Interpersonal Relations, Military, Parenting & Relationships, General, History & Theory, Political History, Anthropology 

In antiquity, it was not only Aristotle who assumed the people are more to be understood in relation to one another than as individual or solitary constructs. Friendship was vital to figures such as Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, because it supplied the type of bonding or fellowship without which they supposed no society could survive - a person unfit for communal life, for Aristotle, must be either a beast or a god.
The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity considers the changing attitudes to friendship since antiquity and notes that almost no major modern philosopher has expounded friendship as an ideal for society, as is strikingly revealed in the book’s essays on key figures such as David Hume and Adam Smith in the eighteen century and Nietzsche in the nineteenth. In the twentieth century, Martin Buber is one of the few important figures to press for some species of return. But the success of that appeal is unclear: Jacques Derrida, on the one hand, insist ‘there is no friend’, meaning that the project is no longer feasible; Horst Hutter, on the other hand, pursues the ideal, while Frankly proclaiming in this volume that friendship will not and cannot be what it was.
 

In antiquity, it was not only Aristotle who assumed the people are more to be understood in relation to one another than as individual or solitary constructs. This examination considers the changing attitudes to friendship since antiquity. - from Amzon 

Contents

1. Introduction Preston King ……………………………………….............p. 1

2. The Role of Friendship in Aristotle's Political Theory
Richard Mulgan …………………………………………………..........................…p. 15

3. Hume, Smith and Ferguson: Friendship in Commercial Society
Lisa Hill and Peter McCarthy …………………………………….....................…p. 33

4. Circles, Ladders and Stars: Nietzsche on Friendship
Ruth Abbey …………………………………………………………............................p. 50

5. Martin Buber and the Ontological Crisis of Modern Man
Charles Rustin p. …………………………………………………….......................p. 74

6. Derrida and Friendship Fred Dallmayr …………………………..........p. 105
7.
8. The Virtue of Solitude and the Vicissitudes of Friendship
Horst Hutter ………………………………………………………..............................p. 131

9. Reviving Greco-Roman Friendship: A Bibliographic Review
Heather Devere ……………………………………………………............................p. 149

10. Abstracts …………………………………………………….. ……......................p. 188

11.Notes on Contributors ……………………………………………..............p. 192