deliberation similar to theoretical inquiry. This is done to some extent by T. Irwin who moves in this direction by making what he takes to be the type of reasoning ethical inquiry uses (i.e., dialectical) a part of deliberation (see T. Irwin, op. cit. , p. 262). But doing so, I think, obscures the contrast Aristotle wishes to draw between the two kinds of practical wisdom.

24. That practical wisdom is concerned with the universal is one of the reasons Teichmüller gives for equating it with ethical inquiry. But he understood practical wisdom in the wide sense; he took it to be not much different from theoretical inquiry. See G. Teichmüller, "Die praktische Vernunft bei Aristoteles," Neue Studien zur Geschichte der Begriffe , vol. 3 (Gotha, 1879).

25. For although deliberation resembles other kinds of reasoning, even theoretical reasoning, it is important not to obscure the difference.

26. On at least two occasions (1142a25, 1143b5) Aristotle argues that the particulars are known by perception or intuition ( ). But even if we were to construe the reaching of particulars as a kind of deliberation, there still would be the parts of ethics dealing with the universal aspects of conduct.

27. This term may mean either "inquiry" or "method." Although in the passages I cite here it means the former, Aristotle uses it at times to mean the latter (see chap. 9 for a discussion of this matter).

28. Concerning the similarities between medicine and ethics, see D. S. Hutchinson, "Doctrines of the Mean and the Debate Concerning Skills in Fourth-Century Medicine, Rhetoric and Ethics," in R.J. Hankinson (ed.), Method, Medicine and Metaphysics: Studies in the Philosophy of Ancient Science (Edmonton: Academic Printing and Publishing, 1988).

29. This line of argument has been taken by several commentators. Thus, Burnet,

op. cit. , p. 257, and Stewart, op. cit. , vol. 2, p. 35, take Aristotle to be restricting the application of the term "knowledge" only to disciplines that deal with that which is necessary. And when he applies it to disciplines like medicine Aristotle is, according to this view, using the term rather loosely. A similar position is put forth by Greenwood, op. cit. , pp. 150-152, where he argues that the term "knowledge" or "science" is used in the N.E. "in the loose sense of 'art', 'practical science', sometimes almost 'profession', which is the popular usage.'' And he refers to 1138b26 where Aristotle calls medicine a science, but claims that " in the strict sense has nothing to do with it."

30. W. F. R. Hardie, op. cit. , p. 31.

31. See Aristotle's remarks on the highest science among theoretical sciences, i.e., the one that deals with the highest genus, as well as his claim, "For not even the mathematical sciences are all alike in this respect—geometry and astronomy deal with a certain particular kind of thing, while universal mathematics applies alike to all" ( Met. 1026a; see also 1064b).

32. See, for example, the uses that, according to Plato, pure geometry has in warfare and the upbringing of the young ( Republic 527B).

33. See Aristotle's discussion at Met. 1025b25ff. and 1064a10. When Aristotle speaks of movement most often he means change in general and not only locomotion.

34. "Mathematics also, however, is theoretical; but whether its objects are immovable and separable from matter, is not at present clear; still, it is clear that some mathematical theorems consider them qua separable from matter" ( Met. 1026a7). But at 1064a32 we are told: "Mathematics is theoretical, and is a science that deals with things that are at rest, but its subjects cannot exist apart."

35. Thus, Aristotle writes at Met. 1064a33, "Therefore about that which can exist apart and is unmovable there is a science different from both of these [i.e., from physics and mathematics], if there is a substance of this nature (I mean separable and unmovable), as we shall try to prove there is."

36. "While in the case of things done it [movement or rest] is in the doer" ( Met. 1025b25; see also E.E. 1223a5 and the rather elaborate discussion of the differences in the sources of motion or change that is due to nature and is internal, and of change that is in something external to what moves or changes at Phys. II.i).

37. Plato, as is well known, insists that there are different faculties that correspond to different types of cognitive activities and objects. The distinction between knowledge and belief in the Republic rests partly on such a claim.

38. See Met. 995a15 and the discussion in chapters 6 and 7 below.

39. Thus, Aristotle claims that the subject matter of physics is inexact but physics is nonetheless a theoretical discipline ( Met. 1025b26, 1026a7, 1064b).

40. J. Rawis, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 121, also p. 126. I take Rawls in this context to be saying that the interest in a moral geometry is a theoretical one. He certainly gives no indication that moral geometry is required by or is to be used for some practical end. Of course, others have denied that there is any knowledge whose goals are purely theoretical in the way Plato, Aristotle, and possibly Rawls claim they are.

41. See Aristotle's discussion of the architectonic structure of desires or pursuits

at N.E. I.i. We need to assume here that A is different from B and that the relation is relativized to some one agent, since it is quite possible that, while some agent desires A for the sake of B, some other agent desires B for the sake of A. See on this last point the discussion by B. Williams, "Aristotle on the Good: A Formal Sketch," The Philosophical Quarterly , vol. 12, no. 40 (1962), pp. 289-296. Of course, I am not here endorsing Aristotle's claim concerning the supposed asymmetry of the relation of subordination.

42. G. E. R. Lloyd (ed.), Hippocratic Writings (London: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 71.

43. H. H. Joachim, op. cit. , p. 16.

44. This would, of course, imply that several theoretical disciplines whose subject matter or accounts exhibit the kind of inexactness that ethics and its subject matter exhibit will also be nondemonstrative.