Neighbors

Overthink

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

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What does it mean to love thy neighbor? And who counts as a neighbor in the first place? In episode 139 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about neighbors. They think through the parasocial relationships that hold between us and those who live near us, how the values of our neighbors affect our lives, and how neighborly relations blur the public/private distinction. They use the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of the neighbor as “the Other” to think about the experience of moral responsibility. And they consider how our relationships with neighbors differ from other relationships? To what extent do we choose our neighbors? How do wealth and class shape our experience of living-with-others? And what actually makes a neighbor a neighbor? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts question whether we have specific ethical obligations to our neighbors and discuss cultural differences in how people view their neighbors.

Works Discussed:
Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties”
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being
Hannu Ruonavaara, “The Anatomy of Neighbour Relations”
Anna Strhan, “And Who is My Neighbour? Levinas and the Commandment to Love Re-examined”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Overthinkers. I'm here to share some exciting updates before we get into today's episode.
0:04.7	First off, you can now get double the overthink. We've moved from a biweekly to a weekly
0:09.8	episode cadence, so you'll now get four episodes per month rather than two. We're also now recording
0:15.3	in person with video. So if you'd prefer to watch our episodes rather than just listen to them,
0:20.6	you can check us out on YouTube and Substack, where the episodes will be posted for free.
0:26.1	Speaking of Substack, it's now our one-stop shop for our subscriber-only content, included extended versions of every single episode.
0:33.5	If you want more from us, that's the place to find us.
0:36.1	We'll also be doing periodic lives, Q&A sessions, short written posts about our episodes, and more.
0:42.6	And some of you may already know that I've also recently started my own substack,
0:46.3	where I'm currently offering a video-based lecture course on intimate relationships.
0:51.0	So I hope you'll consider joining me and us over there.
1:12.4	Hello and welcome to Overthink.
1:16.1	The podcast where we ask you, won't you be my neighbor?
1:18.6	I'm Ellie Anderson.
1:20.3	And I'm David Pena Guzman.
1:24.3	Okay, David, we've lived in a lot of places over the courses of our lives.
1:25.7	We've had a lot of neighbors.
1:29.6	Tell me about a neighbor experience that you've had. During grad school, you know this. I lived in the attic of my dissertation advisor. Oh, yeah.
1:36.9	Yeah. So our professor from Emory University, Cindy Willett, whom we've interviewed on
1:41.6	Overtink before. Yeah, she's been with us. She's great.
2:01.0	She lives in this beautiful home in Atlanta near the Emory campus. It's so beautiful. It's like a quarter of an acre of land or something like, I don't really know acres or measurements of land. It's a beautiful, big plot of land. Yeah, it's a big chunk of land. Lots of trees. And also a little river that runs through the front yard.
2:00.9	And so when I was moving to Atlanta for graduate school, I was looking for housing. It's a big chunk of land. Lots of trees. And also a little river that runs through the front yard.
	...

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