Where to start with Aristotle
Nicomachean Ethics begins with a practical question—what makes a life go well—then Poetics shows the same mind examining art.
Aristotle's enormous system has hidden the working teacher who begins from familiar judgments and tests them.
Starting with the Metaphysics or the Organon and meeting Aristotle as a system rather than as a working teacher, and concluding the philosophy is dry. Or reading him through second-hand summaries that flatten the patient empirical voice into a list of doctrines.
Books in order
- Nicomachean Ethics — Read Books I and II carefully — these are the famous ones, and they introduce the doctrine of the mean, the empirical method, and the connection between virtue and habit. Books VIII and IX on friendship are the warmest passages in any ancient philosophy. Read the rest at your own pace.
- Poetics — A short, unfinished treatise on tragedy. Read it after the Ethics; the same patient empirical method is turned onto why art works on us, and the analysis of plot and recognition has been silently shaping criticism ever since.
Further reading
- Politics — The Politics picks up where the Ethics ends — virtue requires the city, and the city is therefore part of moral philosophy. Not in this catalog yet; it is the natural second move when it arrives.
- Metaphysics — The famous systematic treatise. Save it; the rewards depend on a reader who already trusts Aristotle's patience and is willing to follow him into the most demanding questions in his corpus.