Alfred said, “I still have my Ethics but haven’t opened it for years.” Blowing on his tea and taking a sip, Friedrich turned back to Alfred. “I think now is the time to start reading it. It is a difficult read. I took a yearlong course in it, and often in class we spent an entire hour discussing one page. My advice is to go slow. It’s inexpressibly rich and addresses almost every important aspect of philosophy—virtue, freedom, and determinism, the nature of God, good and evil, personal identity, mind-body relationship. Perhaps only Plato’s Republic had such a wide scope.”
