Friendship from Antiquity to the Present

Catalog description

At all times and in all places, human beings have established and cherished friendships, that is, affectionate bonds with individuals to whom they were not linked by blood relationship or erotic love. But what is friendship? This and related questions are asked in some of our earliest literature and remain relevant today. What is a friend? Can I really trust my friend? How many friends can or should a person have? And is it ever necessary to sever a friendship or "unfriend" a person? In this course, we will examine how philosophical writers of Greco-Roman antiquity—notably, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero—address these issues and how their discourse on friendship resonates through western thought, including in such writers as Aquinas, Montaigne, Bacon, Kant, and Emerson. We will put these theoretical approaches in dialogue with depictions of and reflections on friendship in letters, poetry, novels, plays, children's literature, and film, ranging from the second millennium BCE Epic of Gilgamesh to Elena Ferrante's 2012 bestseller My Brilliant Friend. These sometimes complementary and sometimes jarring juxtapositions will lead us to consider friendship both in its historically and culturally conditioned and in its universal aspects, and will, with any luck, inspire a new appreciation of this profoundly human experience