A splendid new translation of one of the greatest books on friendship ever written In a world where social media, online relationships, and relentless self-absorption threaten the very idea of deep and lasting friendships, the search for true friends is more important than ever. In this short book, which is one of the greatest ever written on the subject, the famous Roman politician and philosopher Cicero offers a compelling guide to finding, keeping, and appreciating friends. With wit and (...) wisdom, Cicero shows us not only how to build friendships but also why they must be a key part of our lives. For, as Cicero says, life without friends is not worth living. Filled with timeless advice and insights, Cicero’s heartfelt and moving classic—written in 44 BC and originally titled De Amicitia—has inspired readers for more than two thousand years, from St. Augustine and Dante to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Presented here in a lively new translation with the original Latin on facing pages and an inviting introduction, How to Be a Friend explores how to choose the right friends, how to avoid the pitfalls of friendship, and how to live with friends in good times and bad. Cicero also praises what he sees as the deepest kind of friendship—one in which two people find in each other “another self” or a kindred soul. An honest and eloquent guide to finding and treasuring true friends, How to Be a Friend speaks as powerfully today as when it was first written. (shrink)

The paper explores the relation between philosophy and rhetoric from a new perspective by highlighting the dramatic nature of the dialogue and paying attention not only to what is said about philosophy and rhetoric but also to what is shown, especially through Gorgias' intervention throughout the dialogue in order to save a community of dialogue that inquires into the good and the just. This re-conception of the relation between philosophy and rhetoric implies a re-conception of the practice of politics itself, (...) rooted in a philosophy concerned with turning individual souls toward the good and a rhetoric that motivates individuals to be turned in the same direction by the words of others. El artículo explora la relación entre filosofía y retórica desde una nueva perspectiva al enfatizar la naturaleza dramática del diálogo y, por tanto, poniéndole atención no sólo a lo que se dice sobre filosofía y retórica, sino también a lo que se muestra, especialmente por las intervenciones de Gorgias a lo largo del diálogo con el fin de salvar a la comunidad de diálogo que investiga lo bueno y lo justo. Esta reconcepción de la relación entre filosofía y retórica implica una reconcepción de la práctica de la política misma, fundada en una filosofía que busca girar las almas individuales hacia el bien y una retórica que motiva a los individuos a ser girados en esa misma dirección por las palabras de los otros. (shrink)

This essay aims to broaden the understanding of the nature of the physician–patient relationship. To do so, the concept of medical philia that Pedro Laín Entralgo proposes is analysed and is considered taking into consideration the relational trait of the human being and the structure of human action as a story of the permanent tension that exists between freedom and truth, where the ontological foundation of the hermeneutic of the "Gift" and the analogy of “Love” as the central dynamic of (...) this action, helps explain the nature of the doctor-patient relationship as a "friendship relationship". This understanding offers a perspective differing from just the utilitarian considerations of current "patient-centred" approaches and proposed the redirection of the teaching of medicine to more humanistic approaches. The dynamic of the doctor-patient relationship proposed here in its most genuine essence is effectively expressed in physician concrete attitudes that the patient usually captures and relates as the “the doctor’s way of being”. Goya's painting, Self-portrait with Dr Arrieta (1820), can be taken as an outstanding artistic representation of this expanded dimension of the medical act, capturing the “medical friendship” in action. (shrink)

Lawrence Anthony and Françoise Malby love animals-so when they hear that a herd of wild African elephants needs a new home, they welcome the herd to their wildlife sanctuary-Thula Thula-with open arms. What follows in this beautifully illustrated true story is an extraordinary cross-species friendship that will move readers and warm the hearts of animal lovers at every age.

Philosophers have tended to construe friendship as an intimate relationship involving mutual love, and have focused their discussions on this ‘true’ form of friendship. However, everyone recognizes that we use the word ‘friend’ and its cognates to refer, non-ironically, to those with whom we share various relationships that are not terribly intimate or which do not involve mutual love. I argue that there exists no general reason to restrict our philosophical focus to ‘true’ friendships, and allege (...) that we can gain important insights if we broaden our perspective to include lesser friends. I contend that friendships, in the broad sense (encompassing both ‘true’ and lesser forms), are necessarily relationships that are the product of significant collaborative norm manipulation. And I argue that understanding friendship in this way helps explain important features, including the difference between friendships and familiar relations, the non-fungibility of friends, and why friendships are often in flux. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift by Claudia BaracchiJoseph GamacheBARACCHI, Claudia. Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift. Translated by Elena Bartolini and Catherine Fullarton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. 146 pp. Paper, $30.00Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift offers a series of reflections on friendship that "outline thoughts, visions, stories." It is well to bear this in mind. There is no sustained (...) discussion of (and not many references to) other commentators or interpreters of the ancient Greeks. Nor is there, despite the title, a sustained philosophical treatment of friendship or its future. It is a series of reflections on ancient Greek texts. These reflections are unified by the theme of friendship, even when friendship seems to recede into the background. Each chapter is organized around a specific text, the reading of which is interspersed with the aforementioned thoughts, visions, and stories.The first chapter focuses on Plato's Timaeus. Friendship in its "most elementary sense" is "looking at the sky" and seeing not only myself, but "myself as us." This sort of cosmic friendship is a look, a "unitive force, a capacity for seeing the bonds and holding together the elements that form every living organism." The second chapter takes up the analogy of the soul and the city in the Republic. I am a friend to myself when the parts of my soul are in harmony.In the third and longest chapter, Baracchi takes up friendship between equals as discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics. The thematic focus is now friendship between persons, and we read that friendship is a "privileged place in which to be," that it "corroborates, strengthens, amplifies, and emphasizes" the friends, that it is the "condition and context for the utmost explication of human dynamis." Friends resemble each other like poetic images "that illuminate and elucidate one another." The third chapter also takes a swipe at "us moderns," whose notions of liberty undermine our ability to appreciate friendship. We moderns "struggle to contemplate seriousness, fidelity, and the depth they entail, without cynicism." The critique is familiar, and trades, at times, on what seems to be a conflation of Hobbes with the entirety of early modern philosophical anthropology. [End Page 535]Chapters 4 through 6 return to Plato, first with a reflection on the Apology and Symposium, and then with a discussion of Aristotle's friendship with Plato. The fifth chapter takes up the tension between the pursuit of truth and the love of one's friends, as that dilemma manifests in the life of a philosopher. Baracchi convincingly argues that Aristotle should be read as honoring the deeper teachings of Plato, and Socrates before him, that one should care about not who holds a belief but only whether the belief is true. Thus did Aristotle resolve the dilemma between truth and friendship. His pursuit of the truth, even when it caused disagreement with Plato, was an act of friendship.Chapter 6 focuses on the origin of the polis as described in the Republic. Baracchi shows how Socrates tries in the Republic to widen the circle of those who count as one's friends, from select others within the polis, to everyone within the polis, to the entire Greek world, as well as to push back against those who argue that enmity is the necessary foundation of the polis. The last three chapters of the book return to Aristotle's views about friendship: first, about the relationship between friendship and justice, second, about friendships between unequals, and lastly, about the embodied aspects of friendship, its sweetness, and pleasure.There are limits, however, to how helpful the work might be to philosophers interested in friendship. The language is often too abstract, as in the recommendation, "to learn to think human community in its entirety, without this entailing the elimination of differences, and without reducing the differences to identity-related and localistic velleities." Or in the claim that the difference between complete and derivative friendship is the former's ability to "to grasp the broader reasons in the finite, and thus to place the contingent in an otherwise articulated context." Too often there are exaggerations that obscure whatever point is... (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the neo-Aristotelian conception of “friendships of character” appears to misrepresent the essential nature of "genuine", or "true", friendship. We question the neo-Aristotelian imperative that true friendship entails disinterested love of the other “for their own sake” and strives at enhancing moral virtue. We propose an alternative conception of true friendship as involving affective and motivational features which we call closeness, intimacy, identity, and trust. Even on this minimal construal, (...) however, friendship can turn vicious when one of its characteristics becomes overpowering and thereby destroys the very goods for which the friendship was originally sought. (shrink)

Recently, there has been much discussion of two challenging arguments that suggest that if we were to lack free will of the sort required for moral responsibility we would lose one of the most important things that give our lives meaning, namely, valuable human relationships such as friendship. One line of argument, defended by Robert Kane, suggests that freely chosen relationships have an irreplaceable value, and the other, defended by Peter Strawson and recently taken up in a new form (...) by Seth Shabo and others, suggests that the most valuable relationships are ones that require susceptibility to the emotions of resentment and indignation that presuppose freedom and responsibility. These arguments have been ably challenged (see, for example, Pereboom 2014). But even if these arguments are unsound, their conclusion might still be true. In this paper, I aim to defend a distinctive third kind of approach. It appeals to the nature of friendship as requiring a special kind of obligations, and in this way draws a closer connection between the aspects of friendship that require free will and moral responsibility itself. The reasoning rests on two main premises. The first is that genuine friendship entails special obligations. Two people are not friends unless they have obligations toward one another that are partially defining of friendship. The second premise is that one has obligations only if one has the freedom to meet them. This idea is closely related to a principle taken to be axiomatic in various ethical and even deontic logical systems: Ought Implies Can. Putting these premises together, we can conclude that friendship (as well as other special relationships) require freedom. Defending these two premises takes us into two entirely separate debates, one in ethical theory and one in free will and responsibility, and a secondary aim of the paper is to bring these two vibrant discussions together. (shrink)

"On Friendship, with its total of one hundred sayings, is the perfect gift for friends."--Feng Yingjing, renowned scholar and civic official, 1601 Matteo Ricci is best known as the Italian Jesuit missionary who brought Christianity to China. He also published a landmark text on friendship--the first book to be written in Chinese by a European--that instantly became a late Ming best seller. On Friendship distilled the best ideas on friendship from Renaissance Latin texts into one hundred (...) pure and provocative Chinese maxims. Written in a masterful classical style, Ricci's sayings established his reputation as a great sage and the sentiments still ring true. Available for the first time in English, On Friendship matches a carefully edited Chinese text with a facing-page English translation and includes notes on sources and biographical, historical, and cultural information. Still admired in China for its sophistication and inspirational wisdom, On Friendship is a delightful cross-cultural work by a crucial and fascinating historical figure. It is also an excellent tool for learning Chinese, pairing a superb model of the classical language with an accessible and accurate translation. (shrink)

" _On Friendship_, with its total of one hundred sayings, is the perfect gift for friends."—Feng Yingjing, renowned scholar and civic official, 1601 Matteo Ricci is best known as the Italian Jesuit missionary who brought Christianity to China. He also published a landmark text on friendship—the first book to be written in Chinese by a European—that instantly became a late Ming best seller. _On Friendship_ distilled the best ideas on friendship from Renaissance Latin texts into one hundred pure (...) and provocative Chinese maxims. Written in a masterful classical style, Ricci's sayings established his reputation as a great sage and the sentiments still ring true. Available for the first time in English, _On Friendship_ matches a carefully edited Chinese text with a facing-page English translation and includes notes on sources and biographical, historical, and cultural information. Still admired in China for its sophistication and inspirational wisdom, _On Friendship_ is a delightful cross-cultural work by a crucial and fascinating historical figure. It is also an excellent tool for learning Chinese, pairing a superb model of the classical language with an accessible and accurate translation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 428-435 [Access article in PDF] Agapic Friendship Sharon E. Sytsma ARISTOTLE CATEGORIZED FRIENDSHIP into three types: friendships of pleasure, friendships of utility, and complete (perfect or true) friendships (1156a5-10). 1 The thesis developed here is that Aristotle neglects an important kind of friendship. Various aspects of his theory of friendship have been challenged, but no one has charged that (...) his categorization is incomplete. 2 In what follows, an Aristotelian account of the friendship between James Steerforth and David Copperfield in Dickens' David Copperfield will be given, and then shown to be inadequate. Then a brief account of agapic love will be given and shown to be another basis of friendship—agapic friendship. Finally, the agapic nature of the two young men's friendship will be highlighted. I One might suppose that the friendship between David Copperfield and Steerforth is a mixed form of the three types of friendships identified by Aristotle. There can be no doubt that their friendship was pleasurable and useful to both. The two boys (and later young men) were appreciative of the other's pleasing appearance. David frequently comments on the pleasure attending any kind remark issuing from Steerforth on his own behalf. He admits his pleasure in being "cherished as a kind of plaything in my room," indicating his awareness of Steerforth's pleasure in being with him. Steerforth took great pleasure in David's imaginative and talented storytelling, which David eagerly [End Page 428] used as a "cementing" force in their relationship. Surely, Steerforth also took pleasure in the respect and admiration of his doting schoolmate.Also undeniable is that both friends found each other to be useful. David treasured the gift of Steerforth's protection. Being favored by Steerforth automatically elicited the admiration and envy of the other schoolboys. "No one dared to annoy one whom [Steerforth] honored with his countenance." Steerforth, on his part, found David's storytelling to be a useful antidote to his insomnia.However, David's love for Steerforth went beyond any self-interested concern. David loved Steerforth for his friend's own sake. He stayed up late and rose early to recount and embellish tales, not because he was motivated by self-interest or fear, but only because he "admired and loved him." David perceived Steerforth to be considerate and generous, and he mistook his friend's self-confidence as evidence of nobility of character.These perceptions were hardly objective. David's good nature, generous-mindedness, and youthful naiveté kept him from recognizing the faults in his friend's character, even in the face of ample evidence. Steerforth's cruel streak should have been obvious to David since he witnessed Steerforth allowing another student, the hapless Traddles, to take the blame when Steerforth laughed in church, and his ruthless exposure of Mr. Mell's secret shame of having a mother living on charity in an almshouse. He heard Steerforth's story about how he had "accidentally" thrown a hammer into Rosa Dartle's face. David's uneasiness on these occasions was overcome by his natural generosity of spirit and sense of gratitude. When shocked by a cold and arrogant insult against Little Em'ly's fiancé, Ham, David responds with full confidence: [You may] try to hide your sympathies in jest from me, but I know better. When I see how perfectly you understand them and how exquisitely you can enter into happiness like this plain fisherman's, or humour a love like my old nurse's, I know that there is not a joy or sorrow, not an emotion, of such people, that can be indifferent to you. And I admire and love you for it, Steerforth, twenty times the more! So even though David has an inflated sense of Steerforth's virtue, his thinking of Steerforth as virtuous was integral to their relationship, and that in itself would support thinking of the friendship as based on the good.Given Steerforth's defects of character, one might easily be led to the conclusion that Steerforth loved David only for the pleasure and [End Page 429] benefits of his... (shrink)

The two dominant contemporary moral theories, Kantianism and utilitarianism, have difficulty accommodating our commonsense understanding of friendship as a relationship with significant moral implications. The difficulty seems to arise from their underlying commitment to impartiality, to the claim that all persons are equally worthy of concern. Aristotelian accounts of friendship are partialist in so far as they defend certain types of friendship by appeal to the claim that some persons, the virtuous, are in fact more worthy of (...) concern than are other persons. This article argues that we can preserve the underlying impartiality of Kantianism and utilitarianism, while also preserving a certain partiality with respect to our friends: the partiality of commonsense only seems objectionable if we fail to understand the true grounds, nature, and implications of such partiality. Neo-Aristotelian partiality should be rejected in favor of commonsense partiality. (shrink)

The two dominant contemporary moral theories, Kantianism and utilitarianism, have difficulty accommodating our commonsense understanding of friendship as a relationship with significant moral implications. The difficulty seems to arise from their underlying commitment to impartiality, to the claim that all persons are equally worthy of concern. Aristotelian accounts of friendship are partialist in so far as they defend certain types of friendship by appeal to the claim that some persons, the virtuous, are in fact more worthy of (...) concern than are other persons. This article argues that we can preserve the underlying impartiality of Kantianism and utilitarianism, while also preserving a certain partiality with respect to our friends: the partiality of commonsense only seems objectionable if we fail to understand the true grounds, nature, and implications of such partiality. Neo-Aristotelian partiality should be rejected in favor of commonsense partiality. (shrink)

Plato’s characterization of philia in Lysis, on one hand, as one-sided belonging to the ultimate object of our desire and, on the other, as interpersonal reciprocal belonging appears problematic. Yonesawa has recently claimed that one can make sense of both uses of “belonging” if we assume that one is the other’s friend when each one coincides in being the ultimate object of the other’s desire. This paper proposes instead that Lysis’ ‘reciprocity’ of friendship results from friends’ right wanting, which (...) presupposes their souls are well-disposed to a true object of desire. To prove this, I will argue that (i) the action and the argument of the dialogue exhibit this kind of reciprocity, (ii) there is a ‘unique’ ultimate object of desire (‘teleological monism’), that consists of a ‘knowledge about the good life’ and (iii) only the common longing for such knowledge can make possible friends’ reciprocal belonging. (shrink)

Friendships have always been one of the most valuable assets in the lives of human beings, and friendships were of utmost importance to Spinoza. There are different kinds of friendship but for Spinoza genuine friendship can only occur among those who pursue the truth. In this paper I will (1) point out what Spinoza means by the truth, (2) show how friendships are possible even though there is tension in our lives between our desire to preserve ourselves and (...) our desire to preserve others, (3) differentiate two kinds of friendship, and (4) see what if anything is missing from his account of friendship. (shrink)

Social robots are increasingly developed for the companionship of children. In this article we explore the moral implications of children-robot friendships using the Aristotelian framework of virtue ethics. We adopt a moderate position and argue that, although robots cannot be virtue friends, they can nonetheless enable children to exercise ethical and intellectual virtues. The Aristotelian requirements for true friendship apply only partly to children: unlike adults, children relate to friendship as an educational play of exploration, which is (...) constitutive of the way they acquire and develop virtues. We highlight that there is a relevant difference between the way we evaluate adult-robot friendship compared to children-robot friendship, which is rooted in the difference in moral agency and moral responsibility that generate the asymmetries in the moral status ascribed to adults versus children. We look into the role played by imaginary companions (IC) and personified objects (PO) in children’s moral development and claim that robots, understood as Personified Robotic Objects (PROs), play a similar role with such fictional entities, enabling children to exercise affection, moral imagination and reasoning, thus contributing to their development as virtuous adults. Nonetheless, we argue that adequate use of robots for children’s moral development is conditioned by several requirements related to design, technology and moral responsibility. (shrink)

It has been alleged that the demands of friendship conflict with the norms of epistemology—in particular, that there are cases in which the moral demands of friendship would require one to give a friend the benefit of the doubt, and thereby come to believe something in violation of ordinary epistemic standards on justified or responsible belief :329–351, 2004; Stroud in Ethics 116:498–524, 2006; Hazlett in A luxury of the understanding: on the value of true belief, Oxford University (...) Press, Oxford, 2013). The burden of this paper is to explain these appearances away. I contend that the impression of epistemic partiality in friendship dissipates once we acknowledge the sorts of practical and epistemic reasons that are generated by our values: value-reflecting reasons. The present proposal has several virtues: it requires fewer substantial commitments than other proposals seeking to resist the case for epistemic partiality ; it is independently motivated, as it cites a phenomenon—value-reflecting reasons—we have independent reasons to accept; it provides a single, unified account of how various features of friendship bear on belief-formation; and makes clear how it is the very value we place on friendship itself that ensures against epistemic partiality. (shrink)

According to some contemporary epistemologists, truth is a norm of belief: for any proposition p, one ought to believe that p only if p is true. It is sometimes also held that the evaluation of beliefs in terms of their truth-value is universal: truth is a norm of all, and not merely some, of one’s beliefs. Taken together, these claims have inspired the “friendship objection” to the truth-norm. According to this objection, friendship sometimes requires that friends violate (...) the truth-norm when it comes to their beliefs about each other. I begin by discussing how the friendship objection poses a potential problem for the Catholic philosophical tradition. Then, I attempt to resolve the objection by arguing that it is committed to a false dilemma about friendship. Drawing on insights of Gabriel Marcel and Dietrich von Hildebrand, I sketch a virtue by which friends negotiate the demands of both friendship and truth. (shrink)

I once attended a writing conference for aspiring authors of books for children, at which one speaker enraged the audience by making the pronouncement that, in his view, parents were disqualified to be authors of children's fiction. His reason: parents have to protect themselves from the reality of their children's pain and so wouldn't be able to write about childhood traumas with sufficient awareness and honesty. To this the audience, largely composed of mothers, shot back that parents are especially qualified (...) to write for children, for precisely the opposite reason: they live with children in a relationship of great intimacy and so know children in a way that non-parents 1 do not. But, assuming, as I am inclined to do (as myself a writer of books for children who is also a parent), that the parents are correct here, or at least correct in asserting that they have a distinctive avenue of access to children on which they can draw to enrich the writing of their books, what ethical problems, if any, arise? If children do indeed provide their author-parents with "material," is this material the parents are entitled to use? If the children grow up themselves to be authors some day, will they be able to draw on their own childhoods -- and their relationships with parents and siblings -- to craft their own novels, or memoirs? (Flannery O'Connor is quoted as saying that no author need ever be at a loss for subject matter to write about: "All you need is a childhood.") Can friends write about friends, while still remaining friends and being true to the expectations and obligations of friendship? In this essay I want to highlight -- and then partially seek to dissolve, or resolve -- the particular tensions that arise between the obligations of friendship (or family relationships) and the necessity for an author (of either fiction or memoirs) to draw on her own life -- that is to say, her own relationships with friends and family -- in her work.. (shrink)

Scholarly correspondence can be as insightful as scholarly work itself, as it often documents the motivating forces of its writers’ intellectual ideas while illuminating their lives more clearly. The more complex the authors’ scholarly works and the more troubled the eras in which they lived, the more substantial, and potentially fascinating, their correspondence. This is especially true of the letters between Alfred Schutz and Eric Voegelin. The scholars lived in incredibly dramatic times and produced profound, complex works that continue (...) to confound academics. The communication between these two giants of the social sciences, as they sent their thoughts to one another, was crucial to the work of both men. _A Friendship That Lasted a Lifetime: The Correspondence between Alfred Schutz and Eric Voegelin _demonstrates that Schutz and Voegelin shared a remarkable friendship: they first met as students in Vienna in the 1920s and found themselves great partners in discussion; years later they were pushed out of Europe by Nazi pressure and went to work at separate American universities. For twenty years they wrote each other, developing their respective scientific works in that dialogue. The letters bear witness to their friendship during the years they spent in exile in the United States, and they document the men’s tentative attempts at formulating the theories of “lifeworld” and “gnosis” associated with Schutz and Voegelin today. The entire collection of 238 letters was printed in German in 2004, but this edited volume is the first to present their correspondence in English and offers a selection of the most important letters—those that contributed to the thinkers’ theoretical discussions and served as background to their most significant thoughts. Editors Gerhard Wagner and Gilbert Weiss do not analyze Schutz’s and Voegelin’s works in light of the correspondence—rather, they present the collection to create a framework for new interpretations. _A Friendship That Lasted a Lifetime_ takes a unique look at two major social scientists. This volume is a valuable resource in the study of Voegelin’s political philosophy and Alfred Schutz’s contribution to American sociology and marks an important addition to the literature on these remarkable men. Showing how scholarly discourse and the dialogue of everyday life can shed light on one another, the book finally presents this correspondence for an American audience and is not to be missed by scholars of philosophy and sociology. (shrink)

A familiar objection to restrictive consequentialism is that a restrictive consequentialist is incapable of having true friendships. In this paper I distinguish between an instrumentalist and a non-instrumentalist version of this objection and argue that while the restrictive consequentialist can answer the non-instrumentalist version, restrictive consequentialism may still seem vulnerable to the instrumentalist version. I then suggest a consequentialist reply that I argue also works against this version of the objection. Central to this reply is the claim that a (...) restrictive consequentialist is capable of true friendship if the value she aims for is not merely seen as a function of her self-regarding desires, but includes as a central constituent a form of objective value often referred to as 'flourishing' or 'self-realization'. (shrink)

In this analysis of his thought on friendship, I begin first by arguing that for Nietzsche friendship is undesirable or impossible with or between four human types. Insight on this point is valuable, because it provides clear vision of what friendship is not. Second, I will argue that Nietzsche takes superior friendship to be possible but rare, since it requires its participants to balance three pairs of opposing qualities that are difficult to keep in equilibrium. Third, (...) I will show that Nietzsche takes friendship in its highest form to aim at a goal, appropriately named "truth." Here I draw upon both "middle-period" texts and Beyond Good and Evil, the latter to show that a concern for friendship pervades Nietzsche's oeuvre. Fourth, I show that Nietzsche differs most from ancient authors in his uncompromising insistence that if friendship is to serve truth rather than comfort or illusion, it is necessarily agonistic. A final section argues that if true friendship is to be nourished rather than destroyed by opposition, the virtue of "sympathy" must be present. Sympathy in Nietzsche's sense cannot be conflated with pity, since it is related to the "shared joy" that he identifies as the crown of friendship. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this analysis of his thought on friendship, I begin first by arguing that for Nietzsche friendship is undesirableor impossible with or between four human types. Insight on this point is valuable, because it provides clear vision of what friendship is not. Second, I will argue that Nietzsche takes superior friendship to be possible but rare, since itrequires its participants to balance three pairs of opposing qualities that are difficult to keep in equilibrium. Third, I (...) will show that Nietzsche takes friendship in its highest form to aim at a goal, appropriately named “truth.” Here I draw upon both “middle-period” texts and Beyond Good and Evil, the latter to show that a concern for friendship pervadesNietzsche’s oeuvre. Fourth, I show that Nietzsche differs most from ancient authors in his uncompromising insistence that if friendship is to serve truth rather than comfort or illusion, it is necessarily agonistic. A final section argues that if true friendship is to be nourished rather than destroyed by opposition, the virtue of “sympathy” must be present. Sympathy in Nietzsche’s sense cannot be conflated with pity, since it is related to the “shared joy” that he identifies as the crown of friendship. (shrink)

To the extent that one subscribes to the proposition, by now a virtual principle of criticism , that literary texts constitute sites for the negotiation, often vigorous, of power relations within a society, the reader of Catullus can hardly avoid some consideration of the poet's attitude toward contemporary political matters. It is a subject on which two principal lines of thought can be traced. Mommsen argued that Catullus responded to the enormities that followed the reinvigoration of the First Triumvirate at (...) the conference of Luca in 56 by occupying a thoroughly optimate position. Wilamowitz, on the other hand, insisted that Catullus' lyrics reflect only moments of the author's individual experience, amongst which expressions of personal distaste for certain public figures naturally appear but nothing which can appropriately be taken as indications of a political stance. The approach of Wilamowitz has proved more influential, followed in spirit if not in specifics by numerous commentators. To the degree that Catullus has been assimilated to the Augustan elegists, whose poems have been deemed by a scholar of the stature of Veyne to be anti-political in nature, it has been all the easier to reject the idea that Catullus adopts a political position, an assessment strongly maintained in a recent study by Paul Allen Miller, for whom the rejection of all political engagement is the sine qua non of true lyric poetry. Mommsen's optimate Catullus has lately found his champion, however, in a careful article by H. P. Syndikus. Although Miller and Syndikus, like Wilamowitz and Mommsen, draw diametrically opposed conclusions concerning politics in Catullus' poetry, they are agreed nevertheless that politics can be regarded as a relatively straightforward term: it refers to statecraft, matters of government, and party strife. Other readers, however, have been more self-conscious in their theoretical concerns, a salutary consequence of which has been a shift by some to a less narrow conception of the field of reference appropriate to discussions of ‘the political’ in Latin literature. (shrink)

This paper adds ammunition to recent arguments for the possibility of online character friendships in the Aristotelian sense. It does so by exploring sustained and deep email correspondence or epalship as a potential venue for the creation, development and maintenance of character friendships, and by drawing an analogy with a historically famous example of penpalship: that forged between Voltaire and Catherine the Great. It is argued that epalships allow for various technological extensions in the cyberworld of today that were not (...) available to Voltaire and Catherine; and that augmented with those extensions, there is even more reason for seeing epalships as potentially making the grade as true character friendships than traditional penpalships. However, despite being potentially categorisable as character friendships, mature epalships are vulnerable to the same problems and pitfalls as other examples of character friendships, and perhaps even more so: pitfalls that were mostly overlooked by Aristotle himself. (shrink)

This paper adds ammunition to recent arguments for the possibility of online character friendships in the Aristotelian sense. It does so by exploring sustained and deep email correspondence or epalship as a potential venue for the creation, development and maintenance of character friendships, and by drawing an analogy with a historically famous example of penpalship: that forged between Voltaire and Catherine the Great. It is argued that epalships allow for various technological extensions in the cyberworld of today that were not (...) available to Voltaire and Catherine; and that augmented with those extensions, there is even more reason for seeing epalships as potentially making the grade as true character friendships than traditional penpalships. However, despite being potentially categorisable as character friendships, mature epalships are vulnerable to the same problems and pitfalls as other examples of character friendships, and perhaps even more so: pitfalls that were mostly overlooked by Aristotle himself. (shrink)

This paper adds ammunition to recent arguments for the possibility of online character friendships in the Aristotelian sense. It does so by exploring sustained and deep email correspondence or epalship as a potential venue for the creation, development and maintenance of character friendships, and by drawing an analogy with a historically famous example of penpalship: that forged between Voltaire and Catherine the Great. It is argued that epalships allow for various technological extensions in the cyberworld of today that were not (...) available to Voltaire and Catherine; and that augmented with those extensions, there is even more reason for seeing epalships as potentially making the grade as true character friendships than traditional penpalships. However, despite being potentially categorisable as character friendships, mature epalships are vulnerable to the same problems and pitfalls as other examples of character friendships, and perhaps even more so: pitfalls that were mostly overlooked by Aristotle himself. (shrink)

Friendship alters the moral demands and ideals that we live with. In this dissertation I examine precisely how those ideals must change if they are to accommodate the realities of friendship. I begin by surveying Aristotle, Kant, and Montaigne, and showing that each of those writers had useful insights into the way in which we reconceptualize the self when we become close friends with another person. I suggest that Kant and Montaigne were both right that we tend to (...) merge our identities with our friends. I then argue that if we value this sense of unity with our friends, certain changes must be made to common normative concepts. In particular, I argue that paternalistic intervention is more justified between friends than between strangers, because such intervention presupposes that the two individuals have a kind of shared autonomy. This presupposition is only true for friends, not for strangers. ;I further argue that the concept of respect must be reshaped if it is to be useful between friends. Kant noted that respect is a concept which distances people from one another, and such distance is not always appropriate between friends. I suggest that the notion of respect can be restructured so that it does not require distance and separation. Finally, I suggest that self-respect must also be restructured if the self is shared. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant argues in the Foundations that remote scenarios are diagnostic of genuine virtue. When agents commonly thought to have a particular virtue fail to exhibit that virtue in an extreme situation, he argues, they do not truly have the virtue at all, and our propensities to fail in such ways indicate that true virtue might never have existed. Kant’s suggestion that failure to show, say, courage in extraordinary circumstances necessarily silences one’s claim to have genuine courage seems to (...) rely on an implausibly demanding standard for warranted virtue attributions. In contrast to this approach, some philosophers—such as Robert Adams and John Doris—have argued for probabilistic accounts of warranted virtue attributions. But despite the initial plausibility of such accounts, I argue that a sole reliance on probabilistic approaches is inadequate, as they are insufficiently sensitive to considerations of credit and fault, which emerge when agents have developed various insurance strategies and protective capacities against their responding poorly to particular eventualities. I also argue that medical graduates should develop the sorts of virtuous dispositions necessary to protect patient welfare against various countervailing influences, and that repeated failures to uphold the proper goals of medicine in emergency scenarios might indeed be diagnostic of whether an individual practitioner does have the relevant medical virtue. In closing, I consider the dispositions involved in friendship. I seek to develop a principled way of determining when remote scenarios can be illuminating of genuine friendship and genuine virtue. (shrink)

Friendship is commonly assumed to reduce strategic uncertainty and enhance tacit coordination. However, this assumption has never been tested across two opposite poles of coordination involving either strategic complementarity or substitutability. We had participants interact with friends or strangers in two classic coordination games: the stag-hunt game, which exhibits strategic complementarity and may foster “cooperation”, and the entry game, which exhibits strategic substitutability and may foster “competition”. Both games capture a frequent trade-off between a potentially high paying but uncertain (...) option and a low paying but safe alternative. We find that, relative to strangers, friends are more likely to choose options involving uncertainty in stag-hunt games, but the opposite is true in entry games. Furthermore, in stag-hunt games, friends “tremble” less between options, coordinate better and earn more, but these advantages are largely decreased or lost in entry games. We further investigate how these effects are modulated by risk attitudes, friendship qualities, and interpersonal similarities. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics 10.7, Aristotle says that the contemplative wise person living the happiest and most self-sufficient life will need other people less than a person living a life of practical virtue. This seems to be in tension with Aristotle's emphasis elsewhere on the political nature of human beings. I analyze in detail Aristotle's most elaborate defense of the need for friends in the happy life in Nicomachean Ethics 9.9 to see whether and how he resolves the need for friends (...) with the self-sufficiency of the happy life. The virtue-friendship described in the chapter does turn out to be more compatible with the self-contained unity of a happy life than other sorts of friendship, because collaboration in virtuous activities integrates the friend into one's activities. This is true even for contemplative friendship, where, as Aristotle suggests in the ornate final argument of 9.9, the friends collaboratively contemplate human nature and take pleasure in the goodness of human life. The unity achieved in this kind of friendship is an imitation of God's self-contemplative and self-contained unity. Nonetheless, I conclude, there is no evidence that Aristotle did not think that friendship was conditioned on human failings and so that friends would be less necessary for those leading the most excellent contemplative lives. (shrink)

This dissertation explores fundamental ethical questions through an examination of the key classical discussions of friendship: Plato's Lysis, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero's Laelius, and Montaigne's and Bacon's essays on friendship. ;Should and can people act selflessly for one another's good? Is our concern for friendship and love rooted in neediness or in strength? Is it possible to love another simply for his own sake, or only because of the benefits that we seek for ourselves? Are the best (...) friendships found between the best individuals, or does the need for friendship wane with increased strength of soul and understanding? ;The author argues that, according to the Lysis, friendship is rooted chiefly in need but also involves a non-utilitarian sympathy for those who are akin. ;Analyzing Aristotle's treatment of the three kinds of friendship in the Ethics, she finds pleasure and utility to be major ingredients in the highest "friendship of virtue," and the affinity of kindred spirits to be a major, neglected theme. Aristotle's exposition of the relationship between friendship and justice reveals the pervasiveness of individuals' concerns with their own good, and the moral confusions that characterize most friendships and that come to light when friends quarrel. Aristotle's comparison between friendship in the various regimes and in the family shows both the injustice of the traditional family and its true source of strength. Love of "being" or of one's own life animates benefactors' love of their beneficiaries and friends' desire to lose themselves in one another's concerns. The theme of friendship is for Aristotle a transition to the philosophic life, in which friendship wanes in importance but does not disappear. Although we are not free to choose anything other than what appears to us to be best, we can include the good of others as a subordinate part of the good that reason seeks. ;The author also provides a critical analysis of Montaigne's claim that friendship is the greatest good in life, and an exposition of Cicero's sympathetic but critical portrayal of a great political friendship and of the deficiencies of both Epicurean and Stoic ideals of self-sufficiency. (shrink)

My goal in what follows is to argue that Astell endorses what I call the admonisher conception of a friend. For I will argue that, according to Astell, a sufficient condition for whether someone is our friend is that they admonish us in her technical sense. So anyone who admonishes us in this sense—be they Mother Teresa, the sinner sitting in confession, or our professional rival—is a friend to us. Put simply, an Astellian friend is an admonisher. The paper is (...) divided into four sections. Having motivated my reading in section one, section two develops and defends my thesis that admonishment is a sufficient condition for someone to be our Astellian friend. With Astell’s admonisher conception on the table, the balance of the paper shows how Astell might have persuaded us to accept her severe-sounding view by sketching the goods that she thinks flow from having an admonisher as a friend. Section three thus contends that, on Astell’s view, there is a class of deep truths about who we are that only our admonishing friends can reliably access; section four sketches how admonishment enhances our moral reasoning skills on Astell’s picture. Published on 2022-12-12 11:42:32. (shrink)

What constitutes a true human-to-human relationship? What is its importance and value for human life? These are the questions I explore in this talk on Aristotle's philosophy of friendship, originally presented as part of Boston University's Core Curriculum lecture series.

A common theological perspective holds that God does not deceive because lying is morally wrong. While Plato denies the possibility of divine deception in the Republic, his explanation does not appeal to the wrongness of lying. Indeed, Plato famously recommends the careful use of lies as a means of promoting justice. Given his endorsement of occasional lying, as well as his claim that humans should strive to emulate the gods, Plato's suggestion that the gods never have reason to lie is (...) puzzling. Our solution to this puzzle centers on the fact that, unlike humans, the gods are self-sufficient. Although lying is good for the souls of neither humans nor gods, human interdependency necessitates lies that will prevent material harms and maintain a just order. In contrast, the self-sufficiency of the gods makes it impossible for them to benefit from deception. (shrink)

When asked why we are friends with someone, we often point to her good virtues as reasons. If these are the reasons, we have equal reasons to be friends with anyone with such virtues, and we can even replace current friends with anyone with the same or better virtues without substantive loss in friendship. However, it does not seem right that a particular friend is replaceable by just any other person with the same or better virtues. This is the (...) fungibility problem of friendship. This essay outlines a Confucian response to the problem on the basis of the Confucian family-based conception of friendship and the Confucian understanding of particularized virtues. First, in the Confucian understanding, true friends are like family members, toward whom we have special obligations. Family members are nonfungible, and so are friends. Second, even though virtues are general traits that can be shared, the formations and practices of virtues are particularized. Confucian thinkers hold that each person configures virtues and exercises virtues in his or her own way depending on specific circumstances, and that persons with the same virtues may nevertheless possess them in varied fashions and exercise different shades of them in particular ways. Thus, persons of the same generic virtues will still retain their particularities as distinctive individuals. We become friends and remain friends with people in part because of their virtues practiced in ways that we appreciate. This notion of particularly exercised virtues makes it practically impossible for two persons to be identical in virtues. On such an understanding, virtuous friends are nevertheless unique and nonfungible. (shrink)

Aristotle's well-known divisions of friendship, those based on utility, pleasure and virtue, are based on the kind of good each provides. It is fairly easy to see what is contributed by utility- and pleasure-friendships, but virtue-friendship presents a special difficulty. Aristotle writes that virtue-friendship occurs between good (virtuous) persons, each of whom is happy because of that goodness. Aristotle also asserts, however, that the good (happy) person, especially the philosopher, is largely self-sufficient, needing little in the way (...) of external goods for his happiness. Such a person is virtuous not only in the moral sense but intellectually, having developed the capacities of the mind to make effective moral decisions and, in the case of the philosopher, to contemplate the most divine of subjects. If that is the case, it is not difficult to see why such a person would not need many utility- or pleasure-friends, but why would he need virtue-friends? What does virtue-friendship contribute to the happiness of one who is already happy? Possible answers to those questions have been provided by a number of commentators, whose views will be considered below. I believe their answers can be classified into three general types of argument: the �opportunity argument�, the �reassurance argument� and the �pleasure argument�. Although all of these have their merits, each has pitfalls. There is another possible answer, an �essentialist argument�, which more accurately describes Aristotle's view. I will argue that virtue-friends come to understand each other's true selves, and each, through the awareness and contemplation of the other, becomes a better human being and, consequently, happier. (shrink)

This Nietzschesque “genealogy of morals” presents the Confucian virtue of xin (trust and true) so basic to friendship as a civic virtue rooted among social equals. Among non-equals, a servant has to prove his trustworthiness but not yet vice versa. The script 信 ( xin ) tells of living up to one’s words. Yanxing 言行 (speech and action) describes actively keeping a verbal promise. The Agrarian school endorses xin as the primary virtue in its utopia of virtual equals. (...) It knew oral trust and had no use for written covenants. In debating Mencius, Gaozi kept to that earlier primacy granted public speech as tied to one’s social reputation. Mencius turned inward and elevated mind as the inner good of moral intent instead. In the Doctrine of the Mean , inner xin would expand outward into becoming the ultimate truth, the sincerity of Heaven and Earth. The essay ends on an aside on the case of the Cretan Liar. (shrink)

Does shame have a limited moral role because it is associated with a loss of self-respect or is it an important emotional support for socially beneficial behaviours? Aristotle supports the latter position. In his ethical theory, he famously claims that shame is a semi-virtue essential in the habituation of moral norms. He clarifies this role in the Rhetoric’s lesser-known distinction between true and conventional shame, which implies human beings make subjective evaluations of those appropriated cultural norms. Importantly, he locates (...) this potential for ethical assessment in friendship and not in public discourse, as he thinks it would be shameless to publicly evaluate moral rules. The article ends by exploring potential critiques to his position and argues that Aristotle’s approach makes shame indispensable for moral progress, even though we might want to consider some limited role for shameless public protest. (shrink)

In the Lysis, Socrates argues that friendship is driven by a desire to use others for one’s own gain. Some commentators take Socrates to be speaking for Plato on this point. By contrast, I shall argue that the Lysis is a reductio ad absurdum of this instrumental account of friendship. First, three arguments in the Lysis reach counterintuitive conclusions which may be avoided by abandoning the common premise that friendship is instrumental. Second, the dramatic context includes counterexamples (...) to the instrumental account of friendship. Third, Socrates distinguishes between people who are desirable because they are useful, and “true friends” who are desirable for their own sake. This is an explicit rejection of the instrumental account of friendship. (shrink)

It might sound rather convincing to assume that we owe the pleasure of reading the novel form to our elemental repository of physical perception, to our feelings. This would be true only if mere feelings could add up to something more than just emotions, to some deep understanding of the human. After all, a moment of epiphany, where we begin to realize things that dramatically disturb our normal state of mind, is not just emotional, nor indeed a simple moment. (...) Despite its root in the corporeal, a mo(ve)ment of affective realization reaches beyond the realm of the human and opens up the plane of virtual potentials. In this work, we intend to map out the points and relations of affective singularity that pervade the narrative of Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973). Also, we will discuss how these mo(ve)ments of sensation give form to Sula’s and Nel’s experiences and contribute to an affective transformation in morality and friendship. (shrink)

For ten years, between 1903 and 1913, Gertrude Stein saw human relationships as painful mathematical puzzles in need of solutions. Again and again, she converted the predicaments of her personal life into literary material, the better to solve and to exorcise them. The revelation that relationships had a structural quality came to her during the composition of Q.E.D. , when she grasped the almost mathematical nature of her characters' emotional impasse. Stein's persona in the novel comments on their triangular affair, (...) "Why it's like a piece of mathematics. Suddenly it does itself and you begin to see."1 The theory encouraged her to examine such situations as if they were case histories: she continued to study the same piece of mathematics from different angles in Fernhurst , Three Lives , and The Making of Americans . But whatever the sexual arrangements in these triangles, the powerful generally managed to impose their wills upon the less powerful, and the triangles resolved themselves into oppositional structures, pitting two against one. Gradually, when the couple began to replace the triangle as her structural model, Stein composed numerous verbal portraits of couples and their relationships. In two of these, "Ada" and "Two Women," Stein applied her general theory of relationships to the particular puzzle of female friendships because, I think, she felt that women's characters were most intensely molded in same-sex involvements. Although she attempted to "prove" these theories in distanced, deliberately depersonalized prose, we as readers must examine "the complex interplay of self-discovery and writing" from which her portraits emerged.2Stein's portraits of women entangled in familial and erotic bonds seem to invite us into "the process whereby the self creates itself in the experience of creating art"; to read them, we must "join the narrator in reconstructing the other woman by whom we know ourselves."3 This task of reconstruction implies that we must also rethink the place of biography—generally dismissed by New Criticism and its subsequent post-structuralist permutations as "mere" biography—in feminist critical projects. If it is true that "in reading as in writing, it is ourselves that we remake," then feminist critics have a special stake in understanding the biographical, and autobiographical, impulses at work in these activities.4 Stein's portraits, which hover between fiction and biography, raise important questions about the ways in which biographical information can justify our suspicion that female writers may be "closer to their fictional creations than male writers are."5 Recently, feminist critics have adapted psychoanalytic theory to examine the particular closeness of female characters in women's writing or to suggest a related closeness between the female author and her characters. We find it useful to speak of the pre-Oedipal structures and permeable ego boundaries that seem to shape women's relationships. Although Stein used very different psychological paradigms, she approached these same issues in her own studies of female friendships. Realizing that she preferred to write about women, she observed, "It is clearer…I know it better, a little, not very much better."6 In spite of her qualifications, she knew that she could see the structuring principles of relationships with greater clarity when writing from her own perspective.1. Stein, "Fernhurst," "Q.E.D.," and Other Early Writings, ed. Leon Katz , p. 67.2. Elizabeth Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," Signs 6 : 444. For a very useful critical discussion of this complex issue, see Abel, "Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women," and Judith Kegan Gardiner, "The es of dentity: a Response to Abel on 'Merging Identities,'" in the same issue of Signs .3. Gardiner, "The es of dentity," p. 442.4. Jonathan Morse, "Memory, Desire, and the Need for Biography: The Case of Emily Dickinson," The Georgia Review 35 : 271. See also J. Gerald Kennedy's suggestive remarks on the "tension between personal confession and implacable theory" in Barthes' later work .5. Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," p. 444.6. Stein, The Making of Americans, cited in Richard Bridgeman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces , p. 78.Carolyn Burke, an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for Research on Women, Stanford University, has published articles on French feminist writing and on Mina Loy, whose biography she is now completing. The theoretical implications of this essay will be explored in her related study in progress on feminist biography. (shrink)

Aristotle’s portrait of the man of great soul in both the Eudemian and the Nicomachean Ethics has long perplexed commentators. Although his portrait of the man of small soul has been all but ignored by commentators, it, too, contains a number of claims that are profoundly counter-intuitive to the modern cast of mind. The paper is an attempt at identifying the nature of the discrepancies between Aristotle’s values and our own, and at placing the ethical claims that he makes on (...) greatness and smallness of soul within the context of his ethics and political philosophy. The Aristotelian man of great-soul, it is here contended, is best understood as a man who assesses external and internal goods, both his own and those of others, at their true value. His overall excellence fits him to play a key political role, not only in states where the principle of distributive justice dictates that the best should rule, but also in states with a democratic constitution, in which citizens take it in turn to rule and be ruled. He is therefore paradigmatically capable of engaging in civic friendship, a relationship that Aristotle left largely undefined in spite of holding it to be a powerfully cohesive force in the state. The man of small-soul, by contrast, is best understood as a man whose disinclination to take risks of any kind makes him reluctant to contribute to the well-being of his city and who, as a result, proves incapable of engaging in civic friendship. (shrink)

This interview was conducted with one of the closest friends of the visual artist Ray Johnson, the late photographer and writer William S. Wilson. Johnson was a fixture of the New York downtown art scene in the late 1940, 1950s, and 1960s. He was influenced by Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists alike, but was a true original, widely considered to be the founder of “mail art” and also an important collagist and performance artist. Wilson helped Johnson to formulate the (...) idea of “mail art” as they exchanged correspondence, thoughts, ideas, experiences, and much else besides. In this interview, Wilson discusses Johnson's sexuality, sadomasochistic practice, and philosophy of friendship. He provides hitherto unknown details about Johnson's intimate relations with the artist Richard Lippold and life at Black Mountain College. Wilson also recounts details of Johnson's relation to women in terms of art, friendship, love, and sex. But more than anything, this interview captures the atmosphere of queer life in the middle decades of the twentieth century and Johnson's particular experiences of that era. (shrink)