Kind Of Friendship Research Articles

Parasocial relationships and their impact on the psychological and sociocultural adjustment of educational tourists: an autoethnography

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to investigate whether relationships with media figures can impact the psychological and sociocultural adjustment of educational tourists.Design/methodology/approachThe article uses the qualitative method of autoethnography to provide a highly personalised account of the first author’s relationships with podcast hosts during his time as an educational tourist, in order to fulfil its previously mentioned purpose.FindingsAn analysis of the author’s narrative account demonstrates how he formed parasocial relationships (PSRs) with his favourite podcast hosts. These relationships increased self-efficacy, reduced stress and provided a sense of social support, which, in turn contributed to psychological and sociocultural adjustment.Originality/valueBy demonstrating how relationships with media figures can impact their psychological and sociocultural adjustment, this article argues that research on educational tourists should explore their PSRs, in addition to their other kinds of friendships which have already been examined.

The power and limits of friendship in Spinoza’s Ethics

ABSTRACT Spinoza’s views on friendship have been a relatively overlooked aspect of his ethical thought. Even though commentators such as Andrew Youpa and Steven Nadler shed significant light on the significance of Spinoza’s views, they do not provide a detailed examination of the possibility of friendship between people who are not similar to one another. In considering to what extent (if at all) a virtuous person can join ordinary people who are dissimilar to her in friendship, my paper attempts to reach a better understanding of the limits, as well as the power, of friendship for Spinoza. First, I show that we can make a meaningful distinction between two kinds of friendship, which I call active friendship and coincidental friendship. Then, I argue that in Spinoza besides these two kinds of friendships, there is also a group of social interactions wherein the virtuous wants to bring the non-virtuous to enlightenment. In examining the nature of these interactions, I conclude that in Spinoza in addition to what we can call the Socratic quest of bringing people to enlightenment, we also find a strategy of insulation, which consists in taking measures so that ordinary people do not pose a threat to the virtuous.

Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life by Sara Brill

Reviewed by: Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life by Sara Brill Zoli Filotas Sara Brill. Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 304. Hardback, $100.00. This book is a sweeping survey of Aristotle's approach to human life. It covers what might seem to be an idiosyncratic set of topics: friendship, animal behavior, commerce, tyranny, and motherhood are among the more prominent. But Sara Brill pulls them together into a cohesive and illuminating picture, showing how each reflects Aristotle's conception of the concept "life" and the two Greek words, zôê and bios, that he uses to discuss it. The book rebukes thinkers who draw too sharp a contrast between animal life, on the one hand, and human politics, on the other. Until recently, Brill writes, that has been the dominant trend, uniting thinkers otherwise as different as Giorgio Agamben and David Keyt. For writers like them, human beings must overcome and sublimate their base, animal instincts (zôê, "mere life") in order to develop rational, uniquely human "ways of life" (bioi) like the lives of the citizen and the philosopher. For Brill, by contrast, the relationship between a person and the polis in Aristotle is "an intensified form of the relations between any animal and its proper habitat" (29). Indeed, every animal species has a distinctive way of life, a bios. The lavish discussion of animal "personality" or "character" (ethos) in the History of Animals suggests their range: lions are brave, cattle are stupid, dolphins are gentle, and so on. A personality not only helps an animal flourish in some habitat (topos) but also defines its relationships with other members of its species. So although Aristotle only classifies a few animal species as "political," Brill reminds us that there is a clear sense in which all are social. Aristotle famously claims that we humans are the "most political" of all animals, but Brill shows that this claim is both incomplete and misleading. For although Aristotle thinks that we outdo even bees in organized cooperation, he also stresses that we outdo even "warlike" eagles in our capacity for violence and solitude. Confronted with the opposition between solitary and gregarious ways of life, human beings "dualize" or "play a double game" (epamphoterizei) (HA I.1, 488a7). That is, much as frogs have water-dwelling and land-dwelling inclinations, humans are socially amphibious. Indeed, every human behavior—communal, solitary, and contentious alike—turns out to be an expression of animal nature. Brill points out that much of the Politics emphasizes the negative, the way that human beings make their own and each other's lives unlivable. Thus, although Aristotle embraces the sweetness of life, which has a distinct and intrinsic pleasure, his political project anticipates Nietzsche in squarely and unflinchingly studying its "horrors" (254). For Brill, the apex of human sociality in Aristotle is not politics but the so-called "perfect" friendship that Aristotle describes in Nicomachean Ethics VIII–IX and Eudemian Ethics VII. Perfect friends, Aristotle says repeatedly, "share a life" (suzên, cognate with zôê rather than bios). Friends grieve and rejoice together, perceive together, and philosophize together too. Brill emphasizes that this list includes the full range of psychic functions, from appetite all the way up to the highest forms of abstract thought. As they live together, friends build up a "nexus of meaning and value," a "world as it is created through the sharing of pleasure, judgment, and action" in which there "emerges a subjectivity which cannot be easily or simply conceived as 'mine'" (43, emphasis in original). In the best kinds of friendship, we realize that human life is lived by the partnership itself, not just the friends individually. [End Page 149] But Brill stresses that Aristotle thinks few people will ever find "perfect friendship." It is completely out of reach for most citizens of any real-world city. Yet for Aristotle, the flawed and diverse citizens of every polis nevertheless engage in a form of shared life: shared perception of the just and unjust. How is that possible? Through fragile institutions and customs, what Aristotle calls an "adornment of habits and an arrangement of correct laws" (Politics II.5...

Aus-einander-setzungzwischen Hermeneutik und Dekonstruktion und Gadamers Solidaritätsverständnis

Aus-einander-setzung between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction and Gadamer's Concept of Solidarity This paper will analyze the debate between Gadamer and Derrida and Gadamer's concept of solidarity. The previous research literature focused only on their first debate, which could only lead to limited results, even though the exchange between these two philosophers continued after the first debate. In addition, Gadamer revised a large part of his speech, which caused the first debate with Derrida, for publication. In this way, the accentuation of concepts and themes that Derrida found problematic in the published version differs considerably from that in Gadamer's real speech. For this reason, this paper will consider Gadamer's original manuscript, which is preserved in Deutsches Literatur Archiv in Marbach. My point is that in Derrida's funeral oration for Gadamer, Uninterrupted Dialogue, can be found some shared points of view between both philosophers, namely their interpretation of Paul Celan's poems. By means of their Celan interpretations, I will demonstrate that it is not good will that unites all human beings, but their existential fate to find death. Here we encounter the problem of solidarity in Gadamer's work, since in his interpretation of Celan he considers death (or mortality) to be the "ultimate solidarity" of human beings, whereas in his other texts he defines solidarity as a kind of friendship. Hence, Gadamer's understanding of solidarity is discussed in the last part of this paper. My argument is that the concept of solidarity and that of belonging are interconnected in Gadamer's texts and that in this point the concept of openness shows its fundamental role.

Nietzsche and Friendship

Nietzsche and Friendship

The Virtue of Husband and Wife: Understanding Marital Friendship in Aquinas (with a Little Help from Homer)

The Virtue of Husband and WifeUnderstanding Marital Friendship in Aquinas (with a Little Help from Homer) Scott G. Hefelfinger (bio) Introduction Thomas Aquinas is well known for drawing on Aristotle’s analysis of friendship in order to understand and to define charity. Less familiar is Aquinas’s approach to marriage in terms of friendship. “Marriage,” writes Aquinas, “is the greatest friendship,”1 and he elaborates this elsewhere by means of Aristotle’s threefold division of friendship: friendship of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue.2 This already contains a great richness to be explored, but Aquinas goes further, adding suggestively: “There is a virtue proper to both husband and wife that renders their friendship delightful to each other.”3 But what exactly is this virtue, and how does it relate to the three kinds of friendship? The Angelic Doctor does not say. Whatever this virtue is, we seem to stand in great need of it. The world today seems a stranger to the delight that Aquinas mentions and is instead overly familiar with serial cohabitation, broken homes, and more recently, what has been termed “sexless marriages,” which result in no small part from the proliferation of pornography. Such sadness, discontentment, and even despair in the arena of marriage renders Aquinas’s provocative remark all the more striking, and so this short article is an attempt to tease out its meaning. [End Page 126] To do this, I will draw from the theory of Aristotle and the poetry of Homer to put meat on the bones of Aquinas’s skeletal remark, namely, that there is a virtue proper to spouses. In a first step, I will argue based on Aristotle and Aquinas that there is an excellence specific to the coordinated and cooperative work of the household. In a second step, I will turn to Homer’s Odyssey, where, I propose, we catch a glimpse of what this mutual work looks like, and in particular the kind of friendship between equals that it entails. Taken all together, Aquinas, Aristotle, and Homer offer resources for a renewed vision of marriage that is strikingly relevant in a world longing for delight and pining for a renewal of culture—a renewal that begins with the friendship, and virtue, of husband and wife. Aristotelian Roots When, in the Summa contra gentiles, Aquinas speaks of marriage as “the greatest friendship,” he offers two reasons to justify the superlative: he holds that husband and wife are “united not only in the act of fleshly union, which produces a certain gentle association even among beasts, but also in the partnership of the whole range of domestic activity [ad totius domesticae conversationis consortium].”4 Admittedly, these reasons might seem a little thin. Indeed, it almost sounds like Aquinas is suggesting that what makes the greatest friendship between husband and wife is that they sleep in the same bed at night and make the bed together in the morning. Understandably, we’re left wanting a little more than that. If we turn to his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, it helps us to appreciate that, as we expect, there is more going on here. The friendship between husband and wife is a complex, multi-faceted reality. One facet is its usefulness; it is a friendship of utility, Aquinas points out, since it “furnishes a sufficiency [of things] for family life.”5 Another facet of this friendship is that it is pleasant or pleasurable; thus, it is a friendship of pleasure, seen most clearly— but by no means exclusively—in marital intimacy. The last facet is [End Page 127] that related to virtue; Aquinas holds that marital friendship can also be based on virtue and thus it can reach the level of a noble or virtuous friendship.6 What is a virtuous friendship for Aristotle and Aquinas? Friendships are based on love and thus the precise object of love will determine the sort of friendship. Because friendships of utility and of pleasure are based on a love that targets some good other than a person, Aristotle sees them as incomplete or incidental. Complete friendship includes the dimensions of utility and pleasure but also goes beyond them. This...

The Theme of Friendship in Kambar’s Select Occasional Verses: A Critical Analysis

In our everyday life, we come across many relationships. One of the most unique relationships is friendship which we encounter with different people in different situations of our lives. This paper discusses the friendship experienced by Kambar which he has expressed through his occasional verses. Friendship has been classified into five kinds based on the experiences of Kambar culled out from his occasional verses. The five kinds of friendship are (i) friendship based on gratitude, (ii) friendship based on caste to which he belongs, (iii) friendship based on his scholarliness, (iv)Friendship based on profit and (v) friendship based on love.

The definition of friendship

L’amitié représente un problème central dans l’éthique d’Aristote, mais plusieurs questions appellent des clarifications. En particulier, celle de son unité. On soutient ici qu’Aristote ne considère pas les différentes espèces d’amitié (amitié de vertu, de plaisir, d’utilité) comme les espèces d’un genre. Par ailleurs, le rapport à une unité focale de signification ( focal meaning ) ne permet pas d’expliquer leurs relations. Néanmoins, les types secondaires d’amitié ne sont pas purement accidentels: Aristote présuppose visiblement que sa définition de l’amitié par les bonnes intentions et actions mutuelles convient aux trois espèces, bien que d’une manière différente dans chaque cas. L’unité de l’amitié s’explique ainsi par une relation de similarité entre les différents types d’amitié.

Friendship: A moral virtue

In my paper, I would like to compose a comparative analysis between Aristotle and Immanuel Kant's notion of friendship as a moral virtue. Among the virtues discussed by Aristotle, friendship is one of the most important virtues. It is a relationship between two men who have affection for each other and who recognize each other's affection. There are different kinds of friendships - one is based on utility, the other two are either based on pleasant company or based on mutual respect. With emphasis on universal law and duty for duty's sake, Kant gives less importance on friendship as a special relationship. Although both Kant and Aristotle highlight the mutual knowing involved in friendship as a virtue of the highest form of friendship, Kant's emphasis lies not on knowing another person but on being known by another person, since it is in being known by another person that we become connected to someone else. In contrast, Aristotle's interest lies in knowing another person rather than in being known by another person, since it only through knows another person that we can come to know ourselves.

Friendship in Chinese International Relations

Confucian friendship adds to the literature on friendship distance sensibilities and aims to maintain and even reinforce the Confucian ethical order, whereas contemporary international politics fails to provide any clear ethical order. The use of friendship and the concomitant creation of a friendly role by China indicate an intended move away from the improper order, including the tributary system, the Cold War, imperialism, and socialism. Confucian friendship continues to constitute contemporary Chinese diplomacy under the circumstance of indeterminate distance sensibilities. It highlights the relevance of the prior relations that are perceived to have constituted friendship. This article explores several illustrative practices of a Confucian typology of friendly international relations, divided into four kinds of friendship, according to (1) the strength of prior relations and (2) the asymmetry of capacity, including the policies toward Russia, North Korea, and Vietnam, among others. Such a Confucian friendship framework additionally alludes to foreign policy analysis in general. The US policies for China and North Korea are examples that indicate this wide scope of application.

Social Media as Tools of Exclusion in Academia?

Social Media as Tools of Exclusion in Academia?

Kenal saja tidak cukup: Eksplorasi Motif dan Bentuk Pertemanan Urban

Friendship is a form of social interaction which elicits positive affect, happiness, and promote mental health. Commonly, friendship is based on homophily. However, similarity often less seen in a diverse context, specifically urban area. Numerous interactions between migrants and nonmigrants will create a distinctive pattern with non-diverse area. The aim of this study is to frame friendship as perceived by urban youth in Yogyakarta with following questions: 1) what makes urban youth befriend each other, and 2) what kind of friendship they have. Indigenous qualitative study is used as a methodological approach. Author interviewed eight urban youth as participants. The findings suggest that urban youth in Yogyakarta befriend each other based on similarity in communication style, the relationship elicit supportive climate, proximity, and needs fulfillment. These reasons changing overtime, proofed by the consideration on cost-benefit relationship. Urban youth in Yogyakarta have several types of friends, categorized by intimacy. Intimate friendships consist of ‘sharing’ friend and close friend, while acquaintances are friends, functional friend, friends bound by space, and demographic friends. Implications are discussed further on recommendation on migrant friendship.

Making Best Friends From Other Groups and Mental Health of Chinese Adolescents

Friendship may be significantly associated with adolescents’ psychological well-being. Among various kinds of friendships, this study investigated two types of intergroup friendships among Chinese adolescents, specifically cross-hukou-location and cross-gender friendship. Fixed-effects modeling with a two-wave national dataset—the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS)—was performed to evaluate the relationship between within-individual changes in cross-hukou-location friendship, cross-gender friendship, and mental health status ( N = 5,297, boys: 50.18%, average age: 12.92 at wave 1). The relationship pattern among different genders was also explored. The results showed that cross-hukou-location friendship is positively associated with male adolescents’ mental health status. The cross-gender relationship is negatively related to mental health in the overall sample and female subsample. The findings not only emphasized the vital role of intergroup contact but also shed light on understanding the role of gender in intergroup friendship-making and the relationship with psychological well-being.

Transforming Friendship: Thomas Aquinas on Charity as Friendship with God

This article argues that Thomas Aquinas’s definition of charity in the Summa Theologiae as ‘a kind of friendship’ represents a distinctive and theologically significant development of both the Aristotelian and the Christian monastic traditions on which he builds. By approaching his discussion of charity in the secunda secundae through the gateway of friendship, Thomas is able to characterize the spiritual vision of this portion of the Summa through a twofold movement of grace and participation. The shape of this twofold movement has an implicitly incarnational character, and thus points to the divine Subject of the Summa’s third and culminating volume. But the participatory aspect of this spiritual theology also reveals the indispensable role of the human person, and thus allows Thomas to offer a nuanced explanation of the ways that friendship with God relates to friendships with other human beings.

Authenticity as Performance and the Conventions of Companionship in Fanny Kemble's Poems

Authenticity as Performance and the Conventions of Companionship in Fanny Kemble's Poems Martin Brooks (bio) Mrs. Kemble's case would have been an exquisite one for a psychologist interested in studying the constitution of sincerity Henry James, "Frances Anne Kemble" This essay discusses how the actress and poet Frances Anne Kemble (1809–1893), best known as Fanny Kemble, worked to achieve authenticity in her collection of lyrics, Poems (1844). As it shows, Poems draws on Kemble's distinctive ideas about how a person's speech can be authentic, that is, can represent "the great deeps of life" within them.1 In letters and journals dating from her career as a famous Shakespearean actress, Kemble had developed a view that authenticity comes from how rather than why people speak. She disputed the expectation that speech only represents a person's subjectivity, their "self," when it is idiosyncratic or original. Instead, she held that people can use preexisting literary, stage, and social conventions to represent themselves. Kemble generated much of this view from arguing that actors represent themselves by their choice and use of acting techniques for playing their characters. At the same time, though, she had found the same view in poetry, arguing that poets reveal themselves in the ways that they manipulate stock ideas. As this essay establishes, Kemble's view of authenticity runs throughout Poems. Not only does Poems demonstrate how her work as actress and her work as poet were fundamentally linked by her ideas about performance, but it also illustrates how her poetry frames received ideas as able to authenticate speech. Social conventions provide Poems most of its shape. Kemble published Poems during the collapse of her marriage to the American slaveholder Pierce Butler. Its poems draw on the nineteenth-century idea of companionship to depict the poet responding to lost love and rearranging her life.2 As Kemble [End Page 501] had written extolling the relationship to Butler, companionship was a kind of friendship which emphasized closeness, honesty, equality between two friends. Usually they were both women, and their companionship would occur in private or domestic settings. Poems draws on these conventions to establish that the poet's speech represents her core self, and to create a reference point which authenticates that her literary echoes and allusions represent it too. By reading Poems with a focus on companionship, this essay shows how the construction of the poet's voice exemplifies Kemble's theory that she could convey her selfhood by using received ideas. Authenticity in the Nineteenth-Century Theater Authenticity underwent major changes in the nineteenth century. People stopped using it to trace their words back to wider social structures and started to weigh if what they said could be traced back to their individual self. As Kerry Sinanan and Tim Milnes write, "the idea of the authentic harden[ed] around a core, internal self, and the social [was] increasingly experienced as 'other.' "3 Yet, a twentieth-century critical focus on the "core, internal self" has largely displaced critical accounts of the transitional views that people held during that change. In particular, it has minimized the attention paid to nineteenth-century views that popular techniques and tropes in a person's writing or speech can be an authentic representation of that self. This view of authenticity has received little comment. Moreover, several critics have suggested that it is fakery. Lionel Trilling, for instance, rejects as an "impersonation" "the personality whose whole being is attuned to catch the signals sent out by the consensus of his fellows and by the institutional agencies of his culture."4 Geoffrey Hartman, meanwhile, describes "'Hollywood' and its celebrity culture" as an unreal "parallel universe" where "[m]orality, as [Emmanuel] Levinas points out, becomes role playing."5 This critical approach rejects the possibility that a culture might treat people's use of standard ideas as representative of their own selfhood. Certainly, some nineteenth-century writing offered just this type of rejection.6 However, that rejection was not ubiquitous. Kemble, especially, questioned it. Her inquiry led to her bridging between her careers on the stage and in poetry. Nineteenth-century theater critics often focused on how well Kemble used standard acting techniques...

ARISTOTELIAN FRIENDSHIP SEEN IN STEPHEN KING'S THE BODY

This article explores tl1e aristotelia n friendship in King 's The Body to answer two questions: 1) how is friendship described in Stephen King 's The body?; 2) what kinds of friendships are  desscribed in Stephen King s The body? Aristotle grouped friendship into tlueefriendship based on utility ,friendship based on pleasure, andfoendship based on goodness. The research method applied was qualitative descriptive.The result of the analysis showed Gordie, Chris, Teddy and Vern performed friendship based on utility and lfriendship based on pleasure while Gordie and Chris perfonned in the friendship based on goodness because only both of them who always stayed to gethe r and shared goodness in their relationship , the y encouraged one another in good things. Chris showed his love and care to Gordie by the way he pushed Gordie to join the collage course and leave the gang because tlle gang will only drag him down.

A Queer Politics of Touching: Walt Whitman’s Theory of Comrades

This article explores the concept of political and legal regimes of touching by analyzing Walt Whitman’s poems that envision a new political order founded on comradeship – a distinct kind of friendship characterized by physical intimacy. Whitman’s “Calamus” poems, I argue, demonstrate that touching is a political act. This study resists treating Whitman anachronistically as a “homosexual” and argues that comradeship as he understands it represents a model of queerness that can challenge the recent anti-social turn in queer theory.

Riktiga vänner och andra män

Feminist researchers have an ambivalent relation to friendships between men. They have been seen as both threatening and promising, as relationships in which gendered power relations can be either reproduced or challenged. This article draws upon interviews with heterosexual men about their friendships with other men, and the role of emotional and physical closeness in these friendships. The interviewees distinguish between “real” and less real friendships, and claim that they are capable of recognizing and having “real” friendships. They see friendship as gendered, and argue that men in general have difficulties with friendship. Physical closeness, especially hugging, is also discussed. The interviewees distinguish between “real” hugs and back pat hugs, arguing that most men engage in the latter out of fear of closeness and homophobia, but that they themselves prefer the former kind of hug. These narratives are analysed as rhetorical tools making the interviewees stand out as exceptional in relation to other men, who are depicted as shallow or scared of getting close to male friends. By drawing on ideas about “real friendship” and authenticity, they position themselves as anti-homophobic and anti-laddish; as a certain kind of men, aware of gender constructions and different from various “Others”. The article highlights the construction of an anti-homophobic and anti-laddish masculine position in a contemporary Swedish context, focusing on ideas about friendship and authenticity. The interview is theorized as an arena for doing positioning work, where boundaries are drawn and categories are re/produced, one of which is the idea of “real” friendship, used to distinguish between different kinds of men and relationships. The interviewees’ discussions about friendship are complex, as well as filled with longing for and envisionings of new kinds of friendships and intimacies between men.

Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers: the time of friendship

ABSTRACTThis paper provides an introduction to the enduring friendship between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers. It shows how their intellectual development as public educators was sustained by their ongoing dialogue which flourished not in spite of but because of their huge differences of circumstance and personality. This friendship between two renowned scholars raises – by implication at least – the question as to what part friendship plays in academic and intellectual development and to what extent institutions, in their administrative systems and practices, encourage or even allow for the kind of friendship that Arendt and Jaspers shared. The paper does not seek to address these questions directly, but rather to ground them in the particularities of a unique correspondence between two major public intellectuals and to highlight their relevance for those currently working in the higher education sector.

Dialogue with Six Critics

Theory at its best should be a kind of friendship. Thinking is something one does on one's own; but having thought one's way to a set of theoretical positions, one exposes those intellectual commitments to the test of seeing how they stand up to friendly but challenging scrutiny. I'm grateful for the critical commentaries on my book featured in this symposium because they seem to me to have generated interesting and thoughtful responses to what I have written; but I'm no less grateful because they also nicely exemplify this spirit of dialogical friendship. In that way, they help to vindicate the enterprise of theory as I have just characterized it. These theorists are also my friends, and the friendship is constitutively grounded in a shared commitment to theory as a vocation.