Friendship and Love — Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
Details
May 10 - We will read chapter 6 of Book IX. Earlier, we read 1) beliefs about friendship, 2) objects of love, 3) three kinds of friendship, 4) the best kind, 5) state vs. activity, 6) friending varieties, 7) of unequals, 8) loving vs. being loved, 9) friendships in societies, 10) forms of government, 11) right & wrong in these forms, 12) in families, 13–14) complaints by friends, 1) problems with dissimilar aims, 2) with conflicting obligations, 3) whether to break up, 4) relation to oneself, 5) goodwill as jumpstart to friending. Now: like-mindedness.
.
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.
.
----
.
We are live-reading and discussing Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, book VIII–IX, which is about friendship, social relations, and love.
.
The prerequisite to this book is our answering for ourselves these questions from the prior books, to which we will briefly review:
.
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?
.
.
The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.