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258 Aristotle and his schoolIn the light of this argumentative situation in Eth. Eud. 8.2 it can beunderstood, on the one hand, why Aristotle repeatedly makes concessionsto the champions of a rational way to human success; for this reason he paysmuch attention to the part played by ‘intellect’ ( )in lines 26–9; he asserts that intellect, reasoning and deliberation ( and ), too, go back to God (18–21; 27); and he admits thatrational divination, too, ‘uses’ God (34–7). On the other hand, it has nowbecome clear why Aristotle repeatedly stresses the existence of an eutuchiawhich is based neither on reason nor on chance (a 32, 34, 39,b4), and whyhe explains that it is not profitable for the ‘irrationally lucky’ people to usedeliberation () – on the contrary, they owe their success to thevery fact that their reasoning faculty is disengaged ().In this chapter, then, I have tried to solve a problem of textual consistencyboth within Eth. Eud. 8.2 and between Eth. Eud. 8.2 and On Divination inSleep. As a result of this interpretation, the concept of eutuchia has becomemuch less isolated from Aristotle’s ethical and theological ideas in generalthan used to be assumed. However, a discussion of the implications of thetheory of Eth. Eud. 8.2 for a possible development in Aristotle’s theology isbeyond the scope of this chapter. 67PostscriptSince the original publication of this chapter, the Oxford Classical Text ofthe Eudemian Ethics edited by Walzer and Mingay has come out (1991) andhas been incorporated in Woods’ (1992) revision of his (1982) commentary(with discussion of textual problems on 196–8). Other discussions of thischapter can be found in Bodéüs (1992); Verbeke (1985); Kenny (1992); andJohnson (1997). None of these publications, however, have led me to changemy interpretation of the text of Eth. Eud. 8.2 or my overall views on whatAristotle argues in this chapter.67 [See Bodéüs (1992) 242–57.]