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Hello everyone. Welcome, welcome. This is our first live. I am Mona Mona. I am your philosopher-at-large. And I thought I would launch this first live and make the topic friendship and philosophy since I've been writing about that these past couple weeks. But I'm happy to entertain. Your questions as well.

This could be an informal chat with coffee. And we also need to come up with a name for our program. I was thinking about maybe philosophizing but, but I'm open to suggestions. Because I would, I would kind of like to do these regularly, but we'll see, we'll see how it goes. We'll see if this is a good way for us to chat and communicate.

So, welcome, welcome to the Philosophy Publix Live, numero uno live, and I'm having a cup of coffee.

How's everyone doing today?

A good, good handful of people here. Thank you for coming and checking this out. So I guess I can start with thank you for the hearts. That's kind of cool. I've never seen that before. This is going to be a lot of firsts today. Yeah, so welcome. I'll tell you a little bit about myself first. So, going all the way back to the beginning, I guess.

High school. I was a debater and improv sort of, In, in the United States, high schools, there is rhetoric or forensics, which is public speaking. And I was very much into public speaking in theater, and I was really into debate. So that somehow translated through a series of different kind of interesting alchemical transformations.

I ended up studying philosophy as an undergraduate. I started out as a rhetoric student and finally, funny enough, I ended up as a philosopher. And if you know anything about the history of philosophy and its relationship to rhetoric, you know, that way back in ancient times part of what Socrates was.

Teaching his students and working against sort of his his what would be called the people that he argued against a lot were sophists, right? And sophists were people who taught people how to win arguments, whether the argument was right or wrong. They were the lawyers. Of that day and being able to defend your case in court was very important because the Greeks, very much like the Americans, the U.S. Americans were very litigous. They litigated everything. They loved to take people to court so being able to argue was a very important skill and that's what the sophists did. And that's where I started studying rhetoric. Eventually, I had a friend who loved the classics. I started reading Plato and Aristotle.

And I transferred to a university where there was no rhetoric department. And the closest thing was philosophy. One of the ways, one of the stories that I tell about how I ended up being a philosopher and how I ended up studying philosophy. So, I studied philosophy at the University of Oregon as an undergraduate.

Then I did a master's at the University of Memphis, which is a continental program, a well known continental program. I studied with Robert Bernasconi, with Tina Chanter, who is an Irigaray feminist scholar. Who else, Tom Nenon, who is a Heideggerian, he taught me Heidegger. He is a very practical reader of Heidegger.

He always says Heidegger is not, you know, people take him as being very jargonful, but Heidegger It was really just inventing a lot of words, but he was trying to capture something very practical. So he taught us a very specific version of Heidegger. Wish I could have stayed longer, but on the move.

Okay, well, thank you for coming, Caroline. It's really great to see you in here. Yeah, I'm seeing the names come through and recognizing the names. And thank you so much for checking in. I'll see you next time. We'll do these again. I'm, I'm I'm looking forward to doing these regularly. Cool. Oh, and also I opened up a Discord a couple days ago.

So if if you want to be part of our private Substack Discord you'll find that in the chat, the link in the chat. Or, you know, contact me for the link if you want, the invite link. So yeah, so where was I? Oh, so yeah, so I studied I did my master's at at the University of Memphis. And then I went to Stony Brook University, which is one of the top continental philosophy programs.

And at Stony Brook I, I did a dissertation on, um, Plato's Timaeus, but really it was on conceptions of space and the history of concepts of space and specifically also how it's tied to gender because space and matrix, womb, are very much tied. So that's what I wrote my dissertation with, about under Kelly Oliver.

If any of you know Kelly Oliver's work, she's really fantastic. But of course, Ed Casey is there who also studies space, , it was a while ago. So anyways, I studied philosophy a long time and then I taught for about 10 years. And academia is a hard, hard place. And I decided that I wanted to do something else.

Interesting to see how you studied philosophy as an undergrad. Did you have any background in philosophy before that? Was it daunting? I'm an undergrad in philosophy. I'm taking undergrad philosophy. It wasn't I had a friend who was really into the classics Plato Aristotle. She was seeing, she was, her boyfriend was a classicist and she herself was a classicist studying classics.

And that kind of just rubbed off on me a little bit not a little bit, a lot. So, the first philosophy class I took, Very unusual was actually logic. And I loved it. I fought a lot with the logic professor. But but that was my first class. And and that kind of got me hooked. Most people start with an introduction to ethics, or introduction to political philosophy, or an introduction to the history of philosophy.

I started with logic, I don't know why. But no, I didn't particularly find it daunting. I found it I found it very interesting and I love playing with language. I've always been very kind of linguistically oriented so I enjoyed the, the thinking very slowly through the, in the reading process.

I remember at one point I was trying to decide between literature and philosophy and I just, I went with philosophy because I figured literature, I would always enjoy it, and it's a little bit more accessible. Philosophy is a tradition where you really do still need someone to, to teach it to you. To take you through it, because you can read Heidegger but if you don't have the context and the history for it I think it would, I don't know if you could actually get, get really a good picture of what Heidegger was up to.

You'll get your own image of what Heidegger means to you, but philosophy is something that you have to study within a traditional context. I think, I think I could be wrong, but that was my decision at that time. And I also studied philosophy over a long period of time, so I took a long time Oh, I forgot to turn off notifications.

I don't think you can, yeah, you can't see those. I took a long time to do my undergraduate. And then once I was in graduate school, I went through pretty quickly. For my dissertation, I also spent a year in Paris at at Nantes. No, I mean, I was in Paris, but at the university, a 10, I forget the name of it's not Le Sorbonne.

I didn't want to go to Le Sorbonne because everyone did that. And the campus that I was on was a little bit more left leaning, a little bit more radical. It was Paris Campus 10, but I forget the name of it now. You'll notice that I do blank on names quite a bit for some reason. Sometimes words escape my mind.

All right. So that's a little bit about my background. I taught well I had a postdoc at Stony Brook for two years and then I taught at Grinnell College, which is a small liberal arts college in Iowa. Boud, Iowa, not the people of Iowa, but. Iowa, who just passed the first piece of legislation that will take away civil rights, taking away the civil rights of transgender folk in Iowa.

So very sad day for Iowa yesterday. But yeah, I taught at Grinnell College. That was an interesting experience. It's one of the things that made me realize that academic philosophy was not going to be a good path for me. Then I went to UC Berkeley and I taught in the gender studies department at UC Berkeley.

And that. was my last kind of attempt to to establish myself in academia. You know, I had a 10 year track at Grinnell College that I gave up. So that was a big decision, but the right decision for me. I then went into tech for about seven years, six, seven years, I learned how to code. It was those, you know, those were the days and I, I worked you know, in tech for the last few years, but now that I'm semi retired and you know, was laid off a couple times.

I'm like, oh, screw this. I'm going back to philosophy. So yeah, so here, here I am. I started the sub stack about a year and some January to two January to go, I guess, a year and some. Is what I'm trying to say. We're in March now already. Yeah, a year ago, a year and a couple months. And very slowly, you know, the first year grows very slowly.

And then really have focused and dedicated myself to the, to philosophy and writing for you, for the Substack and building this community for the past. I would say four to five months have been my biggest efforts, and it's been really rewarding. You know, when I put something out and people read it, it's it's, yeah, it's, I don't know how to describe the feeling.

It's a little bit like being on stage. If any of you have ever been on stage, there's a kind of a rush of being in front of people and Being on the stage and performing. So Substack has that little bit of a performance bug thing for me when I put something out and people pick it up and You know do things with it.

It's it's super It's super rewarding for me to do that. And now that I've started the discord for our community I'm getting to know people in a much more concrete way as well. So, we had a conversation yesterday about content. I learned a lot about content from someone. Because content is kind of my weak point.

I, I used to say in grad school that I would, That I was going to get through grad school without ever having to read Kant. That's how much I liked Kant. I did in fact take a, take a seminar on Kant. And I didn't hate him as much as I thought I would. So that's something. But yeah, Kant for me is a bit of a blind spot.

So we Funny enough, I ended up learning a little bit about Kant yesterday. So yeah, that's what I'm up to. I've been writing about friendship, but before I kind of launch into that, I thought I would open up the floor of Hello Z. Hello Kijo. Hello Gail. Thank you for joining. Thank you for all of you who are here.

I'll open up the floor and see if you all have any questions. If I missed a question as I was talking, you know, feel free to put it. Place it here again. I think I can also scroll through. Okay. I'm just scrolling through and make sure I didn't miss any questions. Hello, Luca. Hello, Edwin. Hi, B. Hi, Terry.

Marilla. Thank you for joining. Inestra. Peter. Hello, Peter. Hi, Kevin. Nice to see ya. Kevin and I are buddies. We are friends. Aren't we, Kevin? We like each other stuff. All right. Hi, William. Poesis. Jay Marcos Barroso. Hello. Bien. Bien. Bien. Mali. And hello. Hello, everyone. All right. Well, if there's no questions or any, anyone want to say anything, I will talk a little bit about Here's a poll.

Should I talk a little bit about my dissertation topic about space and the concepts of space and gender? Or should we talk about friendship? Something that I have been writing about. So maybe some of you have read some of my pieces on friendship and kind of want to discuss that a little bit. What do you think?

Let's go down. Oh, here I'm missing some, some messages here.

All right. What, what do you all think? Space in place. Friendship. Friendship. Yay. Hi, Tracy. Thank you for coming. All right. So when I started this up stack all the way at the beginning one of the very first things that I picked up was this, this growing desire for community that we all have. I think we recognize even instinct instinctively that in order to get through and thrive.

And make better, make better lives for ourselves in this current political situation, which is quite difficult for all of us, that we're going to need community. And trying to figure out what that means what, what would a community look like that would be supportive? Because for me, community has a slightly negative connotation.

In the sense that the community, when I think of community, I think of a community that's built up from a nuclear family a nuclear family. You join a lot of those, you have a town that town is overseen by a city council and then the city you join a bunch of cities and that becomes a state, right?

So it's the same basic structure, hierarchical structure, which is replicated. at different scales until you get all the way up to the state. So the state is a collection of the nation, is a collection of states, which is a collection of cities, which is a collection of family structures, right? The family, unfortunately is the seat of replicating culture.

Good things in culture as well as Difficult things in culture. And so, I've been trying to think about whether we can build community either alongside that family structure or. An alternative to that family structure because I live primarily outside of, I mean, I have my, my blood relatives, my family, and I'm very, very close to some of my family you know, to my, to my sisters in particular, but we need more, right?

Family cannot serve all of our needs of and. A lot of us also have colleagues, like we're colleagues, which are kind of like friends, but it's also not the same relationship and friendship isn't been turned into this kind of online, parasocial relationship that a lot of us have, even with people who we know because we we interact with them online.

the context in which we're interacting with them shapes that interaction to a large extent. Right. So even if we know them, that parasocial element starts to creep into even our real friendships online. So, yeah. So I started to think about community and how that can be re imagined as well as individualism, which is kind of the opposite Power to community.

I've been a staunch supporter. I believe in individualism individualism. I, I, being kind of coming from more of an existentialist personal ethics and individualism, authenticity, freedom are all very, very important to me and who I see myself as being, right? And it seems that, that need to be an individual.

Sometimes buts against community. We know we shouldn't, but it often does, right? So, I ended up thinking a little bit more about friendship in the last few weeks. Because if you start to look at the history of friendship, you realize that friendship isn't what it used to be. That friendship has evolved over time.

And that friendship adjusts itself to, as does anything, right, to its current, you know, political and social situation. So, studying friendship, intimate friendships between women, which is a very strong institution in the Victorian era in England, so this is very contextual, very cultural and friendships are very culturally situated.

I haven't even gotten to talk about that yet, but when you look at the history of women's intimate friendships, you realize that there was this whole network of women. That was the anchor for the political network that, that occurred that was very strong, right? England conquered a lot of the world, little tiny country.

How, where did that political power come from? Well, it was in my opinion, right? It was seated in, anchored in, a very strong social, cultural, artistic, philosophical network. That was held in place by these friendship relationships. So friendship worked alongside the family and capitalism, and very much was a part of it, to help, and colonialism, to help support and make that structure strong.

It was the invisible part of that structure. Now this institution, a very, very close, Lifelong friends, mostly women are the ones that we are looking at. Although, men did have intimate friends, friends as well, which is interesting to see. I don't know what happened to that piece of it, but. Someone should study it because it's very interesting.

Let's make sure I'm not, not missing any comments. Okay. So I believe that friendship can be so much more than it is right now. And the way that I've had friends, what my history has been, because I've moved around a lot. I sacrificed a lot for my academic career. I went wherever the job was, which meant that I moved around a lot as an adult, but also as a, as a kid, I learned to make fast friends.

And I also learned to let go very easily, which I think it's very hard to hold on to friendships across time and space. And some friendships come and go, but some I think should have stuck. And I'm wondering If we take friendship a little bit more seriously, and the power of friendship, can it be the basis and a support for healthier communities, right?

For healthier families, even. For healthier partnerships, romantic partnerships. If I enter into a partnership, a romantic partnership, I want to not feel like I need to give up my friends in order to be in that partnership. Like, I don't want to feel like my partner is the only person who can meet my emotional needs, or my best friend sometimes is put, right?

I want to distribute that weight. Because it takes a village to keep even one person afloat. And we have to recognize that even though we're individuals, right? What gives us our, our specificity, our individuality, what allows us to flourish and manifest who we are doesn't come from us. It comes from the situation that we're in.

It comes from who's around us, right? Tell me your closest 10 people and I'll tell you who you are kind of thing, right? So. We have to recognize that individualism really is tied to other people, our, our sense of who we are. So I think friendship can be a really fantastic. Thing to think about and to really invest some energy into consciously thinking about friendship and not just befriending people who are just like you, because that's what most of us do, I think just kind of by instinct, but if we took friendship seriously as a political tool, even consciously make friends with people who are a generation older, a generation younger, who are Not of your same, you know, class, race, gender ability right?

All of the different kind of identity categories that we use to wrap our identities around and each of us has a category that is most salient for them. If we were to really make friends with a diverse set of people, it would completely transform who we are as humans. And we need that transformation.

We need to transcend who we are as a human race right now, or we will not survive, I don't think in the long run. So we have to figure out how to expand our sense of morality. And expand what we can know, and that is the work of friendship, I think. And so, I have been thinking a lot about the work of friendship reading a book called What Are Friends For?

by Marilyn Friedman, as well as many other kind of things about friendship. The Maryland Freedman really breaks it down in an analytic, very clear way. The political and social aspects of friendship, which is that, that network that can both support and even replace kinship, family kinship structures.

The the, so there's a moral, there, there's the etymological, which is something I'm writing about right now how through friendships. We expand how we know and what we know as well. So, let me stop there and see let me ask you a question about about friendship. And what is something that you have learned because of friends that you have had.

So I already gave you an example earlier when I was a teenager in junior high, I made a friend who was my best friend and she was a class, she ended up being a classicist. And so she taught me. And encouraged me and I learned from her that Plato and Aristotle were really interesting and that the ancient worlds were really interesting and that completely shaped who I became.

So without that friendship, I can't even imagine who I would have been, right? So that would be my question to you, to you all. What are some things that friends have taught you that you have learned? So there are, that's one way in which friendships have an epist an impact on what we can know.

Epistemology means study of knowledge. Yeah, let's see. Let's check in. The No takers. Okay. Well, I'm going to continue. The other thing, which is a little bit more philosophical, something that I got into a little bit in my last piece. And that is that when we make a friend and we bond with them, we see the world through their eyes, right?

We begin to see through another's eyes. That is empathy. And so we learn empathy through friendship. That's one, one way we learn empathy. And there's been a lot of talk about empathy lately and and attention on the importance of that for building good relationships. Let's turn that off. But as we see the world through their eyes, right?

We also see ourselves through their eyes, right? So they become a mirror for us and who we are in their world. So. We are transported from our world, our particular perspective on the world, right, to their eyes seeing us in their context. That's an amazing metaphysical trick. It's magic, really. And that is what allows us To see ourselves and to know who we are.

Let me give you a very quick example. I didn't know I was American until I went to Paris. Until I started to travel. And then I realized, oh yeah, okay, I, I am American, right? Because I couldn't see that my Americanness until I was in another world and another language and people saw me as And I realized or came to understand what that meant.

And there's lots of like little examples like that, right? So the friend is the mirror that allows us to see who we are good and bad, right? And so we cannot even work on ourselves without. Mirror, that mirroring. There's different ways we can have that mirror. It could be a friendship, but it can be a book.

It can be a piece of art. It can be an institution. So that mirror, mirroring happens all over the place. But friends in particular are excellent mirrors because one, there's a trust in friendship that I talked a little bit about. That is very important for us being able to receive not only good information about ourselves, but the critical as well.

So I believe that one of the key things that friends can do is to criticize us in a productive, caring, loving way that is able to reach us. So if we fall down a conspiracy rabbit hole, there's very few people who can retrieve us. Family, maybe. If we have a good relationship with family and we trust them.

And friends. So friendship is important in that way. Now, Let me read this comment. I think it's scary that friends can have that influence so much. But you, you choose your friends, right? Initially you do, unlike family members who have an influence in your life, but you can't really choose your family members.

Exactly. Exactly. Friendship is voluntary. That's something that Marilyn Friedman hammers on over and over again. Right? It's one of the few relationships actually that is of, of love, love relationships that is voluntary. So we choose our friends. And yes, right now I'm really focused on the good things that friends can do, but if we, when we choose a friend, we can easily trust the wrong person.

Right. And so. We can just as easily be influenced in a positive direction or in a negative direction. And when we're younger and our judgment isn't fully formed, right, we can fall into the wrong crowd, be influenced by the wrong set of people, and fall into a world Then our family has to come and retrieve us from if they can or, you know, that shapes our lives.

So that trust that we put in people as friends and learning to do that well is part of humaning. One of the more difficult parts of humaning, right, is to choose who you are going to Surround yourself with and even with family, right? There's family that is related to you and that's a very specific, socially constructed relationship.

But you also choose which family members you're going to be close to and work on as an adult on that relationship. But yeah, there's definitely negative, kind of, negative and unintended consequences that can emerge from having certain friendships. That is for sure. And I haven't talked enough about that and I've recognized that.

The other thing I haven't talked about is how culturally specific friendships are. I might be lagging a little bit. I come from I grew up in a Latin American country and friendship there is, is quite different from American friendships and in my experience in France. Those friendships are different.

So they're very culturally specific. I was trying to make friends using pattern I learned as a child in Latin America, in the U. S. And that didn't work very well. Latin Americans have a different sense of space, both physically and the space of intimacy is different as well. So. Anyways, that's kind of a whole nother topic.

I wanted to finish the thing about inter intersubjectivity. So in Continental Philosophy, we have this whole discourse on intersubjectivity, which is an account of how subjectivity emerges through an encounter with the other. That encounter, which has its roots all the way in Hegel, but comes from Hegel.

Sartre has his own version. Heidegger has His version who are, right. All the Continental philosophers have wrestled with this question or problem in their own way. Husserl as well, obviously. But the other is always a negative There's a negative connotation. There's a challenge that the other gives us.

There's a fight unto death for Hegel, for recognition. And that sets a kind of tone of the relationship to the other as agonistic, as a fight as a challenge. And I think friendship gives us a completely different paradigm for understanding our relationship to others and to otherness and to difference and an ability to build on that difference rather than fight against it.

So in that way, philosophically, friendship is most interesting to me. For, for that piece of it. I was influenced by non friends. Euphemism for quasi enemies. Yes, there's the friend, frenemy, right? There's the frenemy that you disagree with and fight with all the time but somehow you're still, like, bonded through that, that struggle.

Yeah. Because they objectively showed to me how I was perceived. I was influenced by non friends because they objectively showed to me how I was perceived. Yes. Yeah, and that can be you, how do I put it? So, people can give us feedback, right? Anyone can give us feedback. They should probably ask first.

You know, can I give you some feedback? Or are you open to feedback? This is what I was taught as an adult. I didn't do, like, boundaries wasn't something I grew up with. But they, they can also just give you the feedback and then you've got to figure out what to do with it. But you are always the one that gets to decide whether that feedback is something you're willing to take on or not.

And the consequences of that decision are also on you. So it's all you, right? They can, they can believe whatever they want about you. And they can try to show you how you're perceived by others and you can decide to ignore that and decide, I don't know, people think I'm kind of an asshole. That's okay.

I know the people that love me and that I'm not an asshole too, that think that I'm nice. So maybe I'm being an asshole to the people that I'm being perceived by in this, For this person who's telling me this, there's a good reason. And I'm just going to say, yeah, that's how it is. Or I may say, Oh, wow, people are perceiving me as an asshole.

Maybe I should look at my behavior and why that is because I don't want them to perceive me as an asshole. I want them to like me and to accept me and it's important to me, right? So how you act, even that, that feedback is what determines. Your level of responsibility, what, how you're able to accept or not accept that feedback that you get.

And you get it in all sorts of ways, sometimes passive aggressive ways, sometimes violent ways, like there's lots of ways that you can get feedback from the world. And we're constantly getting feedback and learning that one, you don't have to accept the feedback just because someone gives it to you or has that perception of you.

And number two, it's on you, whether you accept it and how you process that. And learning to do that is a really difficult advanced humaning skill. Let's say there's lots of people who can't do that. I find it hard to do that. You know, so, so it's, it, it is not easy, but friends are, I think, in charge of giving you the bad news because of family, you can trust family to a certain extent, but because of the way those social rules are built, they're defined from outside of your relationship, right?

Your father, your mother, your sister, your brothers Those are all roles that we play in other people's lives, and they're defined to a large extent. There's a pattern that we pick up, and we might elaborate on that pattern in different ways, but the basic pattern remains, and it's very difficult to fight against that pattern, to completely change what that pattern is, socially, for, I won't go into that.

We are tied to our family. Our fates are tied to our family's fates, whether we like it or not. Whether we are in close physical proximity or we have cut them off, we are still tied to them in ways that are legal even, right? So We can't fully trust that the advice that we get from family is completely disinterested, right?

Because they have their, their interests are wrapped up in yours. Friends are a little bit more disinterested, right? Part of the work of friendship is being able to adopt another person's goals without, by leaving, leaving your ego aside. And whatever your wants and needs are, you have to be able to table those in order to support another person in doing something that you may even disagree with, right?

You might say, you know, I think this is a mistake and I can't help you with that. Or you might say, I think this is a mistake and I am going to support you to this or that degree, right? And then you have to support your friend in the ways that they are asking for support, not how you think you should support them.

It's a bit tricky, right? But once that trust is established It's an incredibly strong bond because there is no trust, I think, like that trust of friends. It's disinterested, it's all about you and you can trust that if a true friend is telling you that you're doing something that is hurting them, because you care for them, right?

You By taking that feedback on and working on that, you're showing them that you care for them. Not just saying, oh, I care for you, and I don't mean to hurt you. That's not worth very much. But actually working on it shows them that you care that you've hurt them, right? And friends are the ones who can give us that type of bad news and really reach us, I believe.

At least friendship is a very is a very It's a very special relationship when you start to think about it, you know, I thought this was going to be a one, one article, you know, let's explore friendship philosophically. And I know Aristotle has a lot to say about friendship. I haven't even gotten into that.

But when you start looking at friendship, it's actually really complex in part because it's not well defined. Friendship is voluntary, which means we choose our friends, but the work of friendship is defining. With another person. So it's not a choice or series of choices that you can make yourself. You have to make those with another person.

So it's also collaborative in that sense. You have to decide what your friendship is about. What types of things are you going to enjoy together? Are there any boundaries on that? I give an example about meeting someone, some of my friends in the dark park. We meet because our friends are dark like them, like each other.

Right, and our friendship, as it deepens, is all about dogs, and it just never really goes beyond the dog world, and that's perfectly fine. Someday, maybe it will. But friendships can always grow. There's no cap, right? They can always morph and, and and because of that, it's very complex because it's a very porous, very flexible relationship.

And so I think we should all have more friends and more different types of friends within our human limits. We are very limited as humans. We cannot have a hundred true friends. Our energies just don't go that far. I have the energy for two or three friends, real, you know, relationships I'm really working on and really value.

anD that means, yeah, my energies are very limited. Some people might be able to have a little bit more of a more friends or fewer friends, depending on your capacity. But having those two friends is one of the greatest joys in life. And in American culture in particular, Which is what I know the best.

We don't have robust friendships. I don't think. As far as I can see. I could be wrong. It could just be me. I'm kind of looking at it through my own kind of American experience, right? The friends that we have can, what, what passes a friendship can be very superficial and you don't know it until that friendship is tested, which is a whole nother topic.

How our friendships get tested. Friendship is great. That is pretty difficult to apprehend it philosophically. Friendship is so great that it is pretty difficult to apprehend it philosophically. Yes, yes, friendship is, is you know, philosophically, you're looking at it through a little tiny window.

It's even bigger than that, right? Although philosophy can really grab a hold of a lot of things. You know, for example, I'd love to see someone write about depictions of friendship. In, in popular art in movies, in television that would be really interesting to see if there is a pattern to how friendships are depicted throughout different eras.

What was friendship seen as because depictions are kind of social. They tell you what that society believes about friendship in that moment. So in the fifties, Was friendship different from what it is today? I think the fact that Facebook named the people you connect through their platform as friends has had an impact on what we think friends are So we might I think we have changed what yeah, I think we would depict friendship maybe differently I find social a pair of social friendships.

Very interesting. That's kind of an it's probably not a totally new thing we put if we think about it, there's probably some precursors to it, but Yeah, well, celebrity culture is parasocial relationships, but the the degree to which we all have parasocial friends now, not all, but most of us who use social media, right?

It's really interesting. It's it's a really interesting There's so much more to explore. Like I have gone down this rabbit hole and I have not come up for air yet. So Hi, Lorenzo And hi, friend Santiago. Thank you for your comment. Hello, Dimitri. Any Spanish speakers in the room? Hola! I lived in the States for many years.

Thank you for the heart. But I actually, I left the States about seven plus years ago. Once I became a developer and I was able to work remotely, one of my main goals was to be able to travel through Latin America. And so, I did that for a few years until I got tired of traveling, quite frankly.

So anyways, that's my little spiel on friendship. I'll be writing more about the kind of epistemological aspects of friendship. And some of the other things that I've touched on that I haven't even gotten to, but I'm also a little bit afraid of like doing too much on friendship because some of you might be bored of it already.

I'm going to do one more piece and then maybe. Work on something, you know, work on it in the background and it'll come back basically is what will probably happen I have a lot of other things that I want to look at. Someone put me on to Metamodernism in my, in the MAA that I did last week and I didn't know anything about it Never heard the term.

So I'm like, Whoa this is actually happening to me a lot because I was out of academia for like 10 years. So there's all these things that have happened that I'm not really in tune with. So I'm also trying to get my feet back on the ground. So metamodernism, yeah. Don't know anything about it. Want to write a piece about it.

Just like this is, this is me learning about it. I want, I've been wanting to write about effective altruism. That moment may have passed, but specifically about the utilitarian and libertarian roots of it, so kind of the philosophical roots of it a critique of it. I know someone who's quite into that and they have been passing me things to read, but I haven't, I haven't written about it yet.

So that's something else that I want to write about. If you are a paid subscriber you can suggest topics as well. In the discord, there's a channel for doing that now. What else? Also feminist theory is a big interest of mine. And since I started the Substack, I've been wanting to do a feminist theory, kind of a romp through feminist theory seminar with people.

I did pitch it at one point, but it didn't get the uptake. I may not have had enough subscribers to really get a good group of people together at that point. So we'll try that again someday. I think that would be fun. Yeah, so that is me, and I'm gonna take questions now, so That's enough of me talking.

This is very awkward because I want to actually have a conversation But I also can lecture for about 50 minutes I can talk straight for 50 minutes part of what happens when you become a professor It's a little hard to curb that too because you could be talking to you know A person who's in front of you who you're not lecturing to and you go into that lecture mode and it's like a 50 minute lecture so I have to watch that but for this is perfect.

Look, I'm at 49 minutes, which is my 15 minute lecture has now come to an end. I'll take the questions for 10 minutes. So I will do a little tiny, ask me anything for the next 10 minutes. So do you all have any questions for me? This is the first time that we're meeting. This is our first, first live.

I tried to go on once before and it didn't technically work, but Substack did respond quickly, within a day or two, to my query and fixed it. It was like magic. I'm like, well, why didn't it work to begin with? They just had to flip a switch or something, I think. So, yeah, what are your questions? And how did you come to philosophy?

What kind of theories are you into? I get to know some of you like Lorenzo Tripoli Tripodi I, I recognize your name and I know you a little bit from Substack, so I know from reading your work a little bit about what you're about philosophically. Welcome, welcome. Hi Grady and hello Jordan. Thank you to everyone who who came and and listened to my lecture and participated.

It's really wonderful to, to get on here and and just connect with people. Yeah, any questions? Going once! Questions for your philosopher at large, things that you would like, wish, wishlist. I didn't really prepare, I just kind of jumped on. I, maybe next time I will prepare some very insightful questions.

The question for, I have, I I created this thing called, that I've called a philosophy shadow journal, if you're familiar with, oh thank you Kevin, if you're familiar with shadow journals, which I I, I know a little bit, that's from Jungian philosophy or psychoanalysis psychology. Thank you. That it's a little bit about entertaining your shadow side, right?

So it won't create havoc in your world. But these philosophical, the philosophy shadow journal are these quite a questions that make you think about philosophy things. And so. The question that I've been posting in our subscriber chat have now moved to the discord where we can have more elaborate kind of conversations, I think.

The question for this week is about

oh gosh you know when you have a feeling like you know something? But it's just kind of a feeling that you have. You don't know why you know that, right? It's kind of like an instinct. The question is whether that is a form of knowledge and where that comes from, right? So just to give you an example, if there's no questions Yeah.

I was at a restaurant picking out some pizza and walking. I was going to walk home. And I thought to myself, you know, I should walk the other way. It's a little bit longer, more scenic. And so I had this kind of thought, a momentary thought that I should not go the usual way that I go. And that day I didn't listen and I went the usual way and I was mugged.

Nothing bad happened. I always thought if someone asked for my purse or if I was carrying a bag then I would like Here have it. I like, I'm not a person who has a lot of material possessions. I share what I have. You know, who cares, right? Take it. You don't know how you're gonna react in that situation because I fought and screamed and there was nothing in the bag, but I was so unprincipled angry that someone would try to mug me that I fought like a cat.

I fell on the bag. They were not able to get it. Like it was a, it was a struggle. Anyways, after that I remembered, I thought about why, that, that I shouldn't go that way. Where did that come from? And you know, it could just be that we have these thoughts all the time. They just don't bubble up to the surface.

We don't remember them until they become significant. Like if I had never been mugged that day, I wouldn't have remembered that I had that thought, right? I wouldn't have, Yeah. So is that what it is? It's kind of like a going back after the fact and saying, I felt that that was going to happen. Or is there something else going on?

So that's part of what we're what the question for this week has been. If you're interested in that, you can, you'll have to be a subscriber, but a free subscriber works, right? And then you can go to the discord and chat about that. So let's see if there's, there's a comment here. So Mike says I am coming from quantum physics.

Wow. That's amazing. Where the philosophy of space is completely confused and confusing. Ah, that would be a very interesting conversation, Mike. I mean, I know the I know the philosophy story that we have, and I don't, I'm not, I've read a little bit of the physics that are, especially the early scientists on space, but in quantum physics, I don't know how it plays out, that would be very interesting to know what is confusing, and whether in philosophy there are Yeah, by Some resources for understanding the history of why it became confusing.

That's a really interesting topic. It would also make a really great, like, collaboration post. Just saying. Yeah. Mike says also maybe another time if you feel like it. Yeah, let's put it on the agenda and see. See if we can talk about that at some point. That would be great. You can come up with me if you are open to that, and we could chat.

Let's make a note of it. And if you want, you can send me you know, send me a message and we can start the ball rolling. But I will, I'll, I'll write it down after this live and and try and keep track of that idea so we don't lose control. Okay. Thank you Dr. Linda. Hello. You've come at the end of the session, but welcome.

And I'm going to try and put this up. I believe that the recording goes to your drafts, so I will try to publish this somewhere. So other people can enjoy it. Thank you very much. Love your chat very much. Oh, thank you. Thank you Mike. I'm glad you enjoyed it This was fairly informal. I might do something that's a little bit more structured in the in the in the coming You know coming sessions, but we'll do this regularly because this is really fun Hello, Moon.

Hi, Samantha. And hello again, Mike. Thanks. All right. Well, last call for questions and comments. Thank you for the hearts. It's kind of fun how they kind of float up like that. Heart, heart. All right. Thank you everyone for coming. I think I'm going to call it a day then. Have a wonderful rest of your day and we will chat again very soon. Okay. Take care, everyone. Bye!