Chapter 13

The topics that Aristotle deals with in the final chapters of his treatise are not given any obvious location in terms of the division of things to examine in the case of friendship. ¹ But since the “in what” of friendship has been the topic in the immediately preceding chapters, and since the “what” and the “about what” have been dealt with already, the likelihood is that these chapters are all to be understood as still dealing with the “in what.” The likelihood is strengthened by the actual content, which does fit under that heading. So in the chapters 13 and 14 the topic is the friendship of self-love in the virtuous. In chapter 15 it is friendship in the self-sufficient, and in chapter 16 it is friendship in the number who can be friends. The topic in chapter 17 is a little less obvious, for it is professedly about how to use friends, which seems a different topic. But since what is actually discussed there is the friendships in which complaints arise and why, one may regard the chapter as still dealing with the “in what” of friendship but with the “in what” of easy and hard friendships. This suggestion can perhaps be confirmed by noting that of all 207the puzzles raised in chapter 11 about friendship, only one has not yet been dealt with, that about whether it is hard to be a friend or not. Things have been said along the way, to be sure, that relate to it, as about complaints in the friendships of utility and pleasure, but only in chapter 17 are complaints made a direct, as opposed to an incidental, theme. We may perhaps suppose, then, that this chapter is returning to the puzzle about the difficulty of friendship and is answering it in terms of the “in whom” of the several friendships.