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A fresh reading of the relationship between moral and political philosophy in Aristotle’s thought.

Our democracies promise the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—at least, within the confines of the law. Yet the law is an ineffective guide to the good life; laws can be arbitrary, even immoral. What other limit, then, should direct us as we pursue our own fulfillment? 

In Law and the Good Life, philosopher Robert C. Bartlett examines Aristotle’s consideration of this question. Rather than defer to authority, Aristotle invites us to ground ourselves in moral virtue and intellectual fulfillment, an argument he develops in both Politics and Nicomachean Ethics. As political creatures, Aristotle tells us, we are capable of moral action and therefore must embrace that capacity; at the same time, as rational creatures, we must understand what is true, even without regard to action. In taking these insights together, Bartlett offers a new reading of Aristotle’s political philosophy, one he hopes might serve as a prudent lodestar in our own turbulent times.

Love Song for the Life of the Mind develops the view of comedy that, the author argues, would have been set out in Aristotle's missing second book of Poetics. As such it is both a philosophical and a historical argument about Aristotle; and the theory of comedy it elucidates is meant to be trans-historically and trans-culturally accurate.