Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness

> I didn’t make that claim in any implied way, I asserted, correctly, that Aristotle is not an Abrahamic thinker.

I was trying to make sense of what your two disconnected sentences were saying and used this as an opportunity to address what I suspected may be the underlying presuppositions.

> The Nichomachean Ethics doesn’t discuss ethics within any context of absolute free will even

Aristotle does, in fact, discuss "choice" (προαίρεσις) and the "voluntary" (τὸ ἑκούσιον) to lay the ground for moral responsibility. I grant you it is not identical to the view of, say, Aquinas who goes further than Aristotle - indeed, he takes Augustine's account of the will and integrates it with the Aristotelian - but it isn't a wholesale departure from the Aristotelian either. Aquinas calls the will "rational appetite" (voluntas ut ratio) which is a very Aristotelian take. A notable and immediately relevant Neoplatonic refinement he makes here - consistent with Aristotle - is the supplementation with voluntas ut natura.

Furthermore, I didn't write "absolute free will", by which I can only assume you mean "sheer will"? Rather, I intentionally wrote "freedom to choose between alternatives apprehended by the intellect". Absolute free will is more of a modern, secular notion, not a classical or Christian one (we do see its origins in the "sheer will" of Ockham), hence why we obsessively speak of "sovereignty" and "autonomy" today.

> Most Christian theologies would vehemently disagree precisely because having the supra-knowledge of the Mystery imparted upon one necessarily brings one's being into the dimension of revealed universality.

Whatever the Abrahamic influence on the course of Aristotelian thought, there is no reason to believe that Abrahamic influence was absolutely necessary to "universalize ethics" (take the early Stoics, for instance). This is expected and returns to my original point, that much of ethics is knowable in principle through unaided reason alone.

People have casually dismissed Aristotle in total merely because his physics is obsolete, even though it is separable from and in no way necessarily implied by his metaphysics. Similarly, his views about slaves and so on do not follow from these core principles and are rather auxiliary rationalizations of prevailing cultural practices. It was very much a failure on Aristotle's part to be consistent with his own natural law views.

> All three of the Abrahamic theologies were infected by Neoplatonism

"Infected" here is a needlessly tendentious and loaded term. I don't consider this influence as somehow undermining the essential core of Aristotelian thought. I do not think Aristotle was condemned to hold the aforementioned views on slaves, etc.

> Aristotle was describing in Metaphysics a cosmology concerned with unpacking the notion of motion as the actualization of potentiality, hence, "First Mover", which is not at all an Abrahamic idea.

Under a strict understanding faithful to Aristotle's complete views, yes, the Prime Mover is not "Abrahamic". But that doesn't mean the essential characteristics of the Prime Mover are in contradiction with, say, a traditionally Christian account, even if they are incomplete. At the very least, the Prime Mover establishes that there is a first actualizer along with some properties this actualizer must have.

> An aside, but the Muslims called Aristotle “The Philosopher” (Ibn Rashud, Ibn Sina), and that tradition was received through the Muslims by their European readers.

Yes, but this doesn't contradict what I wrote.

Also, he was referring to people performing labour, not people adhering to spiritual belief or ideological systems.

I see what you mean, but I don't think this means what he believed was true. I see it as categorically different. People adhering to beliefs without critical thought vs being forced into labour due to their 'nature' are very different matters.

I just don't think it should be.

Aristotle has flaws, that's all.

I love his work on happiness. On the academic side of Philosophy, I believe his conception stands alongside what is typically called "Hedonism" defining the two major schools of thought, obviously with modern takes and twists. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on "Happiness" if you're interested.

To be clear, I'm a huge Aristotle fan. He's a towering intellect I will never come close to equaling. His ideas set the stage for very nearly all western thought. It just goes to show that everyone everywhere has deficiencies and blind spots. The smartest person who ever lived can still be wrong in extremely obvious ways in retrospect. Intelligence is no guarantee you're going to actually be right about very much.