★ Best-selling authors Mariano Sigman and Jacobo Bergareche join forces to analyze the formation, maintenance, and end of friendship from a scientific and philosophical perspective, offering profound insights and thoughts that help readers better understand the significance of friendship in life.
★ This book brings together voices from diverse backgrounds and delves into the essence of friendship through dialogue, showcasing its diversity and complexity, allowing readers to understand this important relationship from multiple angles.
★ The book not only features academic discussions but also real personal stories, ranging from bank presidents to graffiti artists. The rich cases make the exploration of friendship more vivid and inspire readers to reflect on and resonate with their own interpersonal relationships.

“Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods.”

― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics ―


There is a verse from the Iliad that became proverbial in Aristotle's Greece to speak about friendship. The beautiful idea it contains is that friends share the road, march together, are in sync, and seek a destination together.

To reflect on friendship, Mariano Sigman and Jacobo Bergareche, friends among themselves, brought together a heterogeneous group of people who put forward their opinions on that so obvious and so elusive thing that is friendship. In these conversations, now published in a coedition with Libros del Asteroide, a series of concepts and personal stories have emerged to bring us light on the central question.

Yet while friendship has been one of life's fundamental aspirations since immemorial time, we don't often reflect on its nature. How do we make friends? Why do we instantly like some people? Can friendship survive over distance? Is it learned? Is it cultural? Does it have to be reciprocal? Can it happen between parents and children? When and why does it end? What happens when it mixes with desire?

Here, the authors turned to science and philosophy to explore these questions. But they soon felt that this literature did not reflect the wide diversity of views on this type of relationship, and so they invited people from all kinds to talk with them. Here we will find the octogenarian president of a bank, a young Salvadoran emigrant without papers, the director of an old people's home, an actress, a winegrower, a writer and a group of graffiti artists among others. Together they make up an interesting scenario of what we call ‘friendship’.

Mariano Sigman was born in Argentina and grew up in Barcelona, Spain. He obtained a master degree in physics at the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in neuroscience in New York. He moved to Paris to investigate decision making, cognitive architecture and consciousness. In 2006 he founded the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory, at the University of Buenos Aires, an interdisciplinary group integrated by physicists, psychologists, biologists, engineers, educational scientists, linguists, mathematicians, artists and computer scientists.
Throughout his career, he developed numerous research interactions with representatives of different domains of human culture including, musicians, professional chess players, mathematicians, magicians, visual artists and chefs. Several of these interactions resulted in exhibits presented in museums and galleries in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, US, Japan, New York, Austria.
As an author, he has sold more than 70,000 copies and has been translated into 10 languages.

Jacobo Bergarache was born in London in 1976. He combines writing with audio-visual production and screenwriting, and collaborates with various media. His works include "The Beach" (2004, poetry), "Coma" (2015, drama), the "Exploring the Human Body Town" series (2017, children's literature), "The Return Station" (2019, autobiography), "The Perfect Day" (2021, novel, translated into 10 languages), and "Farewell" (2023, novel).