True Friendship: Insights from the Classical and Christian Traditions | Prof. Joshua Hochschild

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2020

⏱️ 66 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on 4 February 2020 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	True friendship, insights from the classical and Christian traditions.
0:08.0	Why would you trust me to tell you about friendship?
0:14.0	Why, especially to tell you about true friendship?
0:19.0	Is there even such a thing? Isn't friendship rather subjective and contextual?
0:25.2	Why would you trust a philosopher to tell you about something that's a matter of personal experience,
0:30.6	of particular circumstances, and pragmatic calculation? Isn't friendship a matter of what works for you
0:36.8	rather than some general truth?
0:40.3	And even if there is such a thing as true friendship, some common essence of friendship, however diverse its individual expression may be,
0:50.3	why trust me to tell you about it?
0:53.3	Maybe I'll just give you my own opinion out of my own interests without any regard for the truth you are interested in.
1:01.1	If you are a Christian, you may trust Scripture to reveal the truth about love with no need for a philosopher to complicate or confuse matters.
1:13.2	Christian or not, modern intelligent people are reasonably suspicious of strangers or worse academics or experts telling them what to think,
1:22.2	and we're conditioned to expect that someone with power, even if it's only the power of logic or eloquence, might be
1:29.5	abusing that power for personal gain. Safer to seek advice if you seek it at all from
1:35.9	a lifestyle personality or a mindset guru or an anonymous Reddit poster, some disinterested
1:42.5	party who doesn't have anything to gain from you, except perhaps your attention.
1:49.2	I doubt you fear me, but it is worth asking how you could know whether by sharing about friendship,
1:57.0	I come as a friend and not as an enemy, seeking to deceive you or harm you, or at least to exploit you for my own gain.
2:07.2	When John Paul Sartre addressed a Paris lecture hall about authenticity and the dangers of living in bad faith,
2:16.7	we hope that at least some of the bright young women in the audience
2:22.0	had enough regular common sense to suspect
2:24.8	that his existential analysis of sexual freedom
	...

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