Welcome to the Timistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at

to mystic institute.org.

Thank you very much, John and James, for organizing this.

Thank you all for coming.

I look forward to our discussion after we complete a talk.

So my talk today is titled,

Fulrishing Through Friendship, Vices that Undermine and Virtues that Aid in Friendship.

I propose that there's a connection between a person's notion of human flourishing and his or her notion of friendship.

Inadequate views of human flourishing can lead to inadequate views of friendship.

The lesson is that if we don't get flourishing right, we may not get friendship right either.

But we should care about getting both right.

I'll discuss some examples of mistaken accounts of flourishing and friendship, and then turn to what I take to be the best accounts of flourishing and friendship.

Then I'll discuss how good friendships aid flourishing, and finally, I'll give extended practical advice on virtues to pursue and devices to avoid if you desire good friendships.

It's evident that we all want a good life.

For our purposes, let us think of the good life as the fulfilling or the flourishing life.

It's the best human life.

We all seek to live our best life. But it isn't obvious what such a life

consists in, so we must think carefully about what it is and how to get it. To get us thinking,

let's go back to ancient Greece and the philosophy of Aristotle. Aristotle was a fourth century philosopher who lived during the golden age of Greece.

...