How to Flourish: An Ancient Guide to Living Well

Written by Aristotle and Susan Sauve Meyer

Narrated by Hannibal Hills

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is one of the greatest guides to human flourishing ever written, but its length and style have left many readers languishing. How to Flourish is a colloquial new translation by Susan Sauve Meyer that makes Aristotle's timeless insights about how to lead a good life more engaging and accessible than ever before.

For Aristotle, flourishing involves becoming a good person through practice, and having a life of the mind. To that end, he draws vivid portraits of virtuous and vicious characters and offers sound practical advice about everything from eating and drinking to managing money, controlling anger, getting along with others, and telling jokes. He also distinguishes different kinds of wisdom that are essential to flourishing and offers an unusual perspective on how to appreciate our place in the universe and our relation to the divine.

Omitting Aristotle's digressions and repetitions and overly technical passages, How to Flourish provides connecting commentary that allows listeners to follow the continuous line of his thought. The result is an inviting and lively version of an essential work about how to flourish and lead a good life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Translator: Susan Sauve Meyer
• Release date: Jun 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781696610957

Aristotle

Aristotle (384-322BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath whose writings on various subjects - including economics, the natural sciences, philosophy, language, politics, psychology, and the arts - influenced Western culture in countless ways, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and beyond. Few writers' works have had such a profound and lasting effect and his admirers include everyone from Thomas Aquinas (who dubbed him the "First Teacher") to Dante Alighieri (who called Aristotle "the master of those who know"). A student of Plato, Aristotle attended Plato's Academy for twenty years before being asked by Philip II of Macedon to tutor his son, who would go on to become Alexander the Great. After Aristotle established a library at the Lyceum, he began writing his treatises on papyrus scrolls. Most of his works would be lost, but a third of his books survive, including his studies of logic, physics, the arts, rhetoric, ethics, and philosophy. Aristotle is now considered one of the great thinkers of the Classical period and his books and theories are studied, debated and discussed to this day.

Reviews for How to Flourish

[Deedra Winey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was very good. I am not sure if I would have attempted Aristotle in another form.Very interesting to hear his theories.Hannibal Hills was a terrific narrator.