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About the Journal

Over the past twenty-five years ‘friendship’ has been revived as a site of study empirically, analytically, and morally. This revival has seen scholars return to a tradition both wide and deep which views friendship as the investigation and theorization of horizontal ties of affinity, concern, and action. This renewed interest in friendship is being used to inform and moderate current ideas about the state as power and politics as hierarchy. Moreover, it is developing across a variety of disciplines, from politics to literature, from linguistics to sociology, from religion to psychology, and from philosophy to cultural studies.

Amity

  • Provides a wide-ranging forum for the discussion, exploration, and development of the study of friendship within the arts and social sciences.
  • Takes friendship to bracket, in the broadest sense, the horizontal relationships that provide the foundation for all of society’s affective and moral ties.
  • Seeks to restore friendship to the philosophical landscape of postmodernity, treating it as:
  • An elementally important object of empirical research, and as
  • The subject of serious and sustained normative appraisal.

Amity has four broad aims:

1. To resuscitate and adapt the long and rich tradition of friendship both within and across cultural and historical boundaries, and by so doing to interact with all philosophical schools and cultural-historical perspectives.

2. To attend to friendship, equally as an ethical imperative and a subject of logical analysis, but also as a locus of empirical investigation.

3. To locate civil society as the primary site of friendship, within and across states, cultures, traditions, and histories, welcoming contributions that explore friendship from plural vantage points, and from diverse societies around the globe.

4. To publish articles that cut across departmental boundaries, bringing disciplines together in interesting and novel ways, thus catering to contributions from Philosophy, Linguistics, Literature, Law, Religious Studies, Gender Studies, Politics/Political Science (including the history of ideas and empirical political theory), Sociology (including anthropology and cultural studies), Psychology and cognate fields.

Advisory Editor: Prof. Preston King
Executive Co-editors: Dr. Heather Devere, Dr. Graham Smith