This paper examines the friendship between Chŏng Yakyong and Yi Kigyŏng and its evolution. Their friendship rested on many commonalities: they both passed the doctorate competition together successfully in 1789, they belonged to the same political faction, the Namin, they were both officials at the court of King Chŏngjo in Chosŏn Korea, and both had important roles and contributions in this period of great socio-political, religious, cultural, and intellectual transformations. Being interested in different areas of knowedge from the West that had reached Chosŏn Korea, Chŏng Yakyong, or Tasan, adopted the Christian faith in 1784 before publicly renouncing it in 1797 due to criticism and slander. His friend Yi Kigyŏng, however, did not believe his apostasy and became his enemy. By studying the official and personal documents available, we attempt to reconstruct the vicissitudes of their friendship that resulted in Tasan’s long and painful banishment.

Pontus de Tyard may be well known as a poet of la Pléiade, also as the bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône towards the end of his life, yet throughout all these, he was a philosopher. He played an important part in the Royal Academy in promoting philosophy in the French language, being one of the first to write in French. His metaphysics is a good example of the poverty of philosophy in the Renaissance. His first philosophical works were devoted to the arts: Solitaire premier (1552) and Solitaire second (1555). Metaphysics appears for the first time in the Second Curieux (1578), when De l’Univers ou Discours de la nature du Monde et de ses parties, published 20 years prior, was divided into two parts. Hence one of the first metaphysics in French was born of physics and astronomy. There are three characters in Tyard’s Curieux: Curieux gathering all opinions he can find, Hieromnime expressing an orthodox theology, and Solitaire proposing in first person generally skeptical philosophical conclusions. The metaphysics of the future-bishop sometimes resemble a cabinet of curiosities, but with a theological guardrail. For metaphysical reasons, Tyard overpasses geocentrism and infinite universe to a universe in expansion of modern sciences.

This article seeks to re-read and reassess the significance of the famous novel Kokoro by Natsume Sôseki (1867-1916), one of the main figures of Japanese modern literature. The novel is about two consecutive stories of friendship. A young student establishes friendship with an older man, the Master, who himself experienced a very strong friendship with a young man from the same village in his youth, until a love affair tragically separated them. We consider the ambiguous links, contrasts, and parallels between the different bonds in the novel, issues of generation gaps, relationships with the family, philosophical loneliness, and the belittling of women in the portrayal of friendship in the novel.

This paper seeks to understand He Xinyin’s reassessment of the notion of friendship and its subversive dimension in several of his major essays. This reassessment was part of an increase in discourses on friendship in China in the 16th-17th centuries, which was in some ways prompted by the decay of traditional structures, particularly the family structure, that served as the basis for the social functioning of the empire. He Xinyin was one of the most innovative and radical thinkers whose redefinition allowed friendship to take, for the first time, a foremost place among the five social relations, to be conceived as a subjective relationship where the individual emerges as a primary entity, and to form the ground of two major freedoms, the freedom of expression and the freedom of association.