Our relationships with friends shape and define us, and many thinkers have seen friendship as the glue holding societies together. But what makes a friendship good or bad? What should we look for in a friend? And can friendships form our relationships with higher entities, like our society or even God? 

Aristotle spends two of the ten books of his Nicomachean Ethics discussing friendship, a topic he evidently takes to be central to understanding virtue and the good life. Despite Aristotle's enormous influence in the history of philosophy, few of his successors took up this topic with the same zeal. Why is friendship so puzzling and important to Aristotle? What can we learn about human flourishing, sacrifice, and agency from his engagement with the topic? As a way of tackling these questions, we will also consider what Jane Austen might have to say about these topic, keeping in mind Alasdair MacIntyre's claim that “Austen is in a crucial way [...] the last great representative of the classical tradition of the virtues” and the idea we find in her novels, especially Pride & Prejudice, that marriage is a form of friendship aimed at felicity.

This series is co-sponsored by Columbia’s Earl Hall Center for Religious Life.  Sessions will meet in the Dodge Room of Earl Hall.