Friendship for Virtue

by Kristján Kristjánsson

Overview

Through its revised and applied Aristotelianism, this book illuminates our understanding of friendship in moral philosophy, moral psychology, and moral education. Friendship for Virtue has four main aims. The first is to give the virtue of friendship the pride of place it deserves in contemporary Aristotle-inspired virtue ethics. The second is to integrate Aristotelian theory with recent social scientific research on friendship through mutual adjustments. The third is to retrieve Aristotelian friendship as a moral educational concept, where 'friendship for virtue' is to be understood as 'friendship for virtue development'. The fourth is to offer a more detailed and realistic account than Aristotle did of why even the best of friendships can go stale and dissolve and why the human relationships they represent are so precarious - for example in circumstances where erotic love and friendship clash.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192679314
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	09/01/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	925 KB

About the Author

Professor Kristján Kristjánsson is Deputy Director in the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues and Professor of Character Education and Virtue Ethics, University of Birmingham. His interests lie in research on character and virtues at the intersection between moral philosophy, moral psychology, and moral education. He has published nine books on those issues, the latest one is Flourishing as the Aim of Education (2020). His previous books include Aristotelian Character Education (2015), which won the SES Prize for the best Education book of 2015, and Virtuous Emotions (2018). Kristjánsson is Editor of the Journal of Moral Education.

Table of Contents

Preface1. Setting the Scene: Friendship from Aristotle to Contemporary Psychology2. Fragile Friendships: Instabilities and Terminations3. Friendship with a Filter: The Role of Phronesis4. Grounding Friendships: Reconciling the Moralised and Aestheticised Views5. How Friendship Cultivates Virtue: Retrieving Friendship as a Moral Educational Concept6. Friendships for Utility: Their Moral Value and an Online Example7. Online Character Friendships: The Example of Epalships8. Concluding Remarks: Some Retrospective Reflections on Friendships

Editorial Reviews

"According to Kristján Kristjánsson, Friendship for Virtue aims to retrieve for contemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics the major importance that the virtue of friendship plays in Aristotle's own texts, and to do so in a way that highlights friendship as, in essence, characterologically educational. This book succeeds at this aim and does so with clarity. Moreover, Kristjánsson does sufcient justice to the relevant history and in a way that should prove fascinating to historians of philosophy." — Bradford Jean-Hyuk Kim, Metascience

"Kristjánsson's book represents a rigorous, thoughtful, and needed philosophical engagement with the experience of friendship - a near universal part of human existence,... In this sense, Friendship for Virtue helps to fill a real lacuna." — Ryan Connors, The Thomist

"Kristjánsson's book represents a rigorous, thoughtful, and needed philosophical engagement with the experience of friendship - a near universal part of human existence,... In this sense, Friendship for Virtue helps to fill a real lacuna." — Ryan Connors, The Thomist

From the Publisher