ABSTRACT

In this chapter, we contrast Aristotle’s three types of friendships with a contemporary understanding of friendship and with the extant social science of friendships. We argue that Aristotle’s view of friendship is superior in avoiding a simple unidimensional portrayal that is individualistic and limited to seeing relationships in solely means-ends terms. We propose an alternative understanding of friendships and their contributions to well-being in which friends pursue shared goals through inherently meaningful activity. We describe the nascent empirical literature on Aristotelian friendship, and discuss a rich set of social science methods that can compare the adequacy of the predominant model of friendship to one based on an Aristotelian perspective.