Friendship and Philosophy

Full Tuition: $300 — Scholarship Options in Drop-Down Menu

Instructor: Andrews | 5-weeks | Tuesdays March 21-April 18 | 6:30-8:30 PM ET | ONLINE

As people grow older, they often find it becomes more and more difficult to make friends. In the past two decades, in fact, as recently as 2021, 12% of adults in the US report having no close friends. Why is that? Who benefits and who suffers from this decline in friendships?

Most forms of relation are stabilized by law, attended by scientific advancement and economic practices. After all, we need to know exactly who inherits what, who owes who labor, who has care or financial obligations to whom, or even who owns who—for business (by which we mean the social order) to go on as usual. One striking exception is friendship. Friendship is an amorphous category that has proven—perhaps for that very reason—to be a crucial site of philosophical inquiry. What exactly is friendship? Is it a revolutionary social relation as imagined by Michel Foucault or Audre Lorde? Or even the material grounds and condition of possibility for society to exist at all—as Derrida or Harney & Moten—might pose? Historically, how has friendship been a site for social experimentation? And how has its exclusion from the legal order made relations like care difficult or even impossible? Why do so many turn to metaphors of family—rather than friendship—to describe close non-blood relations, from “chosen family” to “sisterhood” to “kin”? And is friendship something that happens only among people? Or can we be friends with, say, animals, the planet, or even philosophy itself? 

In this course, we’ll read widely across philosophers from Ancient Greece to the present to investigate the philosophical and theoretical history of friendship—trying to imagine its possibilities and perils along the way. Authors investigated may include: Aristotle, Sappho, Cicero, Foucault, Deleuze, Cixous, Lorde, Marcus, Derrida, Lugones, Haraway, Morrison, and Wong.

Classes are recorded to allow for students to participate asynchronously. If you want to take a class but cannot make the class time, sign up for the asynchronous audit option to follow along on your own. Recordings are password protected and will only be available for the duration of the class and two weeks after it ends.

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All tuition goes to paying instructors and staff a living wage. We encourage you to pick the payment tier that corresponds with your needs, but ask that you please consider our commitment to fair labor practices when doing so. We are currently able to offer three full scholarships per class, and one full scholarship per person per term. If the scholarship tier you need is sold out or you would like to pay tuition on an installment basis, please email us directly, and we will work with you.

If at any point up to 48 hours before your first class session you realize you will be unable to take the class, please email us and we will reallocate your funds to a future class, to another student’s scholarship, or refund it. After classes begin, we are only able to make partial refunds and adjustments.