- published: 07 May 2016
- views: 15829
Friendship is a relationship between two people who hold mutual affection for each other. Friendships and acquaintanceship are thought of as spanning across the same continuum. The study of friendship is included in the fields of sociology, social psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and zoology. Various academic theories of friendship have been proposed, including social exchange theory, equity theory, relational dialectics, and attachment styles.
The value of friendship is often the result of friends consistently demonstrating the following:
Friendship was a topic of moral philosophy which was greatly discussed by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. This was less discussed in the modern era, until the re-emergence of contextualist and feminist approaches to ethics. Openness in friendship was seen as an enlargement of the self; Aristotle wrote, "The excellent person is related to his friend in the same way as he is related to himself, since a friend is another self; and therefore, just as his own being is choiceworthy him, the friend's being is choice-worthy for him in the same or a similar way." In Ancient Greek, the same word was used for "friend" and "lover".