Friendship: Philosophical Explorations

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 Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return
• dogs and friendship
• friendship and aesthetic judgment
• Nehamas’s 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.

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 Art’s 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 Plato’s Gorgias under the supervision of Alexander Nehamas.