Friendship

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2024

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Even with endless social scripts around romance, we hardly know what it means to be a good friend. In episode 114 of Overthink, Ellie and David reflect on the highs and lows of friendship, from their own bond to Montaigne’s intimate connection to Étienne de La Boétie. From Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics to today’s loneliness epidemic, they question what friends do, how they hold each other accountable, and the deep ways in which our vices and virtues are shaped by our friends. Plus, in the bonus, they talk Ralph Waldo Emerson, intimacy, dyadic relationships, high school friends, and… pluralectics?

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
Francis Bacon, “Of Friendship”
Lydia Denworth, Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond
Elijah Milgram, “Aristotle on Making Other Selves”
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Friendship”
Lawrence Thomas, “The Character of Friendship”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Overthink.
0:16.8	The podcast where two friends, who are also philosophy professors,
0:22.1	leverage our long-term friendship into a hopefully engaging podcast for anyone and everyone.
0:26.7	I am David Peña Guzman. And I'm Ellie Anderson. David, back in spring 2021, we did a podcast
0:34.6	episode on friendship, but very few people listened to it.
0:40.5	This is back when we were a baby podcast, less than a year old.
0:44.2	But moreover, it was about friendship during COVID.
0:47.8	It was part of a series we did on relationships during COVID.
0:51.1	And so that's dated the episode quite a bit.
0:53.4	I feel like nobody wants to relive
0:55.1	that time. And if you are sitting there being like, okay, pandemic's not over, like this podcast
1:00.5	might still be relevant. Let me just say the numbers are telling a very different story because
1:04.7	nobody is downloading that episode. Yeah, count me among those who don't want to relive that episode as well.
1:13.6	But I mean, since then, a number of people have asked us for an episode on friendship.
1:18.1	And so obviously there's a lot to say about this concept.
1:22.4	And I feel like the time has come for us to do an episode on the topic that is just about the topic without qualifiers.
1:29.2	But hey, if you want to relive what it was like to be friends during quarantine, go and
1:35.6	check out that episode. It has some great content. For today, though, we were sort of like
1:40.8	working through some of the troubles we were having with friends during quarantine as well, like on that episode.
1:46.3	I really love that episode.
1:48.0	And we talked to our first ever overthink assistant about it on that episode and like about how friendship was changing for students during college.
1:55.3	So shout out to Anna Koppelman.
	...

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