Mary Astell’s theory of friendship has been interpreted either as a version of Aristotelian virtue friendship, or as aligned with a Christian and Platonist tradition. In this paper, I argue that Astell’s theory of friendship is determinedly anti-Aristotelian; it is a theory of spiritual friendship offered as an alternative to Aristotelian virtue friendship. By grounding her conception of friendship in a Christian–Platonist metaphysics, I show that Astell rejects the Aristotelian criteria of reciprocity and partiality (...) as essential features of the friendship bond and that she develops a theory of friendship that is neither reciprocal nor partial. Further, I argue that Astell’s theory of friendship advances her feminist aims by providing a justification for female–female spiritual bonds in contradistinction to female–male marriage bonds. Astell argues that the female–female bond of spiritual friendship is sanctioned by God, and is, therefore, a divinely authorized alternative to the male–female bond of marriage. Through her theory of spiritual friendship, Astell marks out a central place for female–female bonds and provides women with a justification for resisting marriage. (shrink)

L’amitié représente un problème central dans l’éthique d’Aristote, mais plusieurs questions appellent des clarifications. En particulier, celle de son unité. On soutient ici qu’Aristote ne considère pas les différentes espèces d’amitié (amitié de vertu, de plaisir, d’utilité) comme les espèces d’un genre. Par ailleurs, le rapport à une unité focale de signification ( focal meaning ) ne permet pas d’expliquer leurs relations. Néanmoins, les types secondaires d’amitié ne sont pas purement accidentels: Aristote présuppose visiblement que sa définition de l’amitié par (...) les bonnes intentions et actions mutuelles convient aux trois espèces, bien que d’une manière différente dans chaque cas. L’unité de l’amitié s’explique ainsi par une relation de similarité entre les différents types d’amitié. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

This chapter contains sections titled: Socrates and the Art of Love Socrates and Athenian Paiderastia Loving Socrates Love and the Ascent to the Beautiful The Art and Psychology of Love Explained Writing about Love.

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comFirst, Second and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity is a collection of previously published articles by Jennifer Whiting. In the preface to this volume, Whiting states that this is the first of three volumes, which will include her essays published between 1980 and 2011. Whiting is a highly respected scholar of Aristotle’s ethics, but she (...) indicates that articles focused on interpretations of Aristotle’s ethical thought will be found primarily in the forthcoming second and third volumes. In the Introduction, Whiting explains the three themes that she takes to unify the essays in this first volume: psychic contingency, friendship and the rejection of rational egoism.Before saying more about the topics... (shrink)

A combination of social forces has thrown marriage into question in westernised societies at the end of the millennium. This uncertainty creates space for new ways of thinking about marriage. In this context, we examine the idea of marriage as friendship. We trace its genealogy in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor and then subject it to critical scrutiny using some of Michel de Montaigne’s ideas. We ask how applicable the ideal of higher (...) class='Hi'>friendship is to marriage and what might be gained and lost by a synthesis of marriage and friendship. Grounding the discussion in historical sources is valuable because the topic is so little explored in the contemporary philosophical literature. This approach also allows any enduring value in these historical texts to be elicited. (shrink)

Introduction: The Nature and Signif1cance of Friendship Neera Kapur Badhwar Philosophers have long recognized that friendship plays a central role in a ...

Love, Friendship, and the Self presents a reexamination of our common understanding of ourselves as persons in light of the phenomena of love and friendship. It argues that the individualism that is implicit in that understanding cannot be sustained if we are to understand the kind of distinctively personal intimacy that love and friendship essentially involve. For love is a matter of identifying with someone: sharing for his sake the concerns and values that make up his identity (...) as the person he is. Moreover, in friendship the friends share not only a concern for each other but also their activity, their lives, and even potentially their selves. By providing a detailed analysis of these notions, Bennett Helm argues for an understanding of persons as essentially social. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate Socrates as a friend in Plato's 'Phaedo'. I begin by setting out his friends' request for reassurance of how they will fare after Socrates dies. I argue that by structuring the discussion as he does, Socrates provides one final opportunity for his friends to prepare themselves for life without him, thus offering them the best kind of reassurance they could ask for.

En este artículo, nos preguntamos si es pertinente un análisis del personaje de Medea de Eurípides, y más concretamente, de su filicidio, a la luz de la doctrina aristotélica de la acción. Resulta dudoso, y quizás equívoco, hablar de "responsabilidad" (en sentido aristotélico) en el caso de la heroína, ya que sus motivaciones, como las de todo héroe trágico, tienen un doble signo: enfrentado a una ἀνάγκη superior, también desea lo que está forzado a hacer. Además, Medea no es una (...) mujer común: es un personaje ontológicamente complejo que participa, más de lo que frecuentemente se ha enfatizado, del plano divino. In this article we wonder if it is pertinent to analyse the character of Euripides' Medea and, more precisely, her filicide, in the light of Aristotle's doctrine of action. With regard to the heroine, it is doubtful and perhaps confusing to talk about "responsibility" (in Aristotelian terms) because her motivations, as all tragic heroes', are two-sided: faced to a superior ἀνάγκη he wants what he is forced to do as well. In addition, Medea is not an ordinary woman: she is an ontologically complex character that has a share in the divine level, a share which is more crucial than what has usually been emphasized. (shrink)

Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, originally published in 1980, gives an account of "altruistic emotions" and friendship that brings out their moral value. Blum argues that moral theories centered on rationality, universal principle, obligation, and impersonality cannot capture this moral importance. This was one of the first books in contemporary moral philosophy to emphasize the moral significance of emotions, to deal with friendship as a moral phenomenon, and to challenge the rationalism of standard interpretations of Kant, although Blum’s (...) "sentimentalism" owes more to Schopenhauer than to Hume. It was a forerunner to care ethics, and feminist ethics more generally; to virtue ethics; and to subsequent influential interpretations of Kant that attempted to room for altruistic emotion and friendship, and other forms of particularism and partialism. In addition, the work has been widely influential in religious studies, political theory, bioethics, and feminist ethics. (shrink)

We argue that companion friendship is not importantly marked by self-disclosure as understood in either of these two ways. One's close friends need not be markedly similar to oneself, as is claimed by the mirror account, nor is the role of private information in establishing and maintaining intimacy important in the way claimed by the secrets view. Our claim will be that the mirror and secrets views not only fail to identify features that are in part constitutive of close (...) or companion friendship, but that they miss the mark quite broadly and fail to capture anything significant and distinctive about the ways in which friendship has an impact on the self. The article will proceed as follows. In the first section we outline our account of the self in friendship. In the next two sections we examine the mirror and secrets views and develop our own view in counterpoint to these. In the final section we defend our own account by showing how it provides the governing conditions which do distinguish friendship from other kinds of relations between persons. (shrink)

This essay brings together some lines of thought contained in Maria Markus’s ‘Lovers and Friends’ (2010) and ‘Decent Society and/or Civil Society?’ (2001), and, on that basis, explores possibilities for thinking about friendship in the context of contemporary social change. I begin by situating current problems concerning the semantics of friendship in their historical trajectory. I then go on to elaborate friendship’s ‘normative flexibility’, that is, its relative immunity to reifying societal pressures. Finally, I reflect upon the (...) connexions between friendship’s normative particularities and Markus’s elaboration of ‘decency’. (shrink)

I intend to argue that good friendship sometimes requires epistemic irresponsibility. To put it another way, it is not always possible to be both a good friend and a diligent believer.

Cultures other than those in Christian Europe have had important and interesting observations to make on the nature of friendship, and in this collection there ...

Current literature has documented the detrimental effects of cyberbullying which include a range of internalising and externalising problems for those involved. Although critical, this research can sometimes ignore social-ecological aspects of a child’s life that can potentially ‘buffer’ the negative psychological effects of such involvement. With this in mind, this cross-sectional investigation of 12-16 year olds [M(SD): 13.5(1) years] in Ireland focused on the role of friendship quality and gender in association with cyberbullying involvement and psychological well-being (N= 2410). (...) The Cyberbullying and Online Aggression Scale was used to measure cyber perpetration and victimisation. A modified version of the Cambridge Friendship Questionnaire was included to investigate peer friendship quality. Finally, the Moods and Feeling Questionnaire and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire were chosen to provide a measurement of psychological well-being. Prevalence rates for various types of cyberbullying roles (cyber bullies, victims and bully/victims) are presented, as well as differences for psychological well-being, friendship quality and cyberbullying involvement. In addition, regression models were used to determine the associations between gender, age, friendship quality and involvement in cyberbullying with psychological well-being. The results are considered in terms of the current literature and directions for future research are suggested. (shrink)