Introduction

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 recent decades, however, the philosophy of friendship has focused mostly on relatively narrow issues within moral philosophy, like the nature of the obligations arising in friendship, or how such “special relationship” obligations interact with the general demands of morality. In his 2016 book On Friendship , Alexander Nehamas redirected our attention to a broader set of questions that are at once more basic, and more grounded in real life. Nehamas returns the focus to what is generally good about friendship, upon which we rely as a core source of value in our lives. He also reminds us with clear-eyed realism about the many ways friendship can be bad for us, and how friendship answers to its own demands, even when those push us to pursue paths entirely orthogonal to those of morality, our political commitments, or our other values. This less abstract, more grounded and down-to-earth approach to the philosophy of friendship reactivates three key sources of insight that had been underexploited in the recent literature: 1) the rich historical tradition of philosophical reflection on friendship; 2) the wide-ranging and subtle depictions of friendship in the arts; and 3) detailed and careful analysis of real-life friendships.