The argument of this chapter is that Aristotle's practical syllogism, despite the qualms of modern commentators, is at the heart of Aristotle's ethic of virtue. This chapter connects the different strands of Aristotle's thought on ethical virtue, motivation, and practical wisdom, and it completes the argument of Chapter 5 that ethical virtue and practical wisdom go hand in hand.

I begin by raising a long-lived puzzle about how to distinguish Aristotelian practical wisdom (phronēsis) from a technical skill (technē), and arguing that the solution comes, not from Aristotle's metaphysics, but from his account of the virtues, especially the nameless virtue of truthfulness. I then raise the further problem whether Aristotle is begging the question when he says that the difference between practical wisdom and a technical skill is that the former requires ethical virtue whereas the latter does not. In Chapter 5, I discussed Aristotle's controversial claim that it is impossible to have all the ethical virtues fully without having practical wisdom, and that it is impossible to have practical wisdom without having all of the Aristotelian ethical virtues fully (EN VI 13 1144b30–1145a1). I now turn to Aristotle's practical syllogism, which, on my interpretation, makes the connection between ethical virtue and practical wisdom even clearer.

In the sphere of formal logic, Aristotle is famous for discovering the syllogism (a piece of reasoning consisting in two premisses and a conclusion), and for categorizing all the valid forms of syllogisms with premisses containing subject and predicate terms.