Friendship as Paradigm of Aristotelian Eudaimonia

How essential then is friendship in happiness? What role does it play in the experience and realization of human ultimate good? And in what way can friendship help us understand and spell out the nature of happiness? These are some of the questions that I would like to address in this paper. In view of this, I have divided my paper in three parts. In the first, I argue why it is essential to view eudaimonia as actualization. In the second, I take into account the nature of friendship, pointing out the evident parallelism between happiness and friendship. And in the third part, I explain how friendship, insofar as it is paradigmatic of eudaimonia, can clarify the Aristotelian notion of happiness.