This book offers a comprehensive account of the major philosophical works on friendship and its relationship to self-love. The book gives central place to Aristotle's searching examination of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. Lorraine Pangle argues that the difficulties surrounding this discussion are soon dispelled once one understands the purpose of the Ethics as both a source of practical guidance for life and a profound, theoretical investigation into human nature. The book also provides fresh interpretations of works on friendship by Plato, Cicero, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne and Bacon. The author shows how each of these thinkers sheds light on central questions of moral philosophy: is human sociability rooted in neediness or strength? is the best life chiefly solitary, or dedicated to a community with others? Clearly structured and engagingly written, this book will appeal to a broad swathe of readers across philosophy, classics and political science.
This study illuminates Xenophon's teaching about the underlying psychological motives of the most fully developed political ambition. An analysis of what the Cyropaedia portrays as the interplay among Cyrus's spiritedness, justice, benevolence, piety, and cultivation of an aura of divinity leads to an unveiling of supreme ambition's deepest root: not the desire for power as such, nor the love of justice, but the desire to be a quasi-divine benefactor. The article traces the development of this ambition from its earliest manifestations in the young Cyrus's puppylike spiritedness, through his hope-filled rise to power, to his grim mature rein and his death, showing how a shadowy concern for immortality drives him in ways he is reluctant to see or acknowledge.
This paper analyzes Aristotle's discussion of courage, the first and paradigmatic virtue in his account of moral virtue, as the perfection of human beings’ natures as both political and rational. It identifies unrecognized complexities in his definition of courage as “a mean with respect to fear and confidence,” in his subtle analysis of political courage, and especially in what he reveals to be the conflict-riddled reasons people find courage noble and good. While working to moderate the excessive fieriness of traditional heroism and to render citizens’ courage more sober and moderate, Aristotle shows why political courage can in fact never be made perfectly rational, pointing to a key limit to human rationality altogether.
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