The Search for Happiness: Wisdom from Aquinas and the Classical Tradition | Prof. Jennifer Frey

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on March 18, 2022 at Auburn University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Jennifer Frey is an associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. Prior to joining the philosophy faculty at USC, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. She has published widely on virtue and moral psychology and she has co-edited three volumes on Self-Transcendence and Virtue, Practical Wisdom, and Practical Truth. Her writing has been featured in Breaking Ground, Evangelization and Culture, First Things, Fare Forward, Image, Law and Liberty, The Point, and USA Today.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.5	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:11.4	So I want to talk this evening about happiness, but I kind of want to approach it in a little bit of a roundabout way. And so I want to start with
0:23.0	the question of what ails us or what is wrong with us. Why do I want to start there? Well,
0:30.1	the truth is, as a matter of just empirical fact, that Americans are not very happy. So for the people who measure this sort of
0:40.6	thing, the data looks bad. The data looks bad for us. And for college students in particular,
0:48.3	and this was true before the pandemic, by the way, but the pandemic really accelerated these trends. But college students in
0:57.4	particular report historically high rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and social isolation.
1:05.3	So it's kind of, you know, people talk a lot, especially in university administrations, people
1:13.0	talk a lot about the mental health crisis on campus, and that crisis has only gotten exponentially
1:19.5	worse in the past two years.
1:23.2	And, you know, at this point, we have about 40% of college students taking psychotropic drugs,
1:31.4	just to try to cope with the stress of life.
1:35.2	And suicide rates are at an all-time high, right?
1:39.2	So they're up about 40% in the last 15 years.
1:44.0	It's also the case that medical researchers at the University of Chicago are busy at work on a pill for loneliness, where loneliness is defined as a conscious feeling of estrangement or social separation,
2:00.0	an emotional lack that concerns a person's place in the world.
2:04.9	That's like how they're operationalizing loneliness.
2:08.2	And the surgeon general warns us that loneliness and emotional well-being are serious public health
2:16.2	concerns in this country.
2:20.3	So I guess where I want to start is with a question.
2:24.3	Suppose that you, like a lot of college students, feel lonely or anxious or depressed.
	...

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