Friendship As Mirroring Self-Love — Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
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April 26 - We will read chapter 4 of Book IX. Previously, we read (1) beliefs about friendship, (2) objects of love, (3) three kinds of friendship, (4) the best kind, (5) state vs. activity thereof, (6) friending varieties, (7) between unequals, (8) loving vs. being loved, (9) friendships in communities, (10) forms of government, (11) right & wrong in these forms, (12) in families, (13–14) complaints by friends, (1) friends with dissimilar aims, (2) with conflicting obligations, (3) whether to break off relationship. Now: friendship as mirroring self-love.
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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.