Reading: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, excerpts from book I (on line)

Notes and questions:

1. Please read the notes that I have inserted into the text.
   
2. What does Aristotle understand by "the good" (par. 1)? Why does he hold a knowledge of it to be important (par. 2)?
3. Why does Aristotle describe politics (meaning political science) as a "master art" (par. 2)?
4. What is "the highest of all goods," according to Aristotle, or according to common opinion as seen by Aristotle (par. 3)?
5. What are the three main types of life (par. 5)? What is the end of the political life?
   
6. On what grounds does Aristotle say that one end is "more final" than another (par. 8)? (The word "final"—from the Latin finalis, adjective, from the noun finis, meaning "end"—here is being used as the adjective corresponding to the word "end"; so "more final" means "more of an end" or "more properly called an end.") On what grounds does he identify happiness as "final without qualification" (pars. 8–10)?
   
7. On what grounds does Aristotle say that human beings have a function (par. 11)? What is this function? What follows about happiness from this identification of the human function?
8. A note: Chapter 9 is rather unnecessarily obscure. Aristotle initially poses, or at least mentions, the question whether we acquire happiness by our own efforts or by a gift of the gods (par. 13); he goes on in the paragraphs following as if he had answered this question, when in fact he has not explicitly done so. The implied answer, however, is that happiness is something that we acquire by our own efforts—hence the statement (par. 15) that "the answer to the question we are asking is plain also from the definition of happiness [namely as a virtuous activity of the soul]."
9. What are the two "irrational elements" of the soul that Aristotle distinguishes (pars. 19–21)? How does that distinction support a distinction between two kinds of virtue (par. 22)?