Plutarch addresses the challenge of the flatterer, who often remains hidden and thus harder to disentangle from the experience of friendship. The flatterer insinuates himself using pleasantness and willingness to be obliging, adapting themselves to the likes and dislikes of the one he targets. To identify the flatterer one looks for inconsistencies in the words, deeds, and expressed principles and commitments. Flatterers will tend to shift their behaviour and way of life depending on their context. One can test an acquaintance by pretending to change your mind about various matters and to judge a flatterer by their willingness to shift their minds according to your lead. In addition, a friend will not mimic you nor praise you enthusiastically in everything, but only when the occasion merits it. Flatterers and friends also differ in their manner of exercising frank speech. We can protect ourselves from a flatterer by recognising those individuals who only appeal to our irrational side and who noticeably takes advantage of our emotional whims and who nurtures ill will and distrust.

Chapter 5 investigates the networks of relationship that sustain individuals and communities in the poems. It addresses family, marriage, sexual desire and agency, male bonds and loyalty, and the expectations placed on women and men. It also considers childhood and old age, hospitality, and wider social connections, arguing that epic memory preserves not only heroic deeds but everyday forms of attachment and obligation.

Taking up the framework established by recent scholarship that Beethoven was not only a solitary hero but also an empathetic and communicative composer, this paper argues that Beethoven’s composing was, among other things, significantly embedded in the multifaceted culture of friendship of the late Enlightenment.

In his Elegischer Gesang, Op. 118 of 1814, dedicated to his friend Johann Freyherr von Pasqualati, Beethoven used an elevated text rich in associations and tailored the piece specifically to the dedicatee in setting a public memorial to his deceased wife. This piece, like the piano sonata op. 90 of the same year for his friend Moritz Lichnowsky, expresses not only private friendship (as we understand it today) but rather a broader idea of friendship encompassing both “friendship of virtue” and “friendship of utility” as described by Aristotle, which was prevalent in the eighteenth century.

When the Elegischer Gesang was finally published in August 1827, it took on a new meaning: It was taken (because of to its high opus number and its posthumous publication) as Beethoven’s swan song in the expectation of his own death.

This chapter continues the case for optimistic skepticism by examining whether meaningful forms of love and friendship require belief in free will. The chapter explores various kinds of love – romantic love, parental love, agape love, and the Buddhist virtue of loving-kindness – and argues that none of them depend on the kind of free will required for basic desert moral responsibility. In fact, adopting a skeptical perspective may enhance our ability to cultivate deeper and more compassionate forms of love. Drawing on psychological and philosophical sources, the author shows that many of the factors that lead us to love others – such as personality, shared values, and vulnerability – are not within our control, yet they remain central to authentic and fulfilling relationships. The chapter also explores the Buddhist notion of metta (loving-kindness), emphasizing its emphasis on universal goodwill without attachment or conditions. In the final section, the author turns to Aristotle’s account of friendship to argue that genuine friendship is essential to human flourishing (eudaimonia) and that free will skepticism preserves what matters most in these relationships: mutual support, character development, and shared purpose. Overall, the chapter defends a rich and affirming account of love and friendship that thrives without belief in free will.

Chapter 4 further considers how the city informs young women’s means for realising their much hoped-for futures by focusing on how they navigate the social infrastructure that underpins its daily life. Paying particular attention to young women’s friendships with other young women, the chapter details this group’s fears of ‘fake friends’ and the anxieties they have towards those close to them having the potential to cause them (and their futures) harm. As the ethnography shows, mobile phone communication has afforded young women new styles of communication that allow them to overcome the fears of social intimacy, helping them to stay connected with others while maintaining social distance. Enabling young women to remain visible in urban life from the confines of their homes, and to engage in conversation without revealing personal information, mobile phones provide young women with an alternative social life, re-ordering their experiences of the city while enabling them to remain embedded within the social relationships that sustain it.

Chapter 3 focuses on a small number of letters from Keats to his poet-friend John Hamilton Reynolds written in the first few months of their friendship, in late 1817 and early 1818. As aspiring young poets, Reynolds and Keats developed a close, competitive-collaborative friendship in which the exchange of letters played an important part. The chapter examines the ways in which some of the main tenets of Keats’s conceptual or theoretical sense of both letter-writing and literary criticism arose out of the interchange of letters with a poet with whom he actively collaborated. Through a reading of Keats’s commentary on the power of Shakespeare’s poems and plays, the chapter argues that letter-writing is intrinsically collaborative, and that in his letters to Reynolds, Keats also emphasizes the collaborative or corresponding quality of both literature and literary criticism.

Chapter 5 proposes that friendship is one of the founding principles of, and one of the main reasons for writing, familial letters. It focuses on the exchange of letters between Keats and his friend the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, suggesting that the exchange itself sustained but also threatened the friendship because of its engagement with a paradoxical logic of reciprocity that governs both friendship and letter-writing. The chapter pays particular attention to the inherent contingency of epistolary friendship – friendship that is supplemented or sustained by epistolary contact – in the case of Keats’s mutually flattering but sometimes difficult relationship with a man who shared the poet’s sense of artistic ambition while lacking his talent and genius. As a form of gift exchange, the interchange of letters between two friends may be said to be governed by the economics of an implicit but difficult and ultimately paradoxical reciprocity.

While Ginsberg was certainly influenced by earlier generations of writers stretching back to the Metaphysical Poets, contemporary writers were also instrumental in helping him craft his own poetic vision. Foremost among them was his friend Jack Kerouac, who became a source of inspiration, guidance, and mentorship for Ginsberg throughout his life. This chapter explores the twenty-five years of profound yet tumultuous relationship that developed between the two writers, from their encounter in New York City in 1944 to Kerouac’s death in 1969. While their passionate and sometimes turbulent friendship sparked Ginsberg’s creative energy, Ginsberg drew heavily on Kerouac’s themes and stylistics – including his writing method of “spontaneous prose” – which became central to his own poetical voice. Though their relationship eventually fractured in the 1960s owing to political differences and rivalry, Kerouac continued to play a crucial role in shaping Ginsberg’s growth both as a writer and as an individual.

In this chapter I argue that God’s love and goodness make it impossible for him either to intend the evil of human death or to delegate the authority to take a human life. This concludes my argument for the absolute norm against intending death.

The ‘framing’ goods of life, sociality and rationality constitute necessary formal conditions of all the other, namely non-formal, goods. They are also intrinsically good; indeed, without any one of them, one ceases to be a human altogether. Life has absolute priority as a framing good, and is distinct from health (since one can be living and ill). After canvassing Aquinas’s and Finnis’s justification of life as a basic good, I offer my own bipartite justification in terms of life as both a ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ human function. As to sociality, humans are essentially animals who live-in-relation, in the rich sense of developing various intentional relations to the world. If they fail to develop these, they become disabled (disability being a dysfunction and hence natural bad). I then detail various forms of sociality (which Aristotle calls philia, often translated ‘friendship’), along with the perfections or goods they embody. Last, I broach the framing good of rationality. This should be understood not as a virtue (either practical or theoretical), but rather as the ‘immanent character of human being and its form or mode of living-in-relation’. I explore its content in detail in Chapter 7.

In Sources of the Self, Taylor suggests that the ancient Greeks, despite possessing various linguistic devices for reflexive self-reference, did not have a way of making “self” into a noun. This nominalization of the self is, in his view, characteristic of the modern sense of selfhood. In fact, Aristotle does nominalize autos, the intensifier that functions in Greek much as “self” does in English, in three passages in Nichomachean Ethics IX where he describes a friend as another self. Taylor cites one of these passages in a footnote, commenting that “this doesn’t have quite the same force as our present description of human agents as ‘selves’”, but does not elaborate. This chapter considers what force it does have, exploring three senses of self in Aristotle. Two of them are familiar – the social self expounded in the first nine books of the Nicomachean Ethics and the more contemplative self emerging predominantly in EN X and in De Anima III. Much less familiar is the bodily self that can be discerned at various points in the De Anima and Metaphysics, and that is rather prominent in the Generation of Animals. This conception of the self has its source in the intimate connection between a psuchê and the particular body of which it is the form.

Friendship has its public life in urban spaces. Drawing on recent social constructionist approaches to the domestication of space in urban studies, and based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the outdoor spaces of a mall in Beijing, China, this chapter explores how ordinary visitors domesticate the mall in their everyday lives. Focusing on the practice of friendship in three small groups, I trace how the mall’s spaces are (1) appropriated as “playgrounds” by after-school children, (2) negotiated as “informal childcare workshops” by guardians, and (3) claimed as “senior centers” by elderly visitors. I argue that the mall is not merely a backdrop for friendship, but that friendship practices constitute the mall beyond its default setting as merely a space for consumption. This chapter contributes to scholarship on modern friendship beyond the private realm and advocates for a more embracing conceptualization of friendship in urban spaces.

This chapter revisits “critical friendships,” exploring how moments of sociopolitical and health crises shape and challenge relational bonds. Drawing on UK-based studies of personal responses to Brexit and dating app use during COVID-19, we demonstrate that theoretical assumptions about friendship’s egalitarian and inherently “good” nature often fail to capture the complexities of lived experience. The Brexit study revealed how political differences strained friendships, yet participants often prioritized shared history over political alignment. The COVID-19 study found that while apps facilitated “suffused” relationships during lockdown, these relationships were ultimately disappointingly short-lived. Using Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” we demonstrate how the illusion of the ideal “pure” friendship creates an inevitable disappointment when such relationships prove unachievable. Yet despite these disappointments, the “goods” of friendship can still outweigh the “bads” of “the times” in the potential for new suffused relational forms, however fleeting, as well as in the effort expended to sustain friendships.

This chapter traces the personal and literary relationship between Elizabeth Bowen and the American writer Eudora Welty from their first meeting in 1950 until Bowen’s death in 1973. Letters reveal that the two writers, feeling a connection between their respective ‘souths’, Cork and Mississippi, found common ground in fiction and friendship. They travelled together and frequently commented on each other’s work in progress. Using archival records and extant correspondence, this chapter focuses on their travels together in 1951, when Bowen was lecturing in the American South. Bowen’s reception by women’s clubs and other female literary networks illustrates her literary status at mid-century while revealing the informal networking and paraliterary labour required for independent women to make a living by writing.

Friendship in the workplace is alternately approached as a resource to be leveraged or a liability to be managed. In leadership development, where practitioners carefully cultivate their subjectivities, appearing adequately self-aware and open-minded is valued highly. How do leadership development practitioners’ use of complaints in their workplace, in ways both formal and informal, serve as an affordance for friendship? Considering this example raises questions about what it means to make friendship useful at work and in other contexts, and it suggests that separating the “goods” of friendship from the “bads” is a misleading and problematic endeavor.