Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Georg-August-University
Venue: Historic Observatory/Historische Sternwarte,
Geismar Landstraße 11, 37083 Göttingen
27-28 February 2020
Friendship is a basic feature of ethics
and social life, and our workshop will investigate friendship in a
historical perspective. We will concentrate on the early
modern period (1500-1700) and are especially interested how early moderns
reappraised, re-elaborated, and criticized traditional ideas of
friendship.
Greek philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus and the Stoics put
friendship to the core of human social and political affairs, seeing
the philos as a companion and an equal and defining the
reciprocal obligations of friends in terms of padeia, or the Greek
educational pattern. For Roman thinkers such as Cicero and
Seneca, too, friendship is a special human relationship, despite changes
in the social and political landscape: shifting the focus to wealth and
political influence, the amicus became a cliens. Both of
these conceptions shaped, in turn, the Christian view on friendship
and European culture with its religious imprint and
hierarchical structures.
How was friendship considered, practiced, modeled, and represented in early modern culture, then? Which kind of dynamics did the idea of friendship develop? How did notions of friendship take up these traditional elements, and how did they react to changes and innovations?
Please click here to download the workshops programme.
