Argues that friendship is the gift of a world that is not ones own and that transforms ones world in unforeseeable ways.The Promise of Friendship investigates what makes friendship possible and good for human beings. In dialogue with authors ranging from Aristotle and Montaigne to Proust Levinas and Derrida Sarah Horton argues that friendship is suited to our finitudethat is to the limits within which human beings liveand proposes a novel understanding of friendship as translation friends translate the world for each other so that each one experiences the world not as the other does but in light of the friends alwaysunknowable experience. The very distance between friends that makes it impossible for them to know each other wholly also makes it possible for them to be transformed by friendship.