Book Five: Prudence

That Book Five should, in EE, have the title of “Prudence” is plausibly deduced from Aristotle’s own remarks (1.1.1214a30–b6, 1.4.1215a32–b14, 1.5.1216a27–b25), when he lists prudence, virtue, and pleasure as the three preferred candidates for the happy life. Books Two to Four are clearly about virtue, and Book Five, while it discusses all the intellectual virtues, is focused on prudence. The book could perhaps also have the same title in NE since, at 1.5.1095b14–96a5 in that work, the same division into three of the candidates for happiness occurs. A difference, however, is that there the three are introduced, not as pleasure, virtue, and prudence, but as the indulgent life (which concerns pleasure), the political life (which concerns honor, or virtue as true ground of honor), and the theoretical life (which is not further specified until Book Ten). The thematic division that guides NE seems rather to be into moral virtue and intellectual virtue (1.13.1103a1–10 and 2.1.1103a14–18). The same distinction is also found in EE (2.1.1220a4–15, and in the first chapter here, at 1138b35–39a3), but the division of Book One into prudence, virtue, and pleasure seems to take thematic prominence within the treatise as a whole. In the context of NE, a better title for this book might be “Intellectual Virtues.” The content is the same, but the context of theme differs. ¹ For as to content, the book is about prudence as one among several intellectual virtues. Since, then, prudence tends elsewhere in NE to be used for practical wisdom and in EE for both practical and intellectual wisdom, to give this book the title “Prudence” in EE is to give it a title that embraces all its content (right reason as well as intellectual virtue generally), but to give it this title in NE, and not that of intellectual virtues, is to give it a title that embraces only part of its content.