Friendship and Happiness insights from Aristotle and Aquinas. I'm mostly going to be introducing

Aristotle's ideas about friendship and happiness because Aristotle is the philosophical foundation

for Thomas Aquinas' theology. So I'm going to start off by going over Aristotle's ideas,

and then I'm going to talk about how Aquinas appropriates those ideas within a Christian

theological context. The way that I read Aquinas, he's taking Aristotle's view and making it do work that Aristotle could not make it do himself.

So, yeah, the first thing that I want to note, because I think it's incredibly important, and it's not often noted, is that Aristotle devotes more time to friendship than any other topic in the Nicaragian ethics.

The second thing that I want to note, because I think it's equally important. And you wouldn't, if you looked at

contemporary work on Aristotle, on Aristotle's ethics in particular, and it wouldn't matter

whether that contemporary work was historical or critical. So it wouldn't matter if you were

reading Neo-Rostitelian virtue wouldn't matter if you were reading Neolithician Virtue

ethicists or if you were reading historians who were writing about what Aristotle said,

you wouldn't really realize that Aristotle spent more time in his ethical works

talking about friendship than any other topic

because nobody talks about friendship.

It's completely marginalized within contemporary ethics, contemporary philosophy.

And it's even marginalized as a topic for people who work on Aristotle and Aristotle's ethics.

So there's a question there. Why is this? Why doesn't anyone care about friendship?

Is it that friendship and the love that exists between friends, is it unimportant? Is that the reason why it's completely ignored?

Or is it because philosophers think that friendship and the love between friends is just sort of

obvious?

It's not worthy of philosophical attention.

Or is it because certain assumptions, certain background assumptions made by contemporary

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