Correction: The syllabus did say Nicomachean Ethics, which is why I wrote that when I posted the disclaimer on Wednesday night, but the reading turned out to be from Ars Rhetorica instead. The "Advertisement", the introduction, and the first six chapters of this. What I said (about my post being only a sixth derivative of what Aristotle might actually have meant) still applies, of course.
And a new disclaimer: If you open that link to the reading and count, that was ninety-one pages, and I only need to post 200 words on it, so obviously I don't need to write everything I read, or even about everything I read. Accordingly, I'll take the rapid writing workshop approach of pointing out the one part I thought was strongest and the one part I thought was weakest.
With those two things said, here are my 200 words:
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The final paragraph of Chapter III, after the opening sentence of that paragraph, establishes the need for (or, at least, the desirability of) valuations: "... it is evident that it is requisite to have propositions ...", and "... such for instance as what is a greater or less good, an unjust, or a just action; and in a similar manner in other things."
I aristotally agree with this. I'd only have added a cautionary comment that there's no reason to expect/suspect that such valuations might be either objective or universal, but the text takes care of that (albeit implicitly) in the opening paragraph of Chapter V, where it prefaces its definition of felicity by saying, "... for the sake of an example, we shall assume what felicity is ..." (p. 26), i.e. (a) the text is making an assumption here, and (b) the specific assumption that it is making is merely intended as an example (it would have been possible to make a different assumption instead).
That's the part I thought was strongest.
The part I thought was weakest was the third paragraph of Chapter VI et seq., where the text assumes that lack of evil equals good, which assumption appears to be needlessly simplistic (to me). I suspect you'd get a richer, more complex, and more interesting theory if you allow valuations whose values have no linear ordering.
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There. 229 words. And here's Colour Record No. 133, Side A:
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