Ethics After Aristotle (Carl Newell Jackson Lectures). By Brad Inwood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. 176. Harvard University Press, 2014. $39.95 (hardback). ISBN-13: 978-0674731257. David J. Riesbeck The reputation of Aristotle’s successors in the Lyceum and beyond has long been less than flattering. Since antiquity, a recurrent image of the Peripatetics pictures them as helpless without Aristotle’s texts and in slavish dependence on them when they had them. Though the ancient Aristotelians have not been uni- formly held in such low esteem, the rehabilitation of Hellenistic philosophy in the last generation and the rebirth of neo-Aristotelian philosophy since the mid- dle of the 20 th century have not generated an appreciation of them akin to that now enjoyed by the Stoics, Skeptics, and Epicureans. Yet over the past forty years or so, scholars have labored to gather and interpret the evidence for the development of Aristotelianism in antiquity, and consequently it is now possible to study the tradition more easily and fully than ever before. Brad Inwood’s valu- able new book puts the fruits of that labor to work to present a unified account of the development of ancient Aristotelian ethics from Theophrastus to Alexander of Aphrodisias. The result puts the lie to the traditionally disparaging image of the Peripatetics and is sure to stimulate anyone with interests in the history of ethics or its potential bearing on contemporary ethical theory. Inwood’s study can be especially recommended as the first place non-specialist readers should go for a succinct but philosophically rich treatment of Peripatetic ethics. The book is based on a series of lectures delivered at Harvard in 2011, and it retains the accessibility and scope appropriate to that occasion. In five short chapters, Inwood introduces the cast of characters and examines their contribu- tions to ancient ethical debate and to the Aristotelian tradition as a whole. His inquiry is guided by two central questions. First, what unifies ancient Aris- totelianism? Otherwise put, what made an ethical theory in antiquity Aris- totelian? This is an important question not only because the tradition seems to have admitted more doctrinal diversity than Stoicism or Epicureanism, but also because philosophers today claiming Aristotelian pedigree frequently embrace ideas that were shared between Aristotelians and other schools while downplay- ing or even rejecting some of Aristotle’s own most distinctive positions. Answer- ing this question will therefore aid us both in understanding the ancient phase of one of the central traditions in the history of philosophy and in determining to what extent the preference among many contemporary ‘virtue ethicists’ for Aris- totle rather than other ancient theorists is a substantive rather than stylistic mat- ter. Inwood’s second guiding question focuses more squarely on the relevance of antiquity for today: what, if anything, might we still have to learn from Aris- totelian ethical theory that we have not learned already? His answers to both questions center around a certain kind of naturalism, ‘the distinctively Aris- 235 Ancient Philosophy 35 (2015) ©Mathesis Publications