Pangle, Loraine. Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2002.

Excerpt:

“The phenomenon of kinship, with its richness and complexity, its ability to support but also at times to undercut virtue, and the promise it holds out of bringing together into one happy union so much of what is highest and so much of what is sweetest in life, forms a full topic of philosophic in Paris were the ancients. Plato and Cicero both wrote dialogues about friendship, and a number of others, including Plutarch and Theophrastus,  wrote treatises on it, most of which have now been lost.  Epicurus  devoted much of his life to cultivating friendship and counted it as one of life’s  chief goods; he and Seneca bioethics founded their teachings on friendship epistles to friends.  but by far the fullest and most probing classical study of friendship is to be found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,  church devotes more space to it than to any of the moral virtues and which represents friendship as a bridge between the moral virtues and the highest life of philosophy. The study of rent shift in the classical offers is in many ways a study of human love altogether, and the Greek word can cover all bonds of action, from the closest erotic and familiar  loyalties, humanitarian sip, business partnerships, and even love for inanimate  things, but the word means and foremost friendship, and it is the contention of Aristotle and of all of the classical author’s who follow him that precisely in the French ships of mature and virtuous individuals do we see human love not only at its most revealing but also at its richest and highest.”

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