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Aristotle's Philosophy of Friendship
Presents the major issues in Aristotle's writings on Friendship.
233 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1995
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May 8, 2021
Very engaging and enjoyable—but perhaps only for nerds like me.
Stern-Gillet addresses a topic that is almost always ignored or misunderstood: Aristotle’s theory of friendship. For Aristotle, this was clearly a very important part of ethics—it takes up two of ten chapters in the Nicomachean Ethics—but is often simply left out of most commentaries on Aristotle. If it is mentioned, Aristotle is generally seen to have a horrible and manipulative idea of friendship (for instance, Bernard Williams take on him). Stern-Gillet explains that our inability to get what Aristotle means by friendship results from our very different assumptions, most importantly our assumption that ethics must be informed by the tension between egoism and altruism.
This book addresses the problems of translation from Classical Greek, but in a way that is accessible to “greekless” readers and those are not philosophers. I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in Aristotle; it deals with a topic that gets little attention, even a quarter of a century after this book was written. I give it five stars because personally I enjoyed reading it, but also because there are so few books or even essays that engage the questions she does at anywhere near this level.
Stern-Gillet addresses a topic that is almost always ignored or misunderstood: Aristotle’s theory of friendship. For Aristotle, this was clearly a very important part of ethics—it takes up two of ten chapters in the Nicomachean Ethics—but is often simply left out of most commentaries on Aristotle. If it is mentioned, Aristotle is generally seen to have a horrible and manipulative idea of friendship (for instance, Bernard Williams take on him). Stern-Gillet explains that our inability to get what Aristotle means by friendship results from our very different assumptions, most importantly our assumption that ethics must be informed by the tension between egoism and altruism.
This book addresses the problems of translation from Classical Greek, but in a way that is accessible to “greekless” readers and those are not philosophers. I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in Aristotle; it deals with a topic that gets little attention, even a quarter of a century after this book was written. I give it five stars because personally I enjoyed reading it, but also because there are so few books or even essays that engage the questions she does at anywhere near this level.
Displaying 1 of 1 review