ABSTRACT
That Book Six should have the title of “Pleasure” in the context of EE is plausibly deduced from the division of topics for EE given in Book One (virtue, prudence, and pleasure). The book does deal first, and at length, with continence and incontinence but as subordinate to the overall theme of pleasure, with which theme its final chapters conclude. The new beginning that Aristotle mentions in his opening words (1145a15) must refer back to 1.5.1216a29–37, where two questions about pleasure are raised: whether bodily pleasure contributes to happiness and whether there are other pleasures that belong to the happy life to make it pleasant. Both questions, which were there postponed, are answered here: the first in chapters 1 to 10 (about continence and incontinence), and the second in chapters 11 to 14 (about pleasure). Within NE, by contrast, this beginning refers back to the end of Book Four (9.1128b33–35) where continence, in an aside, is referred to as a sort of mixed state, not a virtue, and something to be dealt with later. So, in the context of NE, this book has the theme of such mixed states (and so would plausibly have there the title of Continence and Incontinence). Its treatment of pleasure, then, instead of being, as in EE, the answer to the second of two questions expressly raised earlier, becomes simply subordinate to the treatment of continence and incontinence. The treatment proper of pleasure in NE comes later in its second discussion of pleasure in Book Ten. The double treatment of pleasure in NE is one of the features of that work that mark it as significantly different from EE. How and why it does and should differ over the treatment of pleasure will be discussed below.
