This lecture considers the 10th and final book of Aristotle’s study of character and the good life, Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics. The 10th book has a very clear outline: The first five chapters are devoted to a second treatment of pleasure and, more precisely, of the question whether pleasure is the greatest good for a human being, the most pleasant life being the best life simply. The next three chapters—chapters 6, 7, and 8—can lay claim to being the peak or climax of the book as a whole, for they treat intellectual virtue, especially in its relation to happiness or the good life for a human being. Aristotle explicitly praises the activity of intellectual or contemplative virtue over that of moral virtue, and he goes so far as to suggest that the philosophic activity is the closest model we can follow to the gods themselves—for what other activity is worthy of gods? He even suggests that a kind of providence may attend those who philosophize—for what activity could be dearer to t