Michael Pakaluk

The author aims to write intellectual history in a traditional cast of a particular idea, the idea of progress, among a particular elite, the educated class of Britain roughly between 1730 and 1789. He describes the idea of progress as "belief in the movement over time of some aspect or aspects of human existence, within a social setting, toward a better condition". This admittedly broad definition is adopted in order to encompass belief in various sorts of progress. One might wonder why every variety of belief in progress ought to be studied as expressions of a single idea of progress, for what sort of unity would one's subject matter have? In fact Spadafora effectively resolves this problem in an Aristotelian manner by implicitly adopting something like a focal-meaning approach to the subject: he identifies two central conceptions of progress and relates other notions of progress to these. The central conceptions are: the Christian understanding of history as eschatological, and Baconian confidence in the advancement of learning. Although these two conceptions are frequently unified in English Puritanism between the accession of Charles I and the Restoration, Spadafora describes how they were largely independent and even at odds in the eighteenth century.

Through a careful discussion of the relevant texts in De Regno and the Summa Theologiae, the author argues that Aquinas understands the political common good to include the full virtue and complete happiness of all of the citizens, as related to one another by bonds of justice and civic friendship. It is not something limited and instrument, as John Finnis has recently argued. Yet that the common good has this character for Aquinas does not imply that he regards political authority as in principle unlimited, on account of a variety of resources available to Aquinas from Aristotelian political theory

In Books VIII and IX of his masterpiece of moral philosophy, the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle gives perhaps the most famous of all philosophical discussions of friendship. Michael Pakaluk presents the first systematic study in English of these books, showing how important Aristotle's treatment of friendship is to his ethics as a whole. Pakaluk's fresh and scrupulously accurate translation is accompanied by a detailed philosophical commentary which reveals the remarkably coherent structure of the books and unfolds with lucidity the various arguments contained within Aristotle's terse and compressed text. Pakaluk looks at the logical form of Aristotle's analysis of friendship, at his subtle view of the relationship between friendship and justice, at the role of reciprocity in friendship, at civic friendship and its relation to the family, and at the development of friendship out of self-love and reflexive consciousness. This volume will be a valuable tool for anyone studying Aristotle's ethics, especially readers with no Greek.