With Mirrors or Without? Self-Perception in Eudemian Ethics VII.12

Abstract

This chapter is both carefully wrought and thoroughly dialectical. Carefully wrought: Aristotle makes an important point through puns. The issue is whether the self-sufficient person will have, or should have, friends. The chapter, then, is dialectical through and through (all the more so, the author suggests en passant, in Aristotle's allusion to a Platonic dialogue, the Symposium). There are in fact three parallel chapters in Aristotle's ethical works that talk about the self-sufficient man and his friends, and do so in the context of some kind of claim about self-perception and self-knowledge: Magna Moralia 2.15, especially 1213a8-27; Nicomachean Ethics IX.9, especially 1170b5-14; and Eudemian Ethics (EE) VII.12, especially 1245a29-b4. The chapter is shaped, thus, around the two versions of the puzzle about virtue and friendship: but they are versions that are distinct. Keywords:Aristotle; Eudemian Ethics (EE) ; friendship; Magna Moralia ; Nicomachean Ethics ; self-perception