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A close and selective commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, offering a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s teachings on the relation between reason and moral virtue.

What does it mean to live a good life or a happy life, and what part does reason play in the quest for fulfillment? Lorraine Smith Pangle shows how Aristotle’s arguments for virtue as the core of happiness and for reason as the guide to virtue emerge in response to Socrates’s paradoxical claim that virtue is knowledge and vice is ignorance.

Against Socrates, Aristotle does justice to the effectual truth of moral responsibility—that our characters do indeed depend on our own voluntary actions. But he also incorporates Socratic insights into the close interconnection of passion and judgment and the way passions and bad habits work not to overcome knowledge that remains intact but to corrupt the knowledge one thinks one has. Reason and Character presents fresh interpretations of Aristotle’s teaching on the character of moral judgment and moral choice, on the way reason finds the mean—especially in justice—and on the relation between practical and theoretical wisdom.

An indispensable introduction to legal reasoning, updated for today’s political and legal environment.

Since it was first published nearly five decades ago, Reason in Law has become the starting point for understanding legal reasoning, a critical component of the rule of law. The editors show how judges can integrate all the elements of a case to persuasively explain their rulings—and, even more importantly, why they sometimes fail to do so. Drawing on cases old and new, Reason in Law enables readers to become sophisticated “judges of judging.”

Now in its tenth edition, Reason in Law includes a new chapter on the increasingly contentious and politically consequential field of administrative law and addresses recent developments in the American legal landscape, including growing conservatism in the federal judiciary and the flood of lawsuits brought against the second Trump administration. It also analyzes new cases on the First Amendment rights of high schoolers, transgender civil rights, the responsibilities universities have for student safety, Donald Trump’s sweeping claims of executive power, and historic Supreme Court decisions expanding the rights of gun owners and allowing states to criminalize abortion. As always, Reason in Law connects legal theory with empirical research on the American judicial system, showing how trustworthy legal reasoning helps preserve social peace and the rule of law.