Suchergebnisse

A central bond, a cherished value, a unique relationship, a profound human need, a type of love. What is the nature of friendship, and what is its significance in our lives? How has friendship changed since the ancient Greeks began to analyze it, and how has modern technology altered its very definition? In this fascinating exploration of friendship through the ages, one of the most thought-provoking philosophers of our time tracks historical ideas of friendship, gathers a diversity of friendship stories from the annals of myth and literature, and provides unexpected insights into our friends, ourselves, and the role of friendships in an ethical life. A. C. Grayling roves the rich traditions of friendship in literature, culture, art, and philosophy, bringing into his discussion familiar pairs as well as unfamiliar—Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Huck Finn and Jim. Grayling lays out major philosophical interpretations of friendship, then offers his own take, drawing on personal experiences and an acute awareness of vast cultural shifts that have occurred. With penetrating insight he addresses internet-based friendship, contemporary mixed gender friendships, how friendships may supersede family relationships, one's duty within friendship, the idea of friendship to humanity, and many other topics of universal interest

In Friendship , Francesco Alberoni offers a wide-ranging analysis of intimacy. Traversing disciplines, he untangles the meanings of friendship from family and friendly relations, from love and passion and the everyday experiences of coupledom. Friendship is the just relationship. Rather than based on exchange, it is an encounter between two intimates that repudiates the logics of the market, the depersonalizing norms of modern bureaucracy and the objectives of collectivities whether they be couples or social movements. Intimate and just, friendship partakes of the world while resisting its dehumanizing drift. Marrying philosophical poetics with social science sensibility, Alberoni shows that the extent to which we live up to the ideals of friendship marks our capacities to realize the republican virtues in concrete everyday life.

A central bond, a cherished value, a unique relationship, a profound human need, a type of love. What is the nature of friendship, and what is its significance in our lives? How has friendship changed since the ancient Greeks began to analyze it, and how has modern technology altered its very definition? In this fascinating exploration of friendship through the ages, one of the most thought-provoking philosophers of our time tracks historical ideas of friendship, gathers a diversity of friendship stories from the annals of myth and literature, and provides unexpected insights into our friends, ourselves, and the role of friendships in an ethical life. A. C. Grayling roves the rich traditions of friendship in literature, culture, art, and philosophy, bringing into his discussion familiar pairs as well as unfamiliar—Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Huck Finn and Jim. Grayling lays out major philosophical interpretations of friendship, then offers his own take, drawing on personal experiences and an acute awareness of vast cultural shifts that have occurred. With penetrating insight he addresses internet-based friendship, contemporary mixed gender friendships, how friendships may supersede family relationships, one's duty within friendship, the idea of friendship to humanity, and many other topics of universal interest

Preliminary Material -- Introduction: Encountering Friendship with Francesco Alberoni /Harry Blatterer and Sveva Magaraggia -- The Meanings of Friendship -- Friendship as Encounter -- The Times of Love and Friendship -- Friendship as Ethical Form of Love -- Preferences, Impartiality and Friendship -- Friendship and Power -- Three Social States -- Friendship and Love's Paradise Lost -- Friendship and Group Solidarity -- Childhood, Adulthood and Friendly Company -- Self, Friends and Benefactors -- Eroticism and Friendship -- Power and Ambivalence, Envy and Desire -- Morality and the Logics of Market and Organization -- Friendship and Creative Action -- Spiritual Friendship -- Familiar Friendship -- Ideal and Reality: Brothers, Friends, Caritas -- Bibliography.

"This book draws on philosophy, biography, ethnography, and literature to explore the meanings and affordances of friendship-a relationship just as significant as, yet somehow different from, kinship and love. Renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson explores the political and personal resonances of friendship, and the tensions between them-in the thought of philosophers from Aristotle and Montaigne to Arendt, in the biography of the Indian historian Brijen Gupta, and in the oral narratives of a Kuranko storyteller, Keti Ferenke Koroma. He offers reflections on childhood friends and imaginary friends, lifelong friendships and friendships with animals; and ruminates on the complications of friendship between ethnographers and their interlocutors in the field. Blending memoir, theory, ethnography, and fiction, Jackson shows us how the elective affinities of friendship transcend culture, gender, and age, and offer us perennial means of taking stock of our lives and getting a measure of our own self-worth"--

Friendship names the raw, sensuous, delicate, multi-dimensional, secret intelligence shared by sentient beings at the moment of their extended encounter. It requires nothing of identity politics, selfhood, social agency, though its very expression enables and indeed solidifies, all this and more. Unlike companionship, it generates a strangely emboldened shared knowing, a suspended aliveness of (and to) otherness without recourse to an old-fashioned 'mastery' or 'authority' or binaric split between 'self and Other'. This is not a suspended aliveness as in 'freefall' or some kind of nihilistic relativism that generates an always-already 'in between' or 'transitioning' state of affairs. Leastwise it is 'romantic', though its irruptions have launched over a thousand delicious plateaus. Friendship requires a wholly different logic of senses, emotions, libidinal economies, calculations and intentions, closer to the Socratic parrhesia (truth) and its reinvention by Foucault in his Courage of Truth, as epimeleia (the technologies of care). Drawing on a specific encounter, a wild encounter, one stretched over a seven-year period with a semi-feral mustang whose precise split-down-the-middle brown/white face, earned him the Ojibwe name "Manhattan" (corrupted from "Madweijwan, the 'heard-flowing' of where the two rivers meet), these remarks here today will step into that suspended aliveness of (and to) otherness in order to develop a wholly different logic of this event-secret-sensuous intelligence called 'friendship'. At its core is an ability to harness a particular type of raw energy, sexual presence, even joy – an athleticism, respect, trust, odd form of mastery and slowness of time (despite or, even perhaps, at a gallop), that not only goes beyond the traditional (and anthropomorphically bound) tropes of 'fraternity' or 'brotherhood', but beyond the linguistic turn itself, with all the trappings of 'subject' and 'object', the 'becoming-x' and the 'transcendental', now thrown to one side. In so doing, a form of consciousness and indeed a 'new' form of communication is enabled, one that speaks a wholly different language game, embodied in the breat(d)th and fractal singularities that today go under the such headings as quantum entanglements, ana-materialisms, incompletenesses and undecidabilities. All this I learned from befriending a wildly playful and somewhat dangerous horse named Manhattan.