Friendship has been a central topic for philosophical reflection ever since philosophy itself was born in the circle of friends who gathered around Socrates to follow his probing examinations of how we should live.
In this outstanding collection, which takes its lead from the work of Alexander Nehamas, a distinguished roster of contributors examines the many dimensions of the philosophy of friendship. They broaden the discussion beyond common questions about friendship obligations and their relation to the claims of morality to explore a much wider set of issues, including:
friendship in the context of Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Kant, Goethe, William James, and Nietzsche the darker side of friendship and frenemies friendship in literature and film, including André Acimans Call Me by Your Name and Andrey Zvyagintsevs The Return dogs and friendship friendship and aesthetic judgment Nehamass own distinctive analogy between the value of friendship and the value of beauty.
Friendship: Philosophical Explorations will be of interest to those in philosophy studying and researching ethics and aesthetics, as well as students and scholars in related disciplines such as literature and film.
List of Contributors Introduction R. Lanier Anderson, Andrew Huddleston,
and Jessica Moss
1. Socratic Friendships Voula Tsouna
2. Knowing Friends Mary
Margaret McCabe
3. Philosophical Dogs: Plato on Knowledge and Friendship
Jessica Moss
4. Friendship, Masculinity, and the Barbarian in Platos Laws
Josh Wilburn
5. What Kind of Friend was Michel de Montaigne? Nehamas and
Desan on Montaignes Relationship with La Boétie R. Lanier Anderson
6. Equal
Mutual Love and Respect: Kant on Friendship Paul Guyer
7. Friendship, Beauty,
Judgment David Hills
8. Philosophy as Friendship: The Romantic Notion of
Symphilosophie Timothy Stoll
9. On Frenemies: Nietzsche, Nehamas, and the
Darker Sides of Friendship Anthony Cross
10. Nietzschean Frenemies and their
role in his project of Self-Creation Ken Gemes
11. Friendship and Over-belief
in Nehamas and James Rachel Cristy
12. Can a Dog be a Humans Best Friend?
Thomas W. Laqueur
13. Truth and Authenticity in Stories About Ourselves
Pamela Foa
14. Friendship and the Novel Andrew Huddleston
15. Brotherly
philia: from Aristotle to Zvyagintsev Pavlos Kontos
16. Portraying Friendship
Philip Kitcher
17. The Promise of Friendship Bernard Reginster
18.
Friendship, Difference, and Aesthetic Discourse Matthew Strohl
19. Every
Painting, if its Any Good, is a Love Affair Michael Smith
20. My Heart went
Boom Jennifer Whiting
21. Friendship, Love, Interpretation: Other Ways of
Knowing? Alexander Nehamas. Index
R. Lanier Anderson is Professor of Philosophy and J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in Humanities at Stanford University. He is the author of The Poverty of Conceptual Truth (2015) and many articles on Kant, Nietzsche, and the neo-Kantian movement, as well as papers on Montaigne and topics in philosophy and literature. His book manuscript on Montaigne (Montaigne and the Life of Philosophy) is currently in the final stages of completion. He did his Ph.D. work (on Nietzsche) with Alexander Nehamas at the University of Pennsylvania, finishing in 1993.
Andrew Huddleston is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Before moving to Notre Dame, he taught at Exeter College, Oxford, Birkbeck College, University of London, and the University of Warwick. He is the author of Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture (2019) and Arts Highest Calling: The Religion of Art in a Secular Age (forthcoming), as well as a number of papers on aesthetics, ethics, and various aspects of post-Kantian European philosophy. He completed his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 2012, with a dissertation on Nietzsche under the supervision of Alexander Nehamas.
Jessica Moss is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. She has also taught at the University of Pittsburgh, and Balliol College, Oxford. She is the author of Aristotle on the Apparent Good: Perception, Phantasia, Thought, and Desire (2012) and Plato's Epistemology: Being and Seeming (2021), as well as numerous articles on Ancient Greek epistemology, ethics, and moral psychology. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 2004, writing a dissertation on Platos Gorgias under the supervision of Alexander Nehamas.
