Other Selves in Action. Similarity and Complementarity between Virtuous Persons in Aristotle’s Theory of Friendship.

In this essay I explore Arirstotle’s notion of the virtuous friend as an “other self”, which, as I will contend, plays a central role in shaping his discussion of virtue-based friendship. After showing that this kind of friendship is premised on the friends’ reciprocal recognition of their similarity in virtue, I shall proceed to analyze the linguistic expressions “ἄλλος αὐτός” and “ἕτερος αὐτός”. Against a well-established trend of Aristotelian scholarship, which takes the two phrases as interchangeable, I will suggest the possibility that “ἄλλος αὐτός” conveys the idea of a friend as an “other” similar in virtue to the one who loves him. In contrast, ἕτερος αὐτός is primarily designed to emphasize (1) the separateness of the “other” and (2) the idea that friends are reciprocally “complementary” in a shared pursuit of contemplative activity.