Friendship and Hannah Arendt

This thesis offers a new interpretation of the notion of friendship in Hannah Arendt’s work. I bring her writing on topics related to friendship in the history of philosophy together with descriptions she gave of the fragility of the friendships in her life to construct a picture of “Arendtian friendship.” I argue that Arendt presents a series of ways of thinking through the practice of friendship and that in all of them friendship emerges as a condition of possibility of the two human activities Arendt thought were most important: thinking and acting.