Through its revised and applied Aristotelianism, this book illuminates our understanding of friendship in moral philosophy, moral psychology, and moral education. Friendship for Virtue has four main aims. The first is to give the virtue of friendship the pride of place it deserves in contemporary Aristotle-inspired virtue ethics. The second is to integrate Aristotelian theory with recent social scientific research on friendship through mutual adjustments. The third is to retrieve Aristotelian friendship as a moral educational concept, where 'friendship for virtue' is to be understood as 'friendship for virtue development'. The fourth is to offer a more detailed and realistic account than Aristotle did of why even the best of friendships can go stale and dissolve and why the human relationships they represent are so precarious - for example in circumstances where erotic love and friendship clash.

"According to Kristján Kristjánsson, Friendship for Virtue aims to retrieve for contemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics the major importance that the virtue of friendship plays in Aristotle's own texts, and to do so in a way that highlights friendship as, in essence, characterologically educational. This book succeeds at this aim and does so with clarity. Moreover, Kristjánsson does sufcient justice to the relevant history and in a way that should prove fascinating to historians of philosophy." - Bradford Jean-Hyuk Kim, Metascience