Abstract
>e paper studies the discussion about human good
in Eudemian Ethics I.7. It is particularly concerned with the existence,
in the text, of two characteristics of the human good: its
peculiarity, on the one hand, which consists not only in the quali-
(cation ‘human’ (anthropinon), but also in the assignment of this
good to the domain of action (the activity that distinguishes humans
from other beings), and, on the other hand, the fact that it
belongs to a spectrum containing the goods of other beings, like
god and the remaining living beings. Divinity works as the standard
for the distinction between eudaimonic goods – belonging to
beings whose nature implies participation in the divine (humans,
for example) – and non-eudaimonic goods that belong to those
beings deprived of such participation. Resorting to other passages
from the Eudemian Ethics, as well as other texts from the corpus,
the paper defends that the two characteristics of the human good
presented in EE I.7 foreshadow an important di?erence between
the two Aristotelian treatises on eudaimonia: whereas the Nicomachean
Ethics emphasizes contemplation as the activity through
which humans participate in the divine, the Eudemian Ethics
stresses virtuous actions as a human activity related to the divine.