Friendship

This entry reviews and discusses several issues regarding online friendship. After introducing two opposite perspectives: the cues-filtered-out perspective and the social information process theory, it examines empirical studies with particular focuses on online friendships development, comparisons between online friendship and its offline counterpart, and the impacts of online friendship on the offline life.

“Friendship in Early Greek Ethics” examines the accounts of friendship (philia) in the early philosophical literature and argues that there is a coherent narrative of philosophical theorizing of friendship prior to Aristotle, one which does not make the Presocratics and Socratics mere pre-Aristotelian. The main treatments of friendship considered in this chapter—namely, those in Empedocles, Democritus, the Sophists, and the Socratics—can be understood as efforts to provide a convincing explanation of what motivates the relation of philia and to isolate the conditions for and key features of this specific form of relation essential to the good life.

Here I attempt a rare conceptual investigation into the similarities and differences between friendships and romantic relationships. Various examples show why sexual activity or desire is neither necessary nor sufficient to make a friendship romantic. I argue that both kinds of relationship share two central features: the creation of a union and a desire to benefit the other person. I defend what I call a federation model of the union view, and a soft paternalism model of beneficence which emphasises the role of counselling. I draw tentative ethical conclusions in favour of friendship and against monogamous romance. The differences I identify between the two relationships are mostly differences in degree. I challenge philosophers to identify significant differences in kind.

This article offers a theoretical approach to evaluate political friendship, and to test this approach by focusing on two well documented and supposed friendships: those of Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand, and George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. In so doing the article aims to address an academic oversight where friendship is taken for granted, without pausing to define and measure its influence on political actors. Part one aims to operationalize the concept of friendship, offering a concise philosophical overview of the concept, culminating in a demarcation between a (businesslike) partnership and a character driven friendship. Part two analyses the current state-centred approach to friendship in international relations and shows that operationalizing the concept of friendship between actors connects directly to current research on friendship, adding an additional layer of analysis on the level of political actors. Part three follows with an overview of the supposed friend...

This study sought to shed light on the complexity of male cross-orientation friendships by using Sexual Script Theory to critically evaluate how existing masculine sexual scripts may be influencing men's willingness to enter such friendships. While it is known that men enter friendships with other men across sexual orientation, little to no research exists around their beliefs and attitudes toward these relationships. This qualitative study stems from a larger, mixed-methods study on heterosexual and gay men's lifestyle habits. It sought to draw these contemporary attitudes from Canadian and American men and investigate how these relationships are viewed to assess men's willingness to enter them. The sample (N = 982) was drawn from the qualitative section of a questionnaire examining men's lifestyle habits and their relation to social and sexual attitudes. Participants responded to an open-ended (i.e., essay box) item asking: "Do you think it's valuable to communities for gay men and straight men to be friends? If so, why? If no, why not?." Braun and Clarke's (2006) inductive thematic analysis approach was used to develop a final thematic structure of two main themes and six subthemes with saturation of the responses. The first major theme was that cross-orientation friendship can be a vehicle for growth and social cohesion and the related subthemes were: these friendships can (a) allow for exploration of masculinity, (b) reduce stigma and homophobia, (c) show the value of diversity, and (d) offer exposure to the LGBTQ+ community. The second major theme was that all forms of friendship are valuable and the related subthemes were: (a) friendship is about personal and common interests and (b) sexual orientation should have nothing to do with friendship. The results revealed a general openness and willingness to enter these friendships, with an overall acknowledgment that these relationships are not yet normalized. Public Significance Statement This study found that the majority of men are willing to enter a friendship with another man who is of the opposite sexual orientation than themselves. These results hold important implications for normalizing cross-orientation friendships, and suggest that current masculine sexual scripts are slowly being redefined to accommodate newer attitudes and beliefs among men surrounding masculinity, friendship, and sexuality.

We use Principal Component Analyses (PCA) to describe components of social relationship quality in bonobos. We find a three component structure, with the first two components, labelled Value and Compatibility, closely matching the theoretical constructs as well as components reported for chimpanzees and other primates. The third component differed but was abandoned based on Parallel Analysis. Among bonobos, female–female dyads have higher Value and Compatibility. Relationships between males are characterised by low Value and Compatibility. Dyads that had been housed together for a longer time and maternally related ones also have more valuable relationships, while individuals close in rank have low compatibility. The results confirm the strong bonds among female bonobos, but for the first time can describe how they differ qualitatively from close bonds reported for captive chimpanzee females. We suggest future studies should also include Parallel Analysis to more accurately describe...

Recent discussions about the conception of self-knowledge in analytic philosophy have been concerned mainly with the distinctive way in which we know certain of our own properties. The flipside of this focus is that a sort of self-knowledge that requires effort in order to be achieved was rarely examined; and, as a consequence, it has been rarely discussed what reasons there are for individuals to strive for improving their self-assessment. It is against this background that I propose in this paper a working definition of the kind of self-knowledge that is also considered a personal achievement. Drawing some lessons from a few historical examples, I discuss what conditions have to be met for a subject to qualify as having this sort self-knowledge. I will close with a few considerations concerning the value this sort of self-knowledge has for the individual acquiring it.

Holmes, M., Greco, S. (2011), ‘Introduction: Friendship and Emotions’, Special Issue on Friendship and Emotions, Sociological Research Online, 16 (1) 16 <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/1/16.html>
0.5153/sro.2316  (with peer review), ISSN: 1360-7804

This article tells the story of the friendship between the late Belgian theatre director and author, Eric De Volder, and Turkey, more specifically, the fishing village Karaburun, the most nordic point on the peninsula in the İzmir province, and one of the most western points of Anatolia, on the coastline of the Aegean Sea. The story is based on anecdotes and archival materials, and has at least three protagonists: that of his wife, photographer and visual artist, Tania Desmet; his friend, director, cofounder of Theater RAST in Amsterdam, and translator of three of his plays, Şaban Ol; and Karaburun itself, which delivers the setting and the mise-en-scène in which their encounters were perhaps less coincidental than that the protagonists could ever imagine. Eric De Volder's story in Karaburun is focused around themes of authenticity, intercultural contact, work process, and social history. The article ends with a short reflection on the politics of friendship (Derrida 1994) through Eric De Volder's work and the time he spent in Turkey.

The lives of Third Culture Kids (TCKs) are characterized by their experiences of living among different worlds that could isolate them from social interaction and establishing long-term friendships. Exploring the experiences of ten TCKs, this paper reports on primary data gathered through the Collage Life Story Elicitation Technique (CLET) in order to gain an understanding of the meaning making of TCKs and their commitment and reticence in establishing relationships during their developmental years. In-depth thematic analysis indicated a struggle building intimacy and companionships and deep friendships, as well as difficulties with maintaining relationships with others and a possible fear of commitment. Implications for counselling of TCKs and their families are discussed. International mobility is a distinctive feature of today&#39;s world, with individuals and groups of people moving voluntarily or involuntarily across borders and around the globe. For children and young people w...

HCI research has explored mobile technologies to support social activity and to support greater feelings of connected- ness. Much of this has focused on different mobile devices, individual preferences and modes of use. Yet social activity and connectedness are about ongoing enactments of relation- ships across technologies. We propose the relational lens as a way to include a notion of relational tension in addition to individual preferences in the design and analysis of mobile communication technologies. We discuss three strategies people use to manage tensions in their relationships: selec- tion, segmentation and integration. Our data show that use of social technologies can at times destabilize social relations and occasion relational tensions, forcing users to renegotiate how they enact these relationships.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the article&#39;s first paragraph: Western philosophers have enthusiastically praised friendship. A few intellectuals have raised doubts about it, such as Thomas Hobbes and Søren Kierkegaard, but friendship has inspired many others, including Aristotle, Francis Bacon, C.S. Lewis, and Mary E. Hunt, who have esteemed its benefits, especially the reciprocal commitment to nurture each friend&#39;s &#39;best self&#39;.

In this article we want to evoke two characters that each suggest different points of departure for thinking about Kolkata as a queer kind of space. By this we want to evoke something of the sexual geography and life-ways of the city, but to go beyond this standpoint too, to question ways in which ethnographic characters might be evoked in respect of any context, Kolkata or elsewhere. In one sense this is to open out a perception of Kolkata as a scene of many sexual life-worlds, inviting a plural kind of analysis suggestive of a multiplicity of perspectives; persons/subjects each with a unique viewpoint to be captured. The two characters we explore here each draw attention to issues of belonging and migration,
of both wanting to move to and away from Kolkata; creating new lifeworlds via the city amidst its shifting sexual geographies, class and caste divisions, and wider diasporic connections and fault-lines. Kolkata itself emerges as an attribute of the characterisations to hand: sometimes as distinct mise-en-scene, at others a kind of sensibility or resonance field for understanding self and others.

In the antiquity a friendship was always a source of friends mutual enrichment despite it should ideally have been completely selfless. A new teaching brought by Christ allows someone to sacrifice their own happiness which supposed to be, according to ancient philosophers, the main target of human life for the sake of their friends' happiness. Thus friendship takes some new forms which have become obvious since. Initially writings treating of friendship were created as a by-product of the work on commentaries on the Bible excerpts. In the golden age of patristics, however, rapid development of the Christian literature began. In addition to the strictly dogmatic treatises also autobiographies and diaries were appearing. Some of them describe personal experiences of their authors' friendships. Teaching on friendship conveyed by the Fathers of the Church is not only a synthesis of the earlier ideas but also their improvement and supplement. Knowledge of the classical philosophic texts constituted a foundation on which writers of the first centuries built an understanding of friendship remaining up to date.

The lives of Third Culture Kids (TCKs) are characterized by their experiences of living among different worlds that could isolate them from social interaction and establishing long-term friendships. Exploring the experiences of ten TCKs, this paper reports on primary data gathered through the Collage Life Story Elicitation Technique (CLET) in order to gain an understanding of the meaning making of TCKs and their commitment and reticence in establishing relationships during their developmental years. In-depth thematic analysis indicated a struggle building intimacy and companionships and deep friendships, as well as difficulties with maintaining relationships with others and a possible fear of commitment. Implications for counselling of TCKs and their families are discussed. Keywords: Autobiographical Remembering, Collage Life Story Elicitation Technique, Friendship, Social Relationship, Third Culture Kids International mobility is a distinctive feature of today’s world, with individ...

Friendship as Social Justice Activism brings together academics and activists to have essential conversations about friendship, love, and desire as kinetics for social justice movements. The contributors featured here come from across the globe and are all involved in diverse movements, including LGBTQ rights, intimate-partner violence, addiction recovery, housing, migrant, labor, and environmental activism. Each essay narrates how living and organizing within friendship circles offers new ways of dreaming and struggling for social justice.

Recent scholarship in different disciplinary fields as well as activist literature have brought attention to the political possibilities within friendship. The essays, memoirs, poems, and artwork in Friendship as Social Justice Activism address these political possibilities within the context of gender, sexuality, and economic justice movements.

citation: Zsuzsanna Simonkay, "Friendly Knights and Knightly Friends: Sworn Brotherhood as Amicitia Perfecta in Medieval English Romances," Első Század 14 (2015)/1-2, pp. 101-119

ABSTRACT:

In the present paper I demonstrate that sworn brotherhood in English romances is depicted as an association of knights which meets almost all the requirements of a “true” or “perfect” friendship described by the ever-popular Roman philosopher Cicero in his work De Amicitia and his Greek predecessor, Aristotle in his books 8 and 9 of Nicomachean Ethics. These two works were the primary canons for medieval literates who wished to engage themselves in the study of friendship – only they added a little taste of  courtliness” and Christianity to them. Thus, in my paper I follow suit and found my analysis on the two above-named philosophers in order to point out the main characteristics of sworn brotherhood, the medieval amiticia perfecta, which seems to have been regarded the supreme kind of association – just like its classical antecedent.
I analyse three romances from the 14–15th centuries (Amis and Amiloun, Eger and Grime and Athelston), in which the protagonists are sworn brothers and the main plot is based on the various challenges through which their friendship is tested. I also investigate a fourth one, Sadius and Galo, which is an odd one out for it is in prose, written in Latin, and the knights do not in fact pledge friendship; what is more, it was written in the 12th century, at the peak of courtliness, while the others at the decline of it. Still, I believe that regardless of their distance in time all the four romances agree in the principles of the friendship they depict and in the standards of the parties’ actions.

"Few people would disagree with Cicero's graceful insight that: 'They seem to take the sun out of the world who take friendship out of life; for we have nothing better from the immortal gods, nothing more pleasant than friendship'. And who has ever boasted of being friendless or of knowing nothing of friendship? Yet although friendship is treasured everywhere, the extent to which people write about it and analyze it varies from age to age; for different times set different priorities, even in the human relationships that they value. In recent decades friendship has often taken back seat to romance or careerism. Happily, the situation in the Middle Ages, particularly in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, differed. Friendship preoccupied intellectuals, to judge by the many treatises, poems, and letters in which amicitia and its vernacular equivalents are discussed and practiced.

The high esteem that this personal bond commanded has caught the attention of historians, from those who study monastic culture and spirituality to those who investigate the development of attitudes toward homosexuality..."

This article examines Derrida’s insistence on the contretemps that breaks open time, paying particular attention to Politics of Friendship and the way in which this book envisages the ‘untimely’ as both interrupting, and making possible, friendship. Although I suggest that Derrida’s temporal deconstruction of the Aristotelian distinction between utility and ‘perfect’
friendships is convincing, I also argue that Derrida’s own account of friendship is itself touched by time, in the peculiar sense of ‘touched’ that connotes affected and wounded. Derrida’s work instantiates what Husserl might call a transcendental pathology, in that it intermittently instantiates an ethics of non-presentist time (the time which is also the transcendental
condition for the event of friendship), and, by contrast, disparages the significance of what we might call an ethics of phronesis, a ‘lived’ friendship of ‘omni-temporal’ dispositions, and embodied and habitual patterns. I end this article by proposing a dialectic between the disjunctive and conjunctive aspects of time that does not accord any kind of a priori privilege to the one over the other.

This article reads the problem of trespass within William Shakespeare's King Lear.  I draw upon eighteenth-century jurist William Blackstone's notion of trespass, sixteenth-century jurist Jean Bodin's notion of sovereignty, in order to understand the question of property rights that emerges in Lear's abdication of his sovereignty.

A "WOW Journal" assignment becomes a practice of friendship in diverse group university of students, in the weeks following September 11, 2001. Journal sharing becomes a ritual (as per Hoffman) and a kind of protocol (as per Aldred & Black Elk), making it possible for students to travel to one another's "worlds" (as per Lugones).

Social relationships such as friendship and partner choice are ruled by the proximity principle, which states that the more similar two individuals are, the more likely they will become friends. However, proximity, similarity, and friendship are concepts with blurred edges and imprecise grades of membership. This study shows how to simulate these friendship dynamics in an agent-based model that applies fuzzy sets theory to implement agent attributes, rules, and social relationships, explaining the process in detail. Although in principle it may be thought that the use of fuzzy sets theory makes agent-based modelling more elaborated, in practice it saves the modeller from taking some arbitrary decisions on how to use crisp values for representing properties that are inherently fuzzy. The consequences of applying fuzzy sets and operations to define a fuzzy friendship relationship are compared with a simpler implementation, with crisp values. By integrating agent computational models and fuzzy set theory, this paper provides useful insights into scholars and practitioners to tackle the uncertainty inherent to social relationships in a systematic way.

The medical model of disability, though beneficial for the medical professional, is often exclusionary, restrictive and dehumanizing when applied to the lived experience of disability. As a result, a critique of this model was constructed called the social model of disability. Much of the language used to articulate the purpose behind the social model of disability can be summed up within the word inclusion. However, this essay asserts that inclusiveness is an incomplete aspiration. The social model, as it currently stands, does not aid in creating a society where those with impairments actually belong. Rather, the social model aids in lessening the visibility, or negative consequence of, difference. Therefore, the social model does not invite society to welcome those with physical and intellectual impairments. It simply aids society in ignoring the existence of impairment by removing explicit forms of exclusion. Rather than simple inclusion, then, this essay uses John Swinton’s concept of friendship and Jean Vanier’s understanding of belonging to better articulate the intended outcome of the social model—a society where everyone can belong.

This paper examines Martin Luther's interpretation of love in the gospel of John. It is part of a series that explores the meaning of love in Luther for the Christian life. Here Luther speaks of some expressions f love that are not prominent in some of his other writings. For example, he writes on love and friendship, on love for Christ and love as the eschatological reality. His understanding of love in this text does not fit into the sharp opposition of eros and agape that Anders Nygren used to interpret Luther.

This paper considers the potential for sexual health promotion to engage with young people via social media. Media/cultural studies accounts of social media practices are drawn upon to highlight key difficulties in adapting current health promotion strategies to young people’s digital media cultures. Health interventions often approach social media as an opportunity to reach young people but do not always consider the compatibility of health promotion and social media. This paper proposes a need to re-think the provision of static information to young people in spaces where they interact as media producers rather than observers. I also ask how health promotion might better engage with social media and its central tenet of friendship intimacies. Drawing from ethnographic studies of young people’s digital media practices, I encourage health promoters not to conceive of social media as opportunities to reach young people, but as channels through which to engage with young people. This engagement requires listening and response to concerns and practices of young people, as is typical of these media. Lastly, opportunities that social media offer young people regarding negotiations of sexual safety, such as friendship care and support, should be explored and better supported by health promotion strategies.

This book is the first in a series published by Living City and which seeks to illumine daily life with light from the Word of God. In this book on Friendship, Laurie Brink, a Dominican Sister of Sinsinawa and a biblical scholar, weaves in the wisdom of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, the theology of medieval theologians such as Aquinas, and the reflections of contemporary ethicists such as Waddell. In a key of virtue and based on several biblical insights, Brink helps us understand in a very practical way why friendship can make us better persons.

This chapter argues for the need to bring ethnographic detail of the everyday to reconciliation studies. It examines the concept and practice of friendship in a 'post-conflict' scenario through the analysis of the group 'Women of the Peace Line', formed by women from Catholic/Nationalist and Protestant/Unionist backgrounds in Belfast. This social space problematizes divisions in Northern Ireland, challenging fixed conceptualisations of communal and gender identities. Elements such as enjoyment, support and trust are highlighted in this exploration as significant aspects in the diverse paths towards positive peace and social transformation.

In this article I explore the contemporary normative meanings of friendship, unpacking the subject through two different questions: “what is a good friend?” and “what is an intimate friend?” Drawing on survey data from a national representative sample (n = 1142), the topic is explored in the context of a southern European country (Portugal) that represents an interesting case study, for its characteristics of late, though abrupt, entrance into late modernity. Statistical analysis of the results enabled the construction of an exploratory typology of representations of friendship, according to the meanings ascribed to friends: family-oriented; trust-oriented; self-oriented; and presence-oriented. Results inspire a two-folded interpretation. On the one hand, they point to a pervasiveness of hegemonic representations such as friendship as trust and self-disclosure, namely among the younger and more educated. On the other hand, they highlight the pervasiveness of kinship ties in the definition of friendship, namely among the elderly and less educated. This suggests that patterns of suffusion may not only refer to more individualized and plural arrangements of personal life, but also to the persistence of more traditional representations and practices, characterized by an ideological commitment to the family in its more institutional forms.

Benjamin Lesbios on the Forms of Friendship:
Ancient, Modern, and Contemporary Approaches

Benjamin Lesbios (1759-1824) was a leading figure of the Neohellenic Enlightenment, scholar and revolutionary, natural scientist and philosopher, a man of both theory and action. He was also a systematic student of both ancient and modern scholarship combining in his work the ancient tradition with modernity, recognizing in his Elements of Metaphysics that “all the theories of the contemporaries are ancient” (IA, §249). Benjamin’s respect to the ancients is apparent in the whole of his work as well as his attempt to project the ideas of ancient Greek civilization, combined with an excellent knowledge of the ancient texts. Despite his admiration for the Greek civilization, Benjamin made critical use of the Greek philosophical tradition, not taking sides in the debate between ‘Ancients and Moderns’, arguing instead that the ideas of the Ancients correspond to those of the Moderns.
More specifically, my aim in this paper is to present and analyse Benjamin Lesbios’s account of the different forms of friendship as found mainly in his Elements of Ethics but also in passim in his Elements of Metaphysics. Based on textual evidence, I argue that Benjamin’s notion of friendship owes very much to that of Aristotle’s. It is clear that Benjamin’s text is full of Aristotelian implicit or explicit references mainly from the Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics. Benjamin’s philosophy achieves into successfully combining Aristotelianism with natural rights theory, being thus more closely affiliated with contemporary Aristotelian theories that attempt to combine virtue ethics with deontology in an endeavour to overcome the dead ends of both modern and contemporary normative theory and to put forward a viable social theory. Therefore, according to my opinion, it is possible to argue that Benjamin’s theory is not only relevant today but also – within the context of the study of the history of philosophy – useful to contemporary Aristotelian moral and political theory.

It is commonly held that political society is based on an agreement about justice, especially in terms of a guarantee of individual rights. Cicero suggests that we need to look elsewhere for the origin and strength of the social fabric, namely, the various forms of friendship. This paper is based on a presentation at ACTC 2017.

Qualitative research provides opportunities to study bullying and peer harassment as social processes, interactions and meaning-making in the everyday context of particular settings. It offers the possibility of developing a deep understanding of the culture and group processes of bullying and the participants’ perspectives on peer harassment as well. It gives participants opportunities to discuss their own understanding and experiences of bullying in their own words. This article reviews qualitative studies on bullying or peer harassment in school (including some studies in which qualitative and quantitative methods — so-called mixed methods — have been used).