2025.07.10 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Sophie Grace Chappell, A Philosopher Looks at Friendship, Cambridge University Press, 2024, 208pp., $12.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781009255547.
Reviewed by Michaela Manson, Simon Fraser University
In eighteen compact chapters, Sophie Grace Chappell’s A Philosopher Looks at Friendship provides a wonderfully readable introduction to many questions and debates under the umbrella that is the philosophy of friendship. These include typical questions about the nature and ethics of friendship, e.g., “What is it?” and “What does it demand of me?”, as well as questions about the appropriate philosophical methods for investigating friendship, “Can philosophy really say anything true or useful about friendship, and if so, how?” To this last question, Chappell offers a somewhat ambivalent answer. The very project of writing a book on friendship in a series titled “A Philosopher Looks At. . .” reveals Chappell’s optimism that philosophy can say something true and perhaps useful about friendship. At the same time,…
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