Loneliness and Friendship: Aquinas' Cure for What Ails the Soul | Prof. Thomas Hibbs

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2022

⏱️ 61 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on September 28, 2022 at Trinity University. For more information please visit thomisticinstitute.org. Thomas Hibbs is currently J. Newton Rayzor Sr. Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University, where he is also Dean Emeritus, having served for 16 years as Dean of the Honors College and as Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture. Hibbs received a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and has served as tutor at Thomas Aquinas College, Full Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy at Boston College, and President of the University of Dallas. Hibbs works in the areas of medieval philosophy, especially Thomas Aquinas, contemporary virtue ethics, and aesthetics. He has published more than thirty scholarly articles and seven books, as well as 100 reviews and discussion articles on film, theater, art, and higher education in a variety of venues.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:04.0	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:08.3	So I want to talk about the issue of friendship, which I think is something that is, that we all value.
0:20.6	I think if we went around the room
0:22.6	and we were asked the question,
0:24.6	do you value friendship?
0:26.6	If someone said no, we would think that's really odd.
0:29.6	And yet we don't seem to have a really good
0:33.6	vocabulary for talking about friendship. And in fact, if we look at data over the last
0:42.1	50 years or so, in surveys, there's been both a decline in personal friendships that people say they
0:51.0	have and a sad increase in what we might call civic hatred.
0:57.5	So two surveys, one survey that's been given in various forms since like the 1970s or 80s,
1:06.2	asks people how many good friends do you have?
1:17.3	And that used to be about 3.5, and now it's under two. I'm not sure what the 0.5 of a friend does for you, but it's better than just three.
1:24.9	So that's like a 50% cut in the numbers of friendships. And then sometimes it even
1:32.9	shrinks further if the people doing the survey ask how many people have you had a conversation with them last three months about something that matters a great deal to you?
1:49.4	And the number shrink even closer to one then.
1:53.1	So we're witnessing a decline in personal friendships.
1:56.8	We all know that COVID placed burdens on all of our relationships.
2:02.9	Sometimes friendships became stronger,
2:05.2	but lots of friendships because you couldn't be present with people became weaker.
2:11.9	On the issue of civic friendship, which is just broadly,
	...

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