Friendship for Virtue

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.

• Preface1: Setting the Scene: Friendship from Aristotle to Contemporary Psychology2: Fragile Friendships: Instabilities and Terminations3: Friendship with a Filter: The Role of Phronesis4: Grounding Friendships: Reconciling the Moralised and Aestheticised Views5: How Friendship Cultivates Virtue: Retrieving Friendship as a Moral Educational Concept6: Friendships for Utility: Their Moral Value and an Online Example7: Online Character Friendships: The Example of Epalships8: Concluding Remarks: Some Retrospective Reflections on Friendships

According to Kristján Kristjánsson, Friendship for Virtue aims to retrieve for contemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics the major importance that the virtue of friendship plays in Aristotle's own texts, and to do so in a way that highlights friendship as, in essence, characterologically educational. This book succeeds at this aim and does so with clarity. Moreover, Kristjánsson does sufcient justice to the relevant history and in a way that should prove fascinating to historians of philosophy.