"A man is happy if he has merely encountered the shadow of a
friend." —Menander Plato and Aristotle with invisible
basketballs Plato and Aristotle both give an important place to
friendship in the good life; Plato devotes the major part of
three books (the Lysis , and Symposium ) to friendship and to
love, and in Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
lavishes extravagant praise upon the Greek concept of friendship
or philia , which includes not only voluntary relationships but
also those relationships that hold between the members of a
family. Friendship, says Aristotle, is a virtue which is ‘most
necessary with a view to living … for without friends no one
would choose to live, though he had all other goods’. If
friendship is so important to the good life, then it is
important to ask the question, what is friendship? According to
Aristotle, for a person to be friends with another ‘it is
necessary that [they] bear good will to each other and wish good
things for each other, without this escaping thei