Friendship as a Means to Freedom
\nBy Allauren Forbes (University of Pennsylvania, Philosophy)<\/p>\n
Date: Tuesday 4th February, 2020
\nTime: 1640-1800
\nPlace: H-232<\/p>\n
Abstract: Friendship has been a subject of interest to Western philosophy since at least Plato and Aristotle, and the women thinking and writing about friendship in the Early Modern period did so within a context indebted to these traditions. This context was, however, deeply anti-women: real friendship was often claimed to be beyond the grasp of women, for women were inferior to men. However, some women philosophers \u2013 including Marie le Jars de Gournay, Mary Astell, and Gabrielle Suchon \u2013 wrote about friendship in ways that both emerge from the history of Western philosophy and yet which resist this inegalitarian framework. For these three philosophers, real friendship represents a means to obtain meaningful freedom. This is, at its core, a feminist project. Gournay, Astell, and Suchon all take a tradition that manifested the claims of their inherent inferiority and use it to suggest that women are not only (at least) potentially equal to men, but also that friendship itself can bring about the very good \u2013 freedom \u2013 that a patriarchal system would deny to them. Notably, though, each of these three philosophers conceives of the kind of freedom facilitated by friendship in a slightly different way. For Gournay, friendship supports a kind of epistemic freedom; Astell\u2019s account of friendship promotes a moral sense of freedom; and Suchon shows that friendship is a necessary feature of a more straightforwardly political sense of freedom.<\/p>\n
Web: http:\/\/www.phil.bilkent.edu.tr\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Friendship as a Means to Freedom By Allauren Forbes (University of Pennsylvania, Philosophy) Date: Tuesday 4th February, 2020 Time: 1640-1800 Place: H-232 Abstract: Friendship has been a subject of interest to Western philosophy since at least Plato and Aristotle, and the women thinking and writing about friendship in the Early [\u2026] <\/p>\n