This book is an attempt to recover and restate, in a fresh and relevant way, an ancient vision of the nature of moral theory and of the good life. It defends and elaborates a cognitivist or naturalist account of ethical terms, and a perfectionist account of the good as the noble. It does so in full awareness of the problems raised for such accounts by the still dominant twentieth century philosophical debate. Through a sustained critique of protagonists on both sides of this debate, a careful unraveling of the issues, and a tracing of origins in writers from Hobbes to Kant, the author shows...