Abstract

Sebastian Petrycy of Pilzno translated into Polish and provided his own comments to three works of Aristotle’s practical philosophy: Politics, Economics and Nicomachean Ethics. He followed the examples of Renaissance Latin translations of Leonardo Bruni and Felicianus. Petrycy recommends moral philosophy of Aristotle in a double sense. Firstly, it could be conceived as a corpus of principles, rules and views how to go on living, the views capable of rational justification. Secondly, it might be understood as a proposition of discourse that in its descriptive aspect enables one to pose the question of the nature of ethics and of the type of thought capable to grasp it. Although Petrycy, following Aristotle, accepts primacy of theoretical knowledge over the practical one, he admits the latter a far advanced autonomy. In contrast to theoretical philosophy — which is deep and difficult by nature, moral philosophy is superficial and easy because what matters in its field is not the knowledge of the essence of virtue but the task of becoming virtuous. The practical order connected with human activity belongs to the dimension of the variable and as such it does not fulfil the demands that are expected from the object of apodictic knowledge. The practical wisdom constitutes its own criteria of precision based on invariability of happiness, which is not a state of character, but activity. It is grounded in the permanence of virtue being the means between excess and insufficiency. Key words PETRYCY OF PILZNO, ARISTOTLE, ETHICS