Friendship and Love — Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
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March 22 - We will read chapter 13. Previous chapters were about (1) beliefs about friendship, (2) object of love, (3) three kinds of friendship, (4) the best vs. the inferior, (5) the state of friendship vs. its activity, (6) comparing the many variations, (7) friendships of unequals, (8) loving vs. being loved, (9) friendships in social groups, (10) forms of government, (11) friendships and right & wrong in these forms, and (12) friendship in families. This next will be about complaints/disputes of friends between equals.
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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.