Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2017
The topic of friendship is enjoying a renewed interest among political theorists and philosophers. The three books reviewed here join several other recent works on friendship and the creation of a journal of friendship studies, Amity. Despite their shared focus on friendship, the three works under review complement rather than duplicate one another. Alexander Nehamas's work is designed for a general readership, with scholarly nuance being largely relegated to the notes. The books by P. E. Digeser and Ann Ward are more typical academic publications. While Ward focuses almost exclusively on Aristotle, Nehamas and Digeser treat him as the touchstone for all later discussions of friendship in the Western tradition.
1 Consider, for example, Schwarzenbach, Sybil, On Civic Friendship (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vernon, Mark, The Meaning of Friendship (New York: St. Martin's, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leib, Ethan J., Friend v. Friend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Mitias, Michael H., Friendship: A Central Moral Value (Rodopi, 2012)Google Scholar; Grayling, A. C., Friendship (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Jusdanis, Gergory, A Tremendous Thing: Friendship from the “Iliad” to the Internet (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.