Friendship and Love — Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

February 1 - We will read chapter 6. The previous chapters read were about (1) common beliefs about friendship, (2) the object of love and friendship, (3) three corresponding kinds of friendship, (4) distinguishing the best from the inferior kinds, and (5) the state of friendship vs. its activity. Chapter 6 will be on further distinctions about forms of friendship, including the erotic ones. (E.g., can you have more than one at once?)
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Our main translation from here on will be by Adam Beresford (Penguin Classics, 2020), but we will occasionally dip into other older English translations to get more insights and commentaries.
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We are live-reading and discussing Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, book VIII–IX, which is about friendship, social relations, and love.
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The prerequisite to this book is our answering for ourselves these questions from the prior books, to which we will briefly review:
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1. What is a virtue of character {ēthikē aretē}?
2. How does one come to acquire any of it? (E.g. pride, ambition, bravery, gentlemanliness, generosity, candor, fairness, …)
3. From a first-person perspective in being virtuous, how does one feel and what does one see (differently, discursively) in a given situation of everyday living?
4. How does one formulate right desires?
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The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.