What Is Friendship?

Catalog description

Friendship is one of the most significant yet highly vexing experiences of our human existence. What does it mean to have or to be a friend? How do friendship and romantic love relate? Why are writers as different as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Derrida so intensely drawn to the statement attributed to Aristotle: “Oh my friends, there are no friends”? Why does Heidegger’s notion of “Being-With” invoke an ear that listens for the voice of the friend? To what extent is intimate friendship always also an experience of anticipated mourning, in which a friend imagines himself crying over the death of another? Is an enemy a fallen friend? This course will trace key concepts of friendship through the Western tradition, spending quality time with a number of highly influential writers and thinkers, both ancient and modern. All students welcome.