Friendship as philosophy in Plato's 'Lysis'

Plato's Lysis has motivated an entire tradition of thinking about friendship, one that starts with Aristotle and carries through to the present. It addresses the questions of what friendship is, who is a friend, and how friends are related to the other goods one possesses or pursues. This dialogue is worthy of attention, because it articulates problems that any adequate theory of friendship must address and it proposes solutions to them that are paradoxical but defensible.;This dissertation's aim is to explicate Plato's theory of friendship through a detailed philosophic commentary on the Lysis. This dissertation pursues this aim by considering the dialogue as a whole and by focusing not only on its explicitly philosophical arguments but also their dramatic context. Although the Lysis appears to end in confusion, this dissertation argues that a positive view of friendship awaits discovery by the careful reader: namely, that friendship is philosophy. In other words, the fundamental human friendship is with wisdom, which in turn makes possible friendship between individuals who love wisdom.;In the Lysis, Socrates assumes that to discover what a friend is we must first understand the nature of friendly love. This dissertation argues that although he considers a number of alternative accounts, Socrates eventually endorses one view of love in particular: that the one who loves must be needy and incomplete, while what one loves must be good and useful. For Socrates, wisdom is the only thing that is unconditionally good and useful. Since the philosopher alone fully appreciates this insight, the philosopher is the paradigmatic friend, and friendship, properly understood, is philosophy. But the philosopher is not only the subject of friendly love; he or she can also be its object. Recognizing one's need for wisdom is itself a kind of wisdom---what Socrates calls in the Apology, "human wisdom." By possessing it, the philosopher becomes good and useful and, as a consequence, worthy of another's love. In this way, philosophers become friends to one another through their shared love of wisdom.