Friendship and the Digital Age: A Thomistic Reflection on Human Connection – Prof. Joshua Hochschild

Prof. Joshua Hochschild argues that digital culture reshapes friendship and attention through Curiositas and acedia, offering a path of renewal by cultivating virtue, mindful leisure, and rooted communal belonging.

This lecture was given on November 5th, 2025, at John Hopkins University.

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About the Speakers:

Joshua Hochschild is 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 served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Keywords: Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, Attention and Technology, Common Action and Solidarity, Curiositas and Acedia, Digital Age, Friendship and Human Flourishing, Leisure and Attention, Trustworthiness and Integrity, Virtue Cultivation in College Life, Virtue Ethics in Friendship