Friendship for Virtue - Hardcover

by Kristján Kristjánsson (Author)

Through its revised and applied Aristotelianism, this book illuminates our understanding of friendship in moral philosophy, moral psychology, and moral education. Friendship for Virtue has four main aims. The first is to give the virtue of friendship the pride of place it deserves in contemporary Aristotle-inspired virtue ethics. The second is to integrate Aristotelian theory with recent social scientific research on friendship through mutual adjustments. The third is to retrieve Aristotelian friendship as a moral educational concept, where 'friendship for virtue' is to be understood as 'friendship for virtue development'. The fourth is to offer a more detailed and realistic account than Aristotle did of why even the best of friendships can go stale and dissolve and why the human relationships they represent are so precarious - for example in circumstances where erotic love and friendship clash.

Author Biography

Kristján Kristjánsson, Professor of Character Education and Virtue Ethics, University of Birmingham

Professor Kristján Kristjánsson is Deputy Director in the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues and Professor of Character Education and Virtue Ethics, University of Birmingham. His interests lie in research on character and virtues at the intersection between moral philosophy, moral psychology, and moral education. He has published nine books on those issues, the latest one is Flourishing as the Aim of Education (2020). His previous books include Aristotelian Character Education (2015), which won the SES Prize for the best Education book of 2015, and Virtuous Emotions (2018). Kristjánsson is Editor of the Journal of Moral Education.