Aristotle - His Strengths and Weakness

Aristotle-his strengths and weakness

3. Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of his/her philosophy in your view point.

Aristotle says that there are three types of friendship: friendship of utility that is the one that is “beneficial rather than just useful, and most of the time it ends when the practical purpose is no longer present.” The other type of friendship is the friendship of pleasure; this is the one that “ends when the pleasure disappears. The last one that he talks about is the friendship of the good. This one is defined, as “Complete friendship is the friendship of good people similar in virtue; for they wish goods in the same way to each other insofar as they are good, and they are good in their own right.” (Aristotle, 122)  Aristotle’s main points on his discussion are based on these three types of friendship and he also analyzes them and explains why he thinks friendship is defined like that.

 Aristotle is the ancient philosopher also have is strengths and his weaknesses.  In his writing and definition of strength is his way of describing what is friendship and how he divided in three types.  For Aristotle, this is one of his strengths, because he lived in a different and ancient society were thing were very different from the society we have today; the modern society.  “Aristotle believes that only the virtuous can have virtuous friendship. Since only a select few can truly be called virtuous, not everybody has the capacity for this kind of friendship.”  (Parent, W. page 6) Even thought is an ancient philosopher and lived in a different society, I think this is true and is never going to change.  He also said that for the majority of people pick their friends for the pleasure.  This is something that people and Vernon argue, but I really think is one of Aristotle’s strength points, because people call many people friends because they like to be with them and they enjoy their company, but they are not virtuous friends with each other.  For me those are some of the strengths of Aristotle, because he makes his point clear and base on his own ideas; not based on what other say.

Finally, even though Aristotle has good strengths in his arguments, he also has his weaknesses.  For many people, Aristotle is a does not explain well the friendship of virtue, because friendship of virtue will also be accompanies with both, friendship of pleasure and utility; people argue that “virtuous friends are primary friends for their own sake.” (Parent, W. page 2) In every friendship, there has to be something that gives you pleasure about the other friend that make you be friend with him/her, because if not, nothing would have bring us together; “otherwise we will not be anything more than acquaintances.” (Parent W. page 3)  Finally, we can say that the weakness on Aristotle’s argument and article is that he wrote with egoism and did not explained in a concrete or complete way the definition of friendship.  He thinks that friendship is based only on the three types of friendship that he explains, but there are a lot of things that can be added and/or argue from his explanations, and many people do not like what he thinks and wrote about friendship.  That is one of the things that Vernon is arguing on his articles and book of “The Meaning of friendship.”