Classical and Christian Perspectives on Love and Friendship | Prof. Joshua Hochschild

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

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2023

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

This talk was given on October 28, 2022, at the Thomistic Institute Chapter in New York City. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Philosophy, Politics and Economics 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.

Transcript

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0:31.6	And finally, please subscribe to this podcast, and don't forget to like and share these recordings with your friends
0:38.4	because it matters what you think. This lecture is called the Fellowship of Happiness, classical and Christian perspectives on love and friendship.
0:58.0	Classical moral theory attends to virtues and happiness, and it is often said that this is what distinguishes it from various modern approaches.
1:08.0	But in addition to theorizing habits of choice and the purpose of life,
1:13.6	a classical approach is also distinctive for its attention to friendship. Every major classical
1:20.6	philosopher wrote on friendship, acknowledging it as an indispensable component of the good life.
1:32.7	It would be hard to conceive of a genuine interest in wisdom about human life that does not attend to what it means to love and what it means to be and to have a friend.
1:40.2	This is true even of scripture.
1:42.6	Consider that the gospel of John, which is the philosopher's favorite for its explicit attention to Logos and Truth, is also the gospel most emphatic about love and friendship.
1:56.0	John's Jesus calls us friend, and John's God is love.
2:04.2	We could all name circumstances in contemporary culture which make friendship practically challenging,
2:10.7	but features of modern thought also make friendship difficult to understand,
2:16.2	theories of human nature and relationship that
2:18.8	so confusion or hide truths from us. If an impoverished understanding of friendship can make
2:25.2	it more difficult for us to experience friendship, then by proposing to explain some classical
2:31.3	insight about friendship, I am not engaging in a merely theoretical
2:35.4	exercise. I am offering or trying to, in a small way, an act of friendship. By sharing
2:42.4	and understanding of friendship, I hope to strengthen your capacity to experience it.
2:49.2	The path toward understanding begins with questions. Some questions I think are
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