How Is My iPhone Changing Me? Neuroscience and Thomistic Psychology | Prof. Joshua Hochschild

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2022

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given at West Virginia University on November 5, 2021. For information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Joshua Hochschild is the Monsignor Robert R. Kline 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’s been elected to serve as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:02.8	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.1	My title is, how is my iPhone changing me?
0:18.0	Neuroscience and to mystic psychology.
0:26.2	Technology. changing me. Neuroscience and to mystic psychology. Technology changes us.
0:33.3	Electric light bulbs and gas lamps before that, automobiles and gasoline-powered farm equipment, gunpowder, and steam locomotion, clocks, and the printing press, bronze,
0:40.3	and iron.
0:42.3	These technologies took hold because they helped us to achieve what we wanted and created
0:47.3	opportunities for new things we didn't know we wanted.
0:52.3	And in and through that, they also changed our patterns of behavior,
0:56.3	our relationships, family dynamics, and economic institutions, the nature of political authority
1:02.4	and social status, and our very sense of self. These technologies changed what we wanted,
1:09.8	and they changed the we that wanted.
1:13.6	This isn't a new or controversial observation.
1:17.8	Plato, in the phaedrus, has Socrates remark that the very invention of writing had psychic and social costs.
1:26.8	We are used to promoting writing as an essential skill of a well-developed soul,
1:31.3	and Plato used it to great effect.
1:34.3	But Socrates argues that as a tool for reminding,
1:38.3	writing weakened the faculty of remembering,
1:41.3	implanting forgetfulness in our souls. He warned that after the advent of writing,
1:47.5	people will seem to know much, while for the most part, they know nothing. Filled, not with wisdom,
1:53.6	but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows. Digital devices are changing us,
	...

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