The Book
About the Book | Endorsements | Book Contents
 About the Book
 Sample chapter
What is friendship? What is its nature, its rules, its perils, its promise? Can colleagues be friends, can online strangers, can lovers?
These are the questions that journalist Mark Vernon takes to thinkers from Plato to Nietzsche, via Augustine and Aquinas, in a search through philosophy for the things that thwart friendship and for the conditions within which it might best thrive. He unpacks these thinkers' penetrating and often unexpected insights with numerous illustrations from history and popular culture to ask about friendship in sex and work, society and ethics, politics and spirituality.
Aristotle asked who would choose to live without friends, though they had every other good thing? The Philosophy of Friendship is the first book length examination of friendship written for the popular philosophy market. With wit, clarity and passion, it will engage anyone interested in friendship, general readers and professionals alike.
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Endorsements
'Friendship is a subject which has been much neglected by recent philosophy. Mark Vernon 's engaging and accessible yet thorough book rediscovers the rich contributions philosophers of the past have made to the subject and shows how these discussions are more relevant today than ever. It is also of much more than theoretical interest, as it illuminates in surprising ways a facet of life important to everyone. Everyone will learn something of value by reading this book, whether their primary interest lies with friendship or philosophy. The Philosophy of Friendship revivifies and sets the agenda for its eponymous subject.'
Julian Baggini, editor The Philosopher's Magazine
'Mark Vernon is the best kind of friend of friendship, who is well aware of how its variations and transmutations elude any individual or ideological appropriation. His treatment is wide-ranging and open-ended, exemplary both in lucidity of exposition and in range of sympathy. He is at once celebratory and common-sensical, appreciative of friendship's aspirings and perceptive of its fallings short, respectful of its indebtedness to ethical tradition, and hopeful of its fecundity in social innovation. Readers will place themselves variably within the spectrum of possibilities that he displays, but with an enhanced sense of the alternatives that one's own choices leave open to others.'
Anthony Price, Birkbeck College, London
'Friendship may seem to be both too familiar yet too elusive and ambiguous a topic to consider on its own out of the context of novels or biographies. However, Mark Vernon convincingly refutes this notion and reconsiders the contributions of philosophers from Aristotle and Plato to Nietsche and Emerson. The result is a wise and accessible discussion of the perils and promise of friendship, providing a beacon of hope to encourage us through the many confusions in our personal lives and suggesting its wider political and spiritual implications. This is definitely philosophy for next Monday morning and it deserves to reach a wide general readership.'
Ray Pahl, author On Friendship
'[The book] offers a history of the idea of friendship through the works of various thinkers from Plato to Nietzsche. It's genuinely useful, lucid, informative and wise. It also shows how same-sex love is at the heart of the history of friendship and how "gay marriage" could be a rather airless historical cul-de-sac.'
Mark Simpson, Independent on Sunday, Books of the Year
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Contents of The Philosophy of Friendship:
Introduction: The Ambiguity of Friendship
1. Friends at Work
On being useful
On not being used
On winning friends, not merely influencing people
The ultimate test: friendship with the boss
The social dimension: commercial culture and the challenge to friendship
Realpolitik
Utility spreads
2. Friends and Lovers
Sex and friendship
Similarities and difference
Immortal longings: a theory of love and friendship
Platonic friendship
Practicalities
Better than sex?
Getting with friends
3. Faking It
Truth hurts
Another self
Other ways of honesty?
Solitude
Ending friendship
4. Unconditional Love
From loss of faith to rejection
Christian secularism
In ethical no-man's land
Reaffirming friendship
Against atomism and absolutes
Trust in friendship
5. Civic Friendship
Tyrant slayers
Garden friendship
The end of an age
Public kisses
Sworn brothers
The piety of friendship
6. Politics of Friendship
Suffragette city
Political weight
Right relationship
What are gay men for?
Lads, blokes and metrosexuals
Queer lives
Sociological evidence
Friendship in other relationships
The return of trust?
7. The Spirituality of Friendship
Timing and exceptionality
Telling it slant
Mere friendship
'To do without it'
Conclusion: Philosophy and Friendship
Further Reading and References
Appendix: Plato and Aristotle on Friendship
Index
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