Abstract

The most powerful attempts to understand the uniqueness of a human have started from the perspective of how she faces her own death. They have, however, overlooked the experience other individuals have of her finitude. This dissertation attempts to articulate a complete understanding of human finitude by showing how we appreciate the finitude of another person in the everyday experience of friendship. We call this finitude "specificity." ;To clear the way for this new understanding of friendship, the dissertation begins with a historical survey of philosophers who have made significant contributions to our conceptions about friendship and love. Beginning with Plato, I establish how the original philosophical understanding of friendship depends upon conceptions of class membership. Throughout his dialogues, Plato maintains, in various ways, that friendship is a privilege reserved exclusively for the most virtuous class of individuals. ;Turning to Aristotle, this dissertation discovers that his conception of "primary friendship" merely repeats in a complicated way Plato's position. For Aristotle, an individual can only be a primary friend to others when he and his friends have fully actualized themselves as members of the human species by exercising their potential to perform rational actions. ;The historical survey concludes with Kierkegaard's description of human love modeled on Christian principles. Despite his references to appreciating someone's individuality, Kierkegaard returns to the ancient way of understanding love. He insists that we love other members of our human species insofar as we are neighbors to each other, created as an individuals by God. ;Once this historical survey clears our way towards a new understanding of friendship, this dissertation describes friendship as a lived-experience of the finitude of another human being. In such an experience, a person is no longer unique because of the death that only she can exclusively face. From the perspective of a friend, a person is finite insofar as there is no one else like her and no one that can replace her when she is lost. In friendship, we appreciate a person's specificity