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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the virtuous disposition most directly concerned, for Aristotle, with playfulness and humor?

2. Where is the source of a willing act located, according to Aristotle?

3. To whom, or what, does Aristotle say the person who commits suicide is being unjust?

4. By human excellence, Aristotle means what?

5. Deliberation is, for Aristotle, principally about the things to be done by whom?

Short Essay Questions

1. From what difficulty, according to Aristotle, does the dispute concerning the nature of happiness, as the end of all actions, arise?

2. Explain Aristotle's distinction between the good and the apparent good, and those who pursue each, as given in III.4.

3. What characterizes Aristotle's distinction between "willing" and "choice"?

4. What is the distinction between the mean in the thing itself and the mean in relation to a man as Aristotle explains it?

5. The magnanimous man is concerned with what things and in what manner, according to Aristotle?

6. What sort of ruler becomes a tyrant, according to Aristotle's observations?

7. What is the significance of the quasi-virtues mentioned by Aristotle in the last part of II.7?

8. To which of the vicious extremes is the truthful man closer in disposition and why, according to Aristotle?

9. What is the relationship that Aristotle cites as existing between opposites in coming to know what is or is not the right way for a thing to be, such as health?

10. What does it mean to say, as Aristotle explains it, that nothing can be habituated to be other than it is by nature?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Compose an analytical essay which presents a clear thesis on some aspect of justice as Aristotle discusses it in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics. Be sure to answer the following:

-What is justice?

-Why is justice a virtue?

-What is unique about justice as a virtue?

Essay Topic 2

What good is understanding a particular virtue if the concept of virtue itself is not understood? Compose an analytical essay which examines the very roots of virtuosity itself, starting with the relationship between particular virtues and Aristotle's conception of it as a mean condition between two extremes. To what does virtue relate? How is that to which virtue is related suspect to extremes of excess and deficiency? What is the essence of virtue itself? What are some particular examples by which this essence is demonstrated?

Essay Topic 3

Of the intellectual virtues, art is the only one inherently ordained for some other end and not at all for itself, for it is concerned entirely with making. Discuss the virtue of art in a thoroughly well-reasoned analytical essay. Why is art a virtue? With what sort of things is art concerned, in particular? What are some specific examples of art as a virtue? Why is art in some way lesser than the other intellectual virtues? Why is art a necessary virtue?

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