Becoming Human: Barbie, Storytelling, and Aquinas on Self-Knowledge | Prof. Joshua Hochschild

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Prof. Joshua Hochschild explores the philosophical and theological dimensions of the Barbie movie, analyzing its narrative through the lens of storytelling, existentialism, and the thought of Aquinas, while engaging with diverse critical interpretations.

This lecture was given on September 20th, 2024, at North Carolina State University.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Keywords: Adultery, Aristotle, Catholic Personalism, Culture, Existentialism, Feminism, Gabriel Marcel, Pinocchio, Plato, Storytelling

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Timistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.7	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.3	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:22.4	to mystic institute.org. So the title of this talk is Becoming Human, Barbie, Storytelling, and Aquinas
0:30.5	on Self-Knowledge. And here's the prelude. As the opening credits fade, exterior shot of a movie theater,
0:41.1	with a crowd forming long lines converging at the doors.
0:44.8	The crowd includes many children and families,
0:47.2	as well as adults in singles, pairs, and groups.
0:50.2	All ages, all kinds of dress, but pink is a noticeably dominant color.
0:55.5	Cut to close-up of members of the crowd, emphasizing diversity with camera panning over in turn.
1:02.4	A group of little girls wearing princess dresses.
1:05.5	A teenager rolling her eyes at her mother.
1:08.6	Two elderly couples, grandmothers and grandfathers, a goth girl, mostly in black,
1:14.4	but with pink accessories, 20-somethings on a date, a blue-haired woman in severe glasses, and a
1:21.0	professorly middle-aged man in Tweed with a notebook. Cut to interior movie theater, packed audience chatting excitedly.
1:30.3	The screen is off camera.
1:32.3	As the camera slowly pans the crowd, the theater lights dim,
1:36.1	the crowd goes quiet, faces light up, illuminated by a glow from the front of the theater.
1:42.3	The camera pans to the front of the theater to reveal not a movie screen, but a stage
1:48.0	with a live, blonde woman sitting in a pink overstuffed chair.
1:54.0	She's holding a cigarette and wearing a pink beret.
	...

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