I trust my work has been original, but I do not claim ever to have offered anything revolutionary. I have been in the mainstream of scholarship in Aristotle and business ethics, or near enough that other scholars will find it useful to developing their own views even if they disagree with mine.
The first chapter of this volume explores Aristotle’s notion of substance. A substance, a natural object of form and matter, is identical with its form, which may persist while its matter changes. It has a telos, a goal, a state toward which it develops and which it sometimes attains. Taking substances rather than events to be primary is not a very useful way of doing natural science, but it has some promise as
the basis for psychology and ethics, two disciplines that virtue ethicists see as
closely related. A human being is a substance with form (soul) and matter (body).
The desirable end state of this substance, a rational and sociable creature, is eudaimonia, roughly a state of happy fulfillment or flourishing.