Aristotle on Friendship
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Aristotle on Friendship
Friendship occupies a remarkably important place in Aristotle's ethical and political philosophy. In the Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle treats friendship, or philia, not as a minor pleasure added to an otherwise complete life but as one of the fundamental conditions of human flourishing. Even people possessing wealth, power, virtue, and other external goods still need friends. Human beings live and act socially, and many of the activities that make a life worthwhile acquire their fullest meaning when they are shared with others.
Aristotle's concept of philia is broader than the modern English word "friendship." It can encompass intimate companions, family members, spouses, parents and children, associates, and fellow citizens. His theory consequently moves from deeply personal relationships to questions of justice, citizenship, political community, and the common good.
The Three Kinds of Friendship
Aristotle famously distinguishes three forms of friendship according to what draws people together: utility, pleasure, and goodness or virtue.
Friendships of utility exist because the participants provide benefits to one another. Business relationships, alliances, professional associations, and many ordinary forms of cooperation can have this character. Aristotle does not deny that these are genuine relationships, but they are inherently conditional. When the usefulness disappears, the principal reason for maintaining the friendship may disappear as well.
Friendships of pleasure arise because people enjoy one another's company. Shared interests, entertainment, conversation, recreation, attraction, and enjoyable activities can bring people together. These friendships are also genuine, but they may be unstable because people's interests, circumstances, tastes, and sources of pleasure change.
The highest form is complete or virtuous friendship. Here friends value one another fundamentally because of who they are. Each recognizes and appreciates the other's good character and wishes good things for the other person's own sake. Utility and pleasure may still exist within such relationships, but neither is their foundation.
Virtue Friendship and the Good Life
Aristotle's complete friendship is closely connected with virtue. Good friends do more than enjoy one another or exchange advantages. They participate together in activities they consider worthwhile and encourage the exercise of good character.
For this reason, friendship becomes part of Aristotle's account of eudaimonia, commonly translated as happiness or human flourishing. Flourishing is not simply a feeling or the possession of external goods. It consists substantially in excellent activity over the course of a life.
Friends provide both companions and opportunities for such activity. Generosity, loyalty, honesty, justice, courage, kindness, and practical wisdom are not merely private characteristics. They are expressed through relationships and actions involving other people.
This helps explain Aristotle's apparently paradoxical claim that even the happy and self-sufficient person needs friends. Self-sufficiency does not mean isolation. A flourishing person still needs others with whom worthwhile activities can be performed and toward whom virtue can be expressed.
The Friend as Another Self
One of Aristotle's most influential descriptions of friendship is the idea of the friend as "another self." The concept connects friendship with Aristotle's treatment of proper self-love.
Aristotle distinguishes healthy self-love from selfishness. The selfish person pursues wealth, honor, pleasure, or advantage without adequate concern for others. Proper self-love instead involves valuing the rational and virtuous dimensions of one's character and choosing morally worthwhile actions.
A good person's relationship with a friend can extend this form of concern outward. The friend's welfare becomes deeply significant, and the friend can be valued for his or her own sake rather than merely as a source of personal benefit.
The idea also helps explain friendship's connection with self-knowledge. It can be difficult to evaluate one's own character and conduct objectively. A close friend provides another perspective. Observing a friend's choices, virtues, mistakes, and judgments can illuminate one's own values and behavior.
Friendship Requires Shared Life
Aristotle does not understand deep friendship as goodwill maintained entirely at a distance. Friendship is active. Friends characteristically want to spend time together and participate in meaningful activities.
The idea of a shared life is therefore central to Aristotelian friendship. What friends choose to do together partly determines the quality and character of their relationship.
Complete friendship also requires time. People cannot immediately know whether another person's character is genuinely good or stable. Trust develops through repeated experience, tested loyalty, conversation, shared activities, and familiarity with another person's conduct.
This requirement helps explain why Aristotle believes complete friendship is necessarily rare. A person may have many acquaintances and useful or pleasurable relationships, but deep friendship demands significant investments of time, attention, knowledge, and shared experience. No individual can realistically maintain an unlimited number of such relationships.
Reciprocity, Equality, and Goodwill
Friendship requires more than privately wishing another person well. For Aristotle, goodwill must be reciprocal and recognized. Both people must understand that the other participates in the relationship.
Equality is particularly important in complete friendship because similarly virtuous friends can recognize and appreciate one another on comparable terms. Aristotle nevertheless acknowledges many friendships involving unequal people, including relationships between parents and children and between people occupying different social positions.
Such friendships need not involve identical contributions. Aristotle instead emphasizes proportionality. Different people may contribute different things while maintaining a relationship regarded as appropriately reciprocal.
This concern with proportionality connects friendship directly with Aristotle's theory of justice.
Friendship, Moral Development, and Education
Friendship provides an important environment for developing character. Aristotle's virtues are habits and dispositions cultivated through repeated action rather than principles learned only through abstract instruction.
Friends repeatedly encounter situations requiring generosity, honesty, patience, loyalty, fairness, judgment, and concern for others. Relationships consequently become settings in which virtues can be practiced and strengthened.
Friends may also contribute to practical wisdom. Another person can offer perspective on choices and motivations that are difficult to evaluate alone. Through conversation, shared experience, observation, correction, and example, friends can participate in one another's moral development.
This insight has encouraged contemporary interpretations of Aristotelian friendship as a form of moral education. Friendship can sometimes resemble mentorship while remaining reciprocal, allowing people at different stages of experience or moral development to learn from one another.
Friendship, Self-Love, and Sacrifice
Aristotle's account creates a difficult philosophical question: if people seek their own flourishing, can they genuinely love friends for the friends' own sake?
His discussion of proper self-love attempts to reconcile these ideas. Virtuous people can seek their own good while genuinely regarding the welfare of friends as valuable.
The problem becomes especially striking in cases of sacrifice. Aristotle suggests that a virtuous person may surrender wealth, honors, advantages, or opportunities for a friend. Yet the person performing the sacrifice may simultaneously choose something noble and thereby express his or her highest character.
Aristotle therefore challenges a simple opposition between egoism and altruism. In the best friendships, one's own flourishing and genuine concern for another person can become interconnected rather than mutually exclusive.
Friendship, Justice, and Civic Life
Aristotle extends friendship beyond private relationships into political philosophy. Friendship and justice concern much of the same social territory because both govern how people relate to one another.
Strong relationships can reduce the need for external enforcement. Where people genuinely care about one another and recognize shared interests, they may be less inclined to behave unjustly.
This principle contributes to Aristotle's idea of civic or political friendship. Citizens of an entire political community cannot all maintain intimate virtue friendships with one another. Civic friendship therefore demands something different: mutual recognition, cooperation, reciprocity, concern for shared purposes, and some commitment to a common good.
Political friendship can exist even among citizens who disagree. It does not require emotional intimacy or complete agreement. Instead, it describes a form of association through which people recognize one another as participants in a shared political community.
Aristotle consequently treats friendship as one of the forces capable of binding communities together. Political stability cannot depend entirely upon laws, institutions, or coercion; social relationships and forms of civic goodwill matter as well.
Family, Kinship, and Human Sociability
Aristotle's broad conception of philia includes relationships within families. Parents and children, siblings, spouses, relatives, companions, and citizens participate in different forms of affection, obligation, reciprocity, and justice.
These relationships demonstrate that friendship does not always require strict equality. Different roles generate different expectations and responsibilities.
Aristotle also connects friendship with human nature. Human beings naturally form associations and live together. Friendship therefore is not simply an optional cultural invention added to otherwise solitary individuals. It expresses a deeply social dimension of human life.
Some interpretations trace this idea into Aristotle's biological writings, where forms of attachment can also be observed among nonhuman animals. Ethical human friendship develops these more basic forms of sociability into relationships shaped by reason, character, choice, and virtue.
Aristotle's Continuing Influence
Aristotle's theory remains foundational to philosophical discussions of friendship more than two millennia after the Nicomachean Ethics. Modern scholars continue debating the meaning of philia, the relationship between friendship and self-interest, whether friends must possess comparable virtue, and whether Aristotle's demanding ideal adequately describes ordinary friendships.
His framework has also influenced discussions of civic friendship, political solidarity, moral education, self-knowledge, family relationships, environmental ethics, and later philosophical and religious traditions.
Contemporary technological life creates additional questions that Aristotle could not have anticipated but that his theory helps illuminate. Social networks can label hundreds or thousands of people as "friends," while Aristotle's complete friendship requires sustained attention, reciprocal knowledge, shared activity, and time. Digitally mediated relationships and artificial-intelligence companions similarly raise questions about whether reciprocity, mutual recognition, independent agency, and genuinely shared life are necessary for friendship.
Aristotle's philosophy therefore provides a useful framework for examining modern concerns about social isolation, declining face-to-face interaction, digital relationships, and weakened community life.
Conclusion
Aristotle's central insight is that friendship belongs to the structure of a good human life. Relationships based upon usefulness and pleasure have legitimate places in society, but complete friendship reveals something deeper about human flourishing.
The best friendships involve reciprocal goodwill, knowledge of character, trust, shared activity, moral concern, and sufficient time to build a life together. Friends can help people understand themselves, practice virtue, develop judgment, experience worthwhile activities, and pursue flourishing in ways that isolation cannot provide.
Aristotle also expands friendship beyond private companionship. Family relationships, civic friendship, justice, political cooperation, and community all demonstrate that human beings flourish through forms of association with others.
His philosophy ultimately challenges the idea that the good life can be understood as a purely individual achievement. However self-sufficient a person may become, flourishing remains profoundly relational. Human beings do not merely possess friends alongside the other goods of life; friendship is one of the ways through which a good human life is actually lived.
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Friendship and Justice
| Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | IEP | Current
This discussion explains Aristotle's striking claim that friendship may occupy an even higher moral position than justice. Where strong friendship exists, many conflicts requiring external rules of justice never arise.
| Aristotle / Brad Inwood / Raphael Woolf | Cambridge University Press | February 5, 2013
Book VII of the Eudemian Ethics investigates friendship alongside justice and character. Aristotle treats friendship as one of life's greatest goods and argues that friendship and justice are intimately connected because people joined by genuine friendship are less inclined to treat one another unjustly.
| Lorraine Smith Pangle | Cambridge University Press | July 4, 2009
Aristotle closely connects friendship and justice because both regulate relationships among people. Pangle examines Aristotle's famous suggestion that friends have less need for externally imposed justice while showing that friendship does not automatically eliminate disagreements about fairness and obligation.
Aristotle's Conception of Philia
| Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | IEP | Current
This overview of Aristotle explains how friendship functions as a bridge between his ethics and politics. Friendship is not merely a private relationship but an important force holding communities and political associations together.
| Corinne A. Gartner | Cambridge University Press | 2017
Gartner examines friendship as mutually recognized affection grounded in goodness, pleasure, or usefulness. The chapter places Aristotle's theory within ancient debates about love, character, ethics, and human relationships.
| Roman S. Platonov | PhilPapers | 2016
Platonov analyzes different meanings of philia in Aristotle and emphasizes friendship as a process of positive communication. The analysis helps separate specifically reciprocal friendship from broader natural forms of sociability.
| David Konstan | PhilPapers / Ancient Philosophy | 2008
Konstan examines what Aristotle means by philia, arguing that it should not simply be understood as a network of social obligations. He emphasizes its affective and elective dimensions and distinguishes the broader idea of love from the reciprocal affection characteristic of friendship.
| Jennifer Whiting | The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics | 2008
Whiting provides a detailed analysis of Aristotle's Nicomachean account of philia, examining the three forms of friendship, Aristotle's ethical egoism, benefactors, parents, pleasure, and the relationship between friendship and human flourishing.
Defining Aristotelian Friendship
| Alexander Moseley | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Current
This overview of the philosophy of love explains Aristotle's conception of philia and the importance he places on kindness, generosity, mutuality, and affection.
Friendship and Eudaimonia
| Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | IEP | Current
Ancient ethical philosophy confronts a puzzle in Aristotle: if the virtuous person is self-sufficient, why are friends still necessary? Aristotle answers by emphasizing beneficence, shared activity, and the friend as a second self.
| Cambridge University Press | The Science of Virtue | 2024
Contemporary neo-Aristotelian approaches identify close relationships and social belonging among important human goods relevant to flourishing.
Friendship and Moral Character
| Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | IEP | Current
Aristotle understands virtues as stable dispositions of character developed through practice. Friendship provides a social environment in which such dispositions are exercised repeatedly.
| Center for Practical Wisdom | University of Chicago | Current
This summary of Friendship for Virtue examines contemporary Aristotelian attempts to place friendship at the center of virtue ethics and moral education.
| Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | IEP | Current
Contemporary virtue ethics draws heavily from Aristotle's conception of character. Friendship offers a particularly important setting for practicing kindness, generosity, honesty, loyalty, and practical wisdom.
Friendship and Political Community
| Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | IEP | Current
Aristotle's Politics links political institutions with the cultivation of virtuous lives. Civic relationships are therefore closely connected with the ethical project developed in the Nicomachean Ethics.
Cheng argues that political stability is central to Aristotle's conception of political friendship and examines its relationship with realistic political conditions.
| Andreas Eitel | Political Theory | 2016
Eitel reconsiders political friendship through Aristotle's moral psychology and asks whether civic friendship should be understood primarily as virtue, practice, or political art.
Complete or Virtuous Friendship
| A. C. Eustice | Journal of Philosophy of Education | 2026
This contemporary study applies Aristotelian character friendship to relationships across generations. It argues that friendships involving people at different levels of experience can contribute to moral development.
| Dean Cocking | Journal of Applied Philosophy | 2014
Cocking analyzes Aristotle's influential claim that ideal friendship exists between people possessing excellent character. The article asks how well this ancient ideal explains friendship as people actually experience it.
| Andreas Vakirtzis | PhilPapers | 2013
Vakirtzis explores whether Aristotelian character friendship requires both participants already to possess complete virtue. He considers whether friendship can instead become a mechanism through which people at different stages of moral development improve together.
Political Friendship and the Common Good
| Robert P. George and Cornel West | The Washington Post | June 30, 2025
George and West invoke the Aristotelian idea of civic friendship as mutual respect and willingness to cooperate for common purposes despite serious disagreements. They apply the idea to contemporary universities and democratic discourse.
| PhilPapers | Journal Article | 2012
This study interprets Aristotle's political friendship as a form of solidarity. Citizens can wish one another well and act for shared goods despite lacking personal acquaintance.
Irrera asks how Aristotle's general account of friendship helps explain political friendship. The analysis places civic cooperation between purely instrumental association and the richer demands of virtue friendship.
Friendship and Happiness
| Financial Times | Financial Times | February 23, 2025
This modern discussion uses Aristotle's ethics to examine declining social interaction. Aristotle's claim that friendship belongs to the good life provides a philosophical framework for thinking about why companionship matters to human well-being.
| Nikhil Krishnan | The New Yorker | June 26, 2023
This discussion of Aristotle's ethics emphasizes that a flourishing life requires more than private virtue. Good fortune and friendships with good people contribute to the conditions under which good judgment and character can develop.
Aristotle and Later Traditions of Friendship
| University of Chicago Press | Journal Review | 2025
This discussion of love and friendship in the Western tradition emphasizes Aristotle's idea that philia arises from forms of sharing or community and belongs centrally to the good life.
| Matthew Teramura | Renaissance Quarterly | 2017
Teramura examines an early modern meditation on friendship that responds critically to the ideal of perfect friendship inherited from Aristotle and Cicero. The article demonstrates the long afterlife of Aristotle's friendship theory.
| Oxford Academic | Oxford University Press | 2002
This chapter compares Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on friends, friendship, and loving others. It demonstrates the profound influence Aristotle's friendship theory exerted on medieval Christian ethics.
| Cyril C. Richardson | University of Chicago Press | 1943
Richardson compares Greek and Christian conceptions of love. Aristotle's highest human relationship is identified with philia, which differs significantly from traditions centered primarily on eros.
Aristotelian Friendship in Modern Life
| D. Grasso | Philosophy and Technology | 2025
Grasso examines whether relationships maintained through digital communication can qualify as Aristotelian virtue friendships. The paper directly tests Aristotle's ideal of shared life in technologically mediated settings.
This discussion of AI companionship raises distinctly Aristotelian questions about reciprocity, equality, mutual recognition, and genuine concern. Chatbot relationships challenge the assumption that friendship necessarily involves two independently acting human beings.
| Desislava Hristova, Mirco Musolesi and Cecilia Mascolo | arXiv | March 31, 2014
Research comparing online and offline social ties provides a modern empirical counterpart to Aristotle's distinction between superficial connections and stronger friendships based on sustained interaction.
Aristotle's Theory of Friendship
| Sophie Grace Chappell | Cambridge University Press | November 9, 2024
Chappell revisits Aristotle's three kinds of philia and questions how accurately the English word "friendship" captures Aristotle's much broader concept. The chapter examines virtue friendship as Aristotle's highest form of association while considering the derivative forms grounded in advantage and pleasure.
| Richard Kraut | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | July 2, 2022
Aristotle's ethical philosophy gives friendship a central role in human flourishing. Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics distinguish relationships based on advantage, pleasure, and character, while arguing that the fullest friendships involve people who value one another for who they are and participate together in virtuous activity.
| Bennett W. Helm | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | December 17, 2021
This philosophical overview of friendship examines Aristotle's influential distinction among friendships of pleasure, utility, and virtue. It considers the difficult question of how genuine concern for another person's good can coexist with the benefits and pleasures that friendship provides to oneself.
| Nora Kreft | Cambridge University Press | May 27, 2019
Kreft investigates Aristotle's account of friendship in relation to his conception of what it means to be human. Because Aristotle recognizes forms of social attachment even among nonhuman animals, the chapter asks what distinguishes specifically human friendship and how friendship participates in rational and ethical life.
| Patricia Vesely | Cambridge University Press | March 11, 2019
This chapter surveys friendship in Aristotle and the wider Hellenistic philosophical tradition. Aristotle's virtue ethics provides an important foundation for examining how friendship contributes to character formation and the pursuit of the good life.
| Corinne A. Gartner | Cambridge University Press | July 26, 2017
Gartner examines Aristotle's theories of love and friendship within the broader framework of ancient ethics. The discussion places philia within Aristotle's understanding of virtue, happiness, human relationships, and the development of a flourishing life.
Friendship of Utility
| Selim Bozdoğan and Veysel Erat | Humanities and Social Sciences Communications | October 5, 2024
The authors explain that Aristotle does not simply dismiss utility relationships. Mutual usefulness helps create associations and communities, although virtuous friendship reaches a higher ethical level.
| Cambridge University Press | Rediscovering Political Friendship | 2019
This chapter revisits Aristotle's treatment of usefulness and asks how instrumental relationships can nevertheless possess characteristics of friendship. It is particularly relevant to economic, civic, and political associations.
| Lorraine Smith Pangle | Cambridge University Press | 2003
Pangle examines Aristotle's classification of useful things as objects of affection. Utility friendships exist because each participant receives some benefit, making the relationship dependent upon circumstances that can change.
Friendship, Concord, and Political Community
| Philosophy & Social Criticism | Sage | February 21, 2024
This article examines Hannah Arendt's appropriation and transformation of Aristotelian political friendship. It demonstrates the continuing importance of Aristotle's friendship theory in modern political philosophy.
| Political Theory | University of Chicago / Sage | 1996
This article examines conflict, deliberation, and political practice in Aristotle. It questions whether political life requires citizens to share the deeper bonds associated with intimate friendship.
Aristotle and Plato on Love and Friendship
| Oxford Academic | Oxford University Press | October 31, 2023
This history of friendship in Greek and Roman thought highlights Aristotle as one of antiquity's most important friendship theorists and compares his extensive treatment with later authors such as Cicero.
| Ronna Burger | University of Chicago Press | 2019
Burger compares the philosophical roles of eros and friendship in Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle appears characteristically as the philosopher of philia, while Plato is more closely associated with eros.
| Ronna Burger | University of Chicago Press | 2008
Burger interprets Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics partly as a dialogue with Socratic and Platonic philosophy. Friendship becomes one of the fields in which Aristotle develops and revises questions inherited from Plato.
Loving Friends for Their Own Sake
| Jennifer Whiting | Oxford University Press | 2023
Whiting challenges interpretations that reduce Aristotelian friendship to rational egoism. She investigates whether actions performed for one's friend must ultimately be interpreted as actions performed for one's own flourishing.
| Bradford Jean-Hyuk Kim | Journal of the History of Philosophy | 2021
Kim examines Aristotle's claim that friends love what is lovable and investigates whether even apparently altruistic friendship remains connected to one's own happiness.
Aristotle on Why Friendship Is Necessary
| Antigone Journal | Antigone | March 13, 2021
This accessible introduction explains Aristotle's conviction that human beings require friendship regardless of wealth or status. It introduces his distinction between useful, pleasurable, and complete friendships.
| Oxford Academic | Oxford University Press | 2017
This treatment of friendship and moral failure emphasizes the remarkable amount of space Aristotle devotes to friendship. Friendship is portrayed not merely as assistance but as an integral component of ethical existence.
| Michael Pakaluk | Cambridge University Press | 2005
Pakaluk explains why Aristotle makes friendship an indispensable part of happiness. A life containing wealth, health, pleasure, and longevity but lacking meaningful human relationships would still fall short of an ideal human life.
| Aristotle | Cambridge University Press | 2000
Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics begins Aristotle's sustained investigation of friendship. He presents friendship as necessary throughout life, helping the young avoid mistakes, supporting older people, and enabling people in their prime to perform worthwhile actions together.
| Aristotle | MIT Internet Classics Archive | Classical text
Aristotle argues that friendship belongs among the things most necessary for human life. Wealth, political power, and other external goods become far less meaningful without people with whom they can be shared.
The Friend as Another Self
| Oxford Academic | Oxford University Press | 2021
This chapter examines Aristotle's idea of shared life and the friend as another self. Intimacy develops when friends share activities they most deeply value rather than merely occupying the same physical space.
| Cambridge University Press | Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics | 2014
This chapter examines how friendship can assist self-understanding. Observing a good friend may allow a person to recognize qualities and actions that are much harder to see objectively in oneself.
Friendship and Moral Development
| José Torres | History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences | 2021
Torres situates friendship within Aristotle's biological and ethical thinking. Natural sociability provides a foundation upon which more sophisticated ethical forms of human association can develop.
Friendship as a Central Part of Aristotle's Ethics
| Dorothea Frede | Rhizomata | 2020
Frede investigates Aristotle's definition of friendship and asks whether his many different uses of philia can be incorporated into a coherent philosophical account.
| Talbot Brewer | Ethics | 2005
Brewer examines the relationship between friendship and Aristotle's wider ethical theory. Friendship challenges interpretations that portray Aristotelian virtue merely as a collection of traits serving the individual's private flourishing.
| Nancy Sherman | Philosophy and Phenomenological Research | 1987
Sherman explores Aristotle's conception of friendship and the shared life. She argues that friends participate in activities together in ways that make friendship an important component of ethical development and human flourishing.
Nicomachean and Eudemian Accounts of Friendship
| Anthony Kenny | Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy | 2018
Kenny compares Aristotle's treatment of friendship in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics with the single friendship book of the Eudemian Ethics.
Aristotle and Friendship in the Digital Age
| Naghmeh Momeni and Michael Rabbat | arXiv | February 11, 2016
Research on online social networks illustrates how radically the modern numerical concept of a "friend" differs from Aristotle's emphasis on intimate shared life. Network connections can number in the hundreds or thousands, whereas Aristotle argues that complete friendship is necessarily restricted by the time and attention genuine companionship requires.
Friendship and Human Nature
| Aristotelis Santas | Environmental Ethics | 2014
Santas extends Aristotle's concept of philia toward questions of biophilia and relations with other living beings. The article explores whether Aristotelian friendship can inform an environmental ethic.
Aristotle on Civic Friendship
| Jason A. Scorza | International Encyclopedia of Ethics | 2013
Scorza surveys civic friendship as a political ideal and its Aristotelian roots. Citizens need not be intimate companions to recognize one another as political equals and cooperate for shared purposes.
| M. Faure | Acta Academica | 2010
Faure investigates Aristotle's philia politike and its possible role as a civic bond. The article considers whether political friendship can provide meaningful cohesion within modern pluralistic societies.
| Elena Irrera | PhilPapers | 2005
Irrera analyzes political friendship through Aristotle's distinction among virtue, pleasure, and utility friendships. Civic relationships contain elements of advantage while potentially directing citizens toward a common good.
| Robert Mayhew | Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy | 1996
Mayhew reconstructs Aristotle's account of civic friendship from remarks scattered throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and Politics. Civic friendship differs substantially from intimate character friendship.
| Sibyl A. Schwarzenbach | Ethics | 1996
Schwarzenbach examines civic friendship as a relationship among citizens rather than merely between private individuals. Aristotle's broad philia includes spouses, relatives, companions, and fellow citizens.
Friendship of Pleasure
| Oxford Academic | Oxford University Press | 2010
This discussion of Aristotle's varieties of friendship places pleasure alongside usefulness and nobility as possible goals around which relationships can be organized.
Family and Friendship
| Paul Millett | Cambridge University Press | August 20, 2009
Millett places Aristotle's concept of philia within the social practices of ancient Athens. Aristotle recognizes that people owe different forms of assistance and respect to parents, relatives, companions, benefactors, and other associates rather than treating every friendship as an identical relationship.
The Three Kinds of Friendship
| Lorraine Smith Pangle | Cambridge University Press | July 4, 2009
Pangle closely examines Aristotle's famous division of friendship into relationships based on usefulness, pleasure, and goodness. She shows how Aristotle's analysis connects affection for others with the human pursuit of one's own good while distinguishing complete friendship from its less durable forms.
| Lorraine Smith Pangle | Cambridge University Press | July 4, 2009
Pangle's book provides a comprehensive study of Aristotle's philosophy of friendship and its relationship to self-love. It examines the three forms of friendship, political and familial friendship, disagreements between friends, friendship as another self, goodwill, sacrifice, and friendship's place in the happy life.
| Aristotle / Michael Pakaluk | Oxford University Press | 1999
Pakaluk's edition and commentary on Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics focuses on Aristotle's celebrated analysis of friendship. The work explores the structure of Aristotle's arguments concerning different friendships, reciprocity, virtue, self-love, equality, and friendship's importance to happiness.
Friendship of Virtue
| Lorraine Smith Pangle | Cambridge University Press | July 4, 2009
Pangle compares Aristotle and Montaigne on the possibility that friendship may be among life's greatest goods. Aristotle's perfect friendship depends heavily upon equality, similarity of character, shared activity, trust, and the ability of each friend to recognize and appreciate the other's virtue.
Friends as Another Self
| Lorraine Smith Pangle | Cambridge University Press | July 4, 2009
Aristotle's description of the friend as another self connects friendship with proper self-love. Pangle examines how Aristotle argues that the characteristics of good friendship originate in the virtuous person's relationship with himself and can then be extended toward another person.
Aristotle, Friendship, and Modern Social Life
| Dmitry Zinoviev and Vy Duong | arXiv | February 26, 2009
Research into online social networks asks whether the hundreds of connections labeled "friends" on digital platforms correspond to traditional friendship. Although not specifically an Aristotelian study, the distinction provides a modern comparison with Aristotle's demanding conception of friendship based on sustained reciprocal relationships.
Aristotle on Self-Love
| Oxford Academic | Oxford University Press | 2005
This chapter places Aristotle's ideas about friendship and self-love within the later history of Western thought. It considers the persistent tension between self-sufficiency and the desire for loving relationships.
| Lorraine Smith Pangle | Cambridge University Press | 2003
Pangle examines Aristotle's defense of proper self-love and his discussion of noble sacrifice. Aristotle distinguishes morally admirable self-love from selfish pursuit of money, honor, pleasure, or power.
Aristotle's Friendship Books as a Philosophical Unity
| Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews | University of Notre Dame | October 12, 2003
This review of Pangle's study emphasizes friendship's structural importance within the Nicomachean Ethics and its possible role in preparing Aristotle's transition toward contemplation in Book X.
Friendship and Shared Life
| Aristotle | Cambridge University Press | 2000
Book IX develops Aristotle's argument that friendship cannot consist merely of goodwill at a distance. Friends characteristically desire companionship and the opportunity to perform meaningful activities together.
Friendship, Egoism, and Altruism
| J. L. Mayor | Open University | 1983
Mayor examines accusations that Aristotle's ethical philosophy is fundamentally egoistic and asks whether his account of friendship genuinely allows concern for another person for that person's own sake.
