Friday, March 10, 2017

Friday Book Report: The Nichomachean Ethics


So maybe Aristotle doesn’t make everyone’s list of top fitness writers.  I put The Nichomachean Ethics on my to-read list because it was cited in one of the books about resilience that I read; knowing what is right helps us survive. 

It turns out that Aristotle wrote a pretty good justification for personal training:  “Moreover, individual tuition, like individual treatment in medicine, is actually superior to the public sort.  For example, as a general rule rest and fasting are beneficial in a case of fever, but not, perhaps, for a particular patient; and presumably a boxing instructor does not make all his pupils adopt the same manner of fighting…” (Book X, ix).


I’m not sure that we need yet another Dead White Male telling us what is right, but the exercise of thinking is always useful.  We need to use our brains as well as our bodies to be healthy.

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