"L'amico è un altro se stesso": amicizia, conoscenza di sé, conoscenza dell'altro in Omero e Aristotele

The paper analyses Homer’s narrative about the friendship between Achilles and Patroklos in order to shed some light – with the aid of the tools of philosophical historiography and philology – on Aristotle’s account of friendship. Both by Homer and by Aristotle, friendship is described as an act of self-knowledge which is necessary to human beings insofar they are unable to attain self-knowledge in a non-relational way. Some considerations are finally drawn about some themes in nowadays scientific thought that seem to point to a possibility of a nowadays reusage of Aristotle’s account of friendship.