But readers who, from the start, have an aversion to heuristic (3) readings of the Nicomachean Ethics will probably not enjoy Burger's book.

Burger does achieve the wholeness that she herself sets down as a criterion of success, though, as I will argue at the end of this review, it comes at a cost. Moreover, she straightforwardly declares in the Introduction that her work is not evaluative in the sense of (2): the work is offered 'not in the spirit of an empirical claim about what Aristotle had in mind when writing the Ethics, but as a tool of interpretation, to be judged by the philosophical results it yields, in particular, the underlying argument it discloses whose movement makes the work a whole' (p. At no point in this work does Burger enter the terrain of history or biography (1). It seems to me that works setting philosopher X in dialogue with philosopher Y lend themselves to making three types of claims: (1) the biographical claim that any complete account of X's psychological life will need to incorporate Y (2) an evaluative claim that since X purposely constructed premises and conclusions as responses to Y, what X meant and intended by these claims cannot be comprehended without the recognition of Y's influence and (3) the heuristic claim that the reader should keep Y in mind when considering X, as this will bring to light some dimension of X's work which would otherwise have been missed.

Anyone who reads this incredibly thought-provoking book should first decide what he or she expects from a work in the 'setting figures in dialogue' genre.

The nichomachean ethics