"Christopher Mirus makes coherent sense of Aristotle's corpus as a whole. It is possible that there are works in languages other than English that one might compare, but for Anglophones, this is the book."?Anthony Preus, SUNY Binghamton"Being is Better than Not Being is a major new effort to place the good and the beautiful at the heart of Aristotle's ethics and of his work as a whole. It is detailed and wide-ranging and breaks new ground. As such, it is a welcome addition to other books that diverge from recent tendencies to understand Aristotle's ethics as separate from his metaphysics and his metaphysics as separate from the beautiful and the good. In its clarity and comprehensiveness?as well as its distinctive voice?Being is Better than Not Being also is a beautiful book."?Barbara Achtenberg, University of Nevada, Reno
"This is a remarkable work: synthetic in scope, as it must be, given its subject matter; analytic in the sense that it is rigorous, careful, and thoroughly informed by the best scholarship in the 'analytic' tradition; thoughtful and highly philosophical; and at the same time personable, because the author's engagement and search for the truth shine through. It will prove a good guide to many difficult passages and themes in Aristotle. And it may just succeed in conveying as well that there is nothing so practical as metaphysics."?Michael Pakaluk, The Catholic University of America
"Christopher Mirus' analysis of Aristotle's 'metaphysics of goodness and beauty' clearly and rigorously tackles a question on which contemporary philosophy and science are in principle, and horrifyingly, silent: why is being better than not being? It should be read."?David Roochnik, Boston College