The Promise of Friendship

The paper explores the answers Nehamas offers for two fundamental questions about friendship: why do we love our friends? What is the good of friendship? The first is a question about what makes love fitting and the second is a question about what makes it good. The paper argues that the answers to both questions rely crucially on the concept of a promise and bear an interesting relation to one another. It does this, specifically, by suggesting that the indeterminate character of this promise—and the absence of a full explanation for why we love our friends it implies—reflects an essential feature of what it is to love our friends for themselves and of what is good about friendship.