Aristotle's Analysis of Friendship: Function and Analogy, Resemblance, and Focal Meaning

Abstract

Both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics discuss friendship (philia) in detail and both recognize several kinds of friendship: the association of morally good men, the association of pleasure seekers and the association of men seeking their own advantage. Furthermore, both ethical treatises are quite clear that this difference in kind is not to be explained in terms of simple, unmitigated equivocity. Friendships are not like capes which may be quite unrelated items such as garments and points of land extending into the sea. But how are the several kinds of friendship related? The Eudemian Ethics answers this question by introducing the focal analysis of pros hen equivocals whose application to being is familiar to students of the Metaphysics. What the Nicomachean Ethics does is not immediately clear. Many scholars, both ancient and modern, have seen focal analysis in the Nicomachean discussion.' This seems to me a mistake which merits correction. For properly understood the Nicomachean treatment of friendship is a complex and sophisticated analysis of considerable independent interest. Two distinct modes of analysis are discernible, yet neither is a focal analysis. In Section