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to mystic institute.org. To start off, I want to note, and this will be less striking,

those of you who have not read Aristotle's famous work than the Nicaramaki ethics,

those of you have, you were sometimes struck by something when you read it, which is Aristotle is a huge fan of two things in particular.

Friendship and contemplation.

For Aristotle, these two things, they're just the bees' knees, as I take it at one point said.

And he doesn't just think that like amongst many great things,

right? He treats them as incredibly central to our understanding of what would make a life meaningful.

I've got two passages here just at the top of the handout. There are two of many I could have

chosen from this

book, but they're sort of representative. So looking at that first one when he talks about friendship

a little earlier, he says, after that, after he talks about a whole bunch of complications

about the nature of virtue, the next topic is friendship, but it is a virtue or involves virtue.

And this is the really interesting line. Further, it is most necessary for our life, for no one would choose to live without friends. And this English translation is a little ambiguous, but if you look at the Greek, what he says is, if you didn't have friends, you would not choose to live. Aristotle, I'm like 95% sure that's true. I've looked at the Greek. I'm not that good. Greek. My friend who also knows Greek much better than he says I'm right about that. What he's saying here is, if you didn't have friends, you would not choose to live. He's not saying if you had two choices, a life with friends or life without friends, you choose a life with friends. Well, yeah, that's true. But he's saying if it was a choice between a life with friends or not a life,

a life with friends

or not a life, life without friends and not a life, you wouldn't have good reason to choose

the life without friends. Friendship for him seems to be central to making life worth living.

At least he seems to say this in this passage. And that's striking. That's really high

praise because you don't see him use similar language like that,

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