The Fellowship of Happiness: Aquinas on the Making of Good Friends | Prof. Michael Pakaluk
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 30 November 2018
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This talk was given by Dr. Pakaluk on October 16th, 2018 at the United States Naval Academy and was co-sponsored by the Catholic Midshipmen's Club.
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About the Speaker:
Michael Pakaluk studied philosophy at Harvard College and the University of Edinburgh on a Marshall Scholarship before getting his Ph.D. at Harvard writing a dissertation under John Rawls. He is a recognized authority on classical philosophy, especially Aristotle’s ethics. Pakaluk has held academic appointments at Clark University, Brown University, Ave Maria University, and The Catholic University of America, among others.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I was asked to speak about friendship in Thomas Aquinas, now, especially how to make friends. |
| 0:07.1 | Thomas Aquinas is highly theoretical philosopher. He doesn't really write about practical matters, |
| 0:14.8 | such as how to make friends, whether he has wonderful spiritual writings. He has accounts of friendship. |
| 0:22.8 | So I'll explain a little bit about that, |
| 0:28.7 | and then it will lead into the question of making friends. So the first thing we have to ask in connection with friendship is, well, what is friendship? And the classical authors |
| 0:35.6 | describe it as reciprocated love. |
| 0:41.0 | Now, then that raises the question, what is love? |
| 0:45.7 | And it's the wish of good to someone. |
| 0:51.4 | You might say the wish of good to something that has a good. I'll give you an |
| 0:55.1 | example. I have some wine. The example goes back to Aristotle. And I want to preserve it. |
| 1:02.5 | And I open up the bottle and I cork it. I put it in refrigerator instead of leaving it out uncorked, right? |
| 1:08.1 | I'm taking care of the wine. I'm doing what preserves it, keeps it good and |
| 1:13.0 | tasty and so on. Do I love the wine? Maybe when you're a kid, your parents would say, well, |
| 1:20.8 | you like wine, you don't love wine, right? On the other hand, consider my dog Lulu. Lulu is hungry. |
| 1:29.4 | I have to feed her, otherwise she will perish the way the wine would perish. |
| 1:33.4 | So I feed Lulu. |
| 1:35.6 | Do I just like Lulu in the way I like the wine? |
| 1:38.5 | I'm taking care of her. |
| 1:40.2 | It seems to me there's something that's more that's there. |
| 1:42.8 | I'm actually tending to her good. |
| 1:44.9 | It makes sense to say that Lulu has a good. |
| 1:47.7 | It's not that I put the cork on the wine and put in the bottle |
... |
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