A Good Life: Friendship, Art and Truth

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Published: Mar 16, 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/conatus.15992
Keywords:
Alexander Nehamas good life friendship morality art truth
Alexander Nehamas
Princeton University
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6051-2903
Despina Vertzagia
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7894-8657
Triseugeni Georgakopoulou
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Jenny Pavlidou
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Katerina Plevridi
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Fotis Stamos
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Abstract
In September 2017 Alexander Nehamas kindly accepted our invitation to have a meeting in Athens in order to discuss several issues of philosophical interest; with his latest publication On Friendship (New York: Basic Books, 2016) as a starting point we soon moved over to a multitude of topics Nehamas has so far dealt with. The whole conversation spirals around the probably most challenging and demanding issue as far as practical philosophy is concerned – yet one every moral agent needs to provide an adequate answer to during his lifetime: Values. Do they exclusively belong to the domain of morality? Nehamas claims that “although moral values […] are important […], they are not the only values that determine whether a life is or is not worthwhile”. This view inevitably shifts the focus from individual values - even fundamental ones such as friendship, art and truth- to the real issue: What is a good life, after all?
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Author Biography
Alexander Nehamas, Princeton University
Alexander Nehamas is Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Philosophy, Princeton University.
References
Nehamas, Alexander. On Friendship. New York: Basic Books, 2016.
Nehamas, Alexander. Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Nehamas, Alexander. The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
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