Notion Of Friendship Research Articles

Friendship and the Political

Friendship and politics generally come to the fore as incompatible phenomena. At the same time, there are at least two important conceptions that link them explicitly: the Aristotelian notion of ‘political friendship’ and Carl Schmitt’s idea of the political as dividing into friend and enemy. While the second is, in the end, more about enmity than actually about friendship, a modification of the notion of the political offers the possibility of accommodating the first. A critical modification of the notion of the political, with the assistance of Jacques Derrida and Chantal Mouffe, makes it possible, finally, to use the notion of friendship in politics to point out the tension between friendship in politics, potentially leading to a ‘rule by friends’, and the necessary striving for political friendship as a means to transform antagonistic into agonistic conflict.

"For the hatching of our hearts": friendship, pastoral care, and the formation for ministry.

The author explores the notion of friendship by drawing on personal and ministry experience, as well as on philosophical and biblical insights, in order to suggest a dynamic practice of pastoral care and a process of ministry formation which transcends the professional paradigm and the peership principle. He suggests that the power to bless, the ability to extend grace, and the potential for change are dynamics of friendship which are effective both in pastoral care and in ministry formation.

Private Girls and Public Worlds: Producing femininities in the primary school

This article draws upon data gathered from a research project entitled 'Children's Relationship Cultures in Years 5 and 6'. The project aims to explore the ways in which primary school age children understand emotional, caring and family relationships. This paper will focus upon the role of friendship in the cultures of girls, aged 9-10, in a primary school classroom. An ethnographic approach is adopted to illustrate the variety of interactions in which friendship is spoken, displayed and enacted within pupil cultures. Analysis of these exchanges suggests that notions of friendship and patterns of friendship are constitutive of sexual-gender identities. The paper argues that being friends/breaking friends is a technique utilised for the regulation and negotiation of femininities and the production of differentiated sex-gender hierarchies. The paper will focus upon the activities of the 'diary group'--a self-styled network of eight girls who met in the school playground to discuss issues that interested and excited them. Recurrent themes in diary group discussions are identified as: puberty/periods; erotic attachments; and imagined futures. The paper suggests that the diary group can be seen as a site for identity production and asks the question: what kind of identities are being produced when these girls meet and talk? Finally, the paper seeks to explore the ways in which members of the diary group create a 'private' space within the public domain of the school and, through talk, produce themselves as feminine subjects.

Gadamer's Praise of Theory: Aristotle's Friend and the Reciprocity Between Theory and Practice

Gadamer's rethinking of the interconnection of theory and practice can lead to a resolution of the debate in contemporary Aristotelian scholarship regarding the priority of theory or practice in Aristotle's Ethics. This is especially true in light of Aristotle's treatment of friendship which, as I will try to show, provides support for Gadamer's claim. In Aristotle's notion of friendship, theory and practice come together, and the activity of friendship is for Aristotle the highest expression of human life precisely because true friendship requires the unity of theory and practice. I argue that Aristotle's sense of eωρια, contemplation, his sense of ultimate happiness that is constituted by the life of theory, is conceived by Aristotle in a thoroughly practical and political sense. Specifically I claim that the practice of theory is the politics of friendship.

Genetic ignorance, moral obligations and social duties.

In a contribution to The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Professor Rosamond Rhodes argues that individuals sometimes have an obligation to know about their genetic disorders, because this is required by their status as autonomous persons. Her analysis, which is based on Kant's concept of autonomy and Aristotle's notion of friendship, is extended here to consequentialist concerns. These are of paramount importance if, as we believe and Professor Rhodes herself implies, the Kantian and Aristotelian doctrines can be helpful only in the sphere of private morality, not in the public realm. Better tools for assessing the right to genetic ignorance as an issue of public policy can, we contend, be found in Mill's ideas concerning liberty and the prevention of harm. Our own conclusion, based on the Millian way of thinking, is that individuals probably do have the right to remain in ignorance in the cases Professor Rhodes presents as examples of a duty to know.

Exemplary Sodomites: Chivalry and Love in Late Ming Culture

AbstractThis essay explores the ideological allegiances between the chivalric (xia) and the romantic (qing) in late Ming fiction and culture. Focusing on notions of friendship and love between men and their role in the formation of the late Ming romantic ideal, it also discusses the discourse on sodomy articulated in two treatises on male friendship by the Jesuit missionaries Matteo Ricci and Martino Martini, and the hypothesis of a late Ming homoerotic fashion.

The Samaritan Concept of Befriending

SUMMARY This paper considers the view that the Samaritan concept of befriending constitutes a debasement of our traditional notion of friendship. An analysis of the main features of friendship is attempted and this analysis is then used as a framework for assessing the nature of befriending. In a recent collection of essays Robinson1 has argued powerfully that deterioration in the use of language entails a concomitant deterioration in the quality of social life—'decline of language is the decline of the people who use it'. His views are derived in part from the later work of Wittgen stein2 and can be seen as part of an honourable tradition of linguistic criticism extending back to the Greek philosopher Isocrates. (For Iso crates, speech is the sole characteristic which distinguishes man from other

In Search of Friendship: An Exploratory Analysis in 'Middle-Class' Culture

Although social anthropologists themselves live lives in which friendship is probably just as important as kinship, and a good deal more problematic to handle, in our professional writings we dwell at length upon kinship and have much less to say about friendship. I venture upon this article with a large measure of disbelief at anthropologists' efforts to uncover friendship. The meagre attention it has received seems to be a function of the formal traditions of our discipline, as much as anything else. For example, where we observe behaviour in the field between persons who are known to us to be cousins, we are very likely to analyse this behaviour in our writings as 'cousin behaviour'; but it may be no such thing; rather, it may be behaviour between friends. Significantly, socio-anthropological studies undertaken by someone whose formal training was not within the discipline (e.g. Laurence Wylie's (1957) monograph on the Vaucluse) and autobiographies by the anthropologists' 'primitives' themselves (e.g. Baba of Karo recorded by Mrs Mary Smith (I964)) frequently devote a good deal of attention to friendship, both as an intrinsic value of human life and as one woven into the fabric of kinship, economics and politics. However, I also believe that there are no short cuts in the comparative sociology of friendship. To begin with, we have to think hard about what we mean by the word 'friendship' when we use it; as Pitt-Rivers remarks in another connexion 'let us examine the objective status of the terms in which the quality of interpersonal relations are described' (I96I: I 8i). Secondly, the tradition of structural analysis in our discipline is surely indispensable when trying to compare the nature and function of friendship with those of other interpersonal relations to which it is close in one way or another. These are the two objectives of this article. Their explication leaves space for only a preliminary and partial treatment of crosscultural differences in friendship; instead, the argument proceeds to certain conclusions based on a notion of friendship in our own Western, middle-class culture.