The end for which a man chooses to live (Eudemian Ethics I 5, 1215b15-16a10)

Abstract

In the beginning of Eudemian Ethics I 5 Aristotle intends to show that the question “what is happiness?” is not so easily answered as generally acknowledged. He does this in a rather puzzling way, examining several situations in which not to live would be better than to live. It is not clear how he intends to connect among themselves the different situations that lead to this conclusion and how he expects them to clarify the difficulty that has been usually overlooked concerning the question “what is happiness?” In this paper, we intend to tackle these issues in order to ascertain the import of this line of argument to the eudemian research of happiness.