Aristotle’s most important observations on human life are found in his Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics and Constitution of Athens, the Rhetoric, and the Poetics. Because ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetry are all concerned with human behavior (ethos), he seems to have lumped them together generically as ethica. In all these works, Aristotle says many invaluably true things about human behavior, politics, and art, but what is essential is not the specific truths or even his system itself, which may strike us moderns as entirely too teleological (that is, predicated on the assumption that all natural processes have a...