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True Friendship

Studied to this day, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is one of the most interesting pieces of literature I have come across. The text offers Aristotle’s views on a variety of topics including what a human being is comprised of, not in terms of physiology, but rather what differentiates us from animals for example. Most importantly, and the parts that I focused on for this assignment were the areas where Aristotle defines the various types of friendships, and the parts where Aristotle discusses moral virtue and how one can go about acquiring them. In this paper I will review Aristotle’s moral virtues in relation to the term philia, and evaluate why self-control is the most significant of the virtues required in a true friendship. Before diving in, it is first important to dissect the term philia as used by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics. The term philia encompasses a variety of relationships types including the relationships between: business contacts, parent and child, soldiers on the same army, the best of friends, and even the relationship to one’s significant other. Though today we would not necessarily consider all of these relationships to be friendships, the term philia did incorporate them. For the purpose of this paper, the term philia, or friendship, is about the relationship between the truest of friends.
Within the scope of friendship overall, Aristotle distinguishes between three objects of philia: utility, pleasure, and good. The friendship based on the object of utility, according to Aristotle, is the lowest kind of friendship as it is based on the mutual intent to use one another. An example of this would be when an agent wants to be one’s “friend” because they require a ride to work. The agent who has a means of transportation may now be able to use carpool because of this “friendship” but beyond this, the two have no real

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