Flourishing with Others: Aristotle on Friendship

FAIN: FT-286093-22

Allison E. Murphy
Carleton College (Northfield, MN 55057-4001)

Research and writing one journal article on Aristotle’s concept of friendship.

My on-going project of three articles explores Aristotle’s view of the role of friendship in the good human life. My project challenges the dominant scholarly line while offering a new appraisal of the role of the friendship books within Aristotle’s larger ethical framework. It also reveals the continuities between Aristotle and the later classical tradition’s understanding of friendship by contributing to the long-standing debate about the Aristotelian influence on the Stoic doctrine of oikeiôsis (appropriation), the developmental process whereby basic instinctual drives mature into higher order, moral and rational states, including a disposition to value the well-being of others as integral to our own. Aristotle’s account of our identification with the good of others is important not only for our understanding of these continuities, but because it offers a compelling case for how we might think of ourselves as naturally fitted for community.