Friendship and Affection

Politics 7 claims that the self-assertive and defensive faculty of soul, the thumos, is “the faculty by which we love” (philoumen; 1328a1). Interpreters have been slow to credit this claim, in part because Aristotle’s treatises on friendship in the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics attribute no such function to thumos. Other places in the corpus corroborate it, however, and the passage and its interpretation illuminate a crux in Aristotelian friendship: whether an initial self-love “extends to others” (EN 9, 1168b5-6).

The family dramas passed down via the corpus of the Attic orators give the modern reader a fascinating insight into the normative values of fifth and fourth century Athens and its environs. Orators would use these cultural expectations to convince the juries of the reliability and propriety of their clients: a jury would be more inclined to vote in favor of a defendant or prosecutor who acted within the bounds of social acceptability towards his family members, friends, and fellow citizens.

With very few exceptions, scholars take Socrates'[1] ethics to be eudaimonist.

It is an accepted fact that there was a regeneration of learning in the Byzantine empire of the 800s into the 1000s and beyond. As part of this regeneration, the epigrams of the Greek Anthology were collected around 900 and subsequently were influential (Cameron 1993). This paper considers some letters of an important Byzantine political figure, Nikephoros Ouranos, in relation to selected epigrams from the collection.

Aristotle asserts that if listeners are to benefit from his ethics lectures, they must have grasped "the that" (ta hoti) (cf. EN I.4, 1095a30-b7). Many scholars seem to think that ta hoti in ethics refer to “concrete judgments about how people, actions, or states are similar or different and better or worse than one another" (Salmieri, “Aristotle’s Non-‘Dialectical’ Methodology in the Nicomachean Ethics,” 322).