Nicomachean Ethics

by Seth Lerer

Boethius grapples with the same central question as Aristotle—how do we live well when fortune seems indifferent to virtue?—but he's writing from a prison cell awaiting execution, which gives his exploration of eudaimonia an urgency Aristotle's lectures never quite achieve. You'll find the same methodical reasoning about human flourishing, but filtered through genuine suffering rather than abstract contemplation.

by Stephen Grosz

This is my surprise pick for you—it's a contemporary psychoanalyst's case studies rather than ancient philosophy, but Grosz does something Aristotle couldn't: he shows eudaimonia failing in real human lives and asks why. He uses Aristotelian ideas about habit and character development, but applies them to people wrestling with depression, infidelity, and self-deception in ways that feel immediately relevant to how you might actually live.

by Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome)

Where Aristotle theorizes about the good life from the outside, Marcus Aurelius is writing to himself as a practicing emperor trying to actually *live* it—his notes are Aristotelian ethics meeting the Stoic tradition, asking how virtue functions when you have absolute power and everything is falling apart. It's philosophy as personal discipline rather than lecture hall argument.

by Slavoj Žižek

I know—Žižek is deliberately provocative and modern, but he's actually wrestling with Aristotle's ethics through a completely different lens, asking whether virtue can exist without the absolute commitment that Christianity demands. If you found yourself questioning Aristotle's assumptions about human nature and the good life, Žižek will push you further into that discomfort with his characteristic irreverence and intellectual rigor.

by Plato

This is Aristotle's teacher's teacher exploring one of Aristotle's favorite subjects—friendship and love as essential to the good life—but through a dinner party dialogue that feels almost novelistic. Where the Nicomachean Ethics is systematic, Plato here is playful and contradictory, letting different characters propose different visions of human flourishing without necessarily resolving them, which might actually deepen your thinking about what eudaimonia really means.