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Physis And Nomos In Aristotle's Ethics, Thornton C. Lockwood

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

In Nicomachean Ethics V.7, Aristotle claims that political justice (to dikaion politikon) possesses a “natural” (phusikon) pail and a “conventional” (nomikon) part In response to those who separated nature and convention and disparaged the latter because it was different from place to place, Aristotle claims that both nature and convention admit of variation, and his language suggests that the two are ultimately parts which need to be interwoven or combined. Scholars who have struggled with Aristotle’s apparently disparate senses of the idea of nature have assumed that nature is an ethical ideal which can be separated from and serve as …