Friendship And Love Ethics And Politics

Today, friendship, love and sexuality are mostly viewed as private, personal and informal relations. In the mediaeval and early modern period, just like in ancient times, this was different. The classical philosophy of friendship (Aristotle) included both friendship and love in the concept of philia. It was also linked to an argument about the virtues needed to become an excellent member of the city state. Thus, close relations were not only thought to be a matter of pleasant gatherings in privacy, but just as much a matter of ethics and politics.What, then, happened to the classical ideas of close relations when they were transmitted to philosophers, clerical and monastic thinkers, state officials or other people in the medieval and early modern period? To what extent did friendship transcend the distinctions between private and public that then existed? How were close relations shaped in practice? Did dialogues with close friends help to contribute to the process of subject-formation in the Renaissance and Enlightenment? To what degree did institutions of power or individual thinkers find it necessary to caution against friendship or love and sexuality?

For friendship, love and sexuality, it touches upon changes in the distinctions between private and public, in subject-formation and legal practices, as well as the varying cultural, existential and ethical importance of close relations in history.

What is friendship? Is it ethically important? Does it exist outside ethics? Is it a potential distraction from the love of God or from moral responsibility? How might it nourish our spiritual lives? How should we make sense of the moral responsibilities we often take ourselves to have to our friends? Does friendship have anything to do with politics? Understanding Friendship answers these questions by painting a picture of friendship as a vibrant expression of Christian love that can enrich individual lives even as in various ways it can also prove socially, culturally, politically, and spiritually significant. Through a wide-ranging, erudite, yet accessible exploration of theological and philosophical traditions, Understanding Friendship examines what friendship is while showing how its distinctive moral status can be supported by multiple approaches to Christian ethics. Understanding Friendship ultimately reveals friendship's place in a fruitful understanding of Christian spirituality.

Applies Aristotle's argument - that citizenship is like friendship - to the liberal and democratic societies of the present day.

This book presents a thorough and systematic integration of Aristotle's analysis of friendship with the main lines of the rest of his work in Politics and Nicomachean Ethics. The author conveys a clear sense of the continuing illumination that Aristotle's analysis of friendship provides to contemporary ethical theorists and to students of Aristotle. Other Selves speaks to both audiences.

This book fully explores for the first time an idea common to Plato and Aristotle, which unites their treatments - otherwise very different - of love and friendship. The idea is that although persons are separate, their lives need not be. One person's life may overflow into another's, and as such, helping another person is a way of serving oneself. The author shows how their view of love and friendship, within not only personal relationships, but also the household and even the city-state, promises to resolve the old dichotomy between egoism and altruism. - ;Friendship and desire in the Lysis; Love in the Symposium; Love in the Phaedrus; Perfect friendship in Aristotle; Aristotle on the varieties of friendship; The household; The City; Epilogue; Appendices; Homogeneity and beauty in the Symposium; Psychoanalysis looks at the Phaedrus ; Plato's sexual morality; Aristotle on erotic love; List of modern works cited. -

These collected essays demonstrate that compelling and illuminating discussions of love and friendship do not fall to psychologists alone, but rightly belong among the major thinkers in the history of political philosophy.

Friendship studies can model behavior both intellectual and actual