From dhicks4 at ucmerced.edu Mon Nov 24 11:38:34 2025 From: dhicks4 at ucmerced.edu (Dan Hicks) Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2025 19:38:34 +0000 Subject: [PhilosophyEvents] "Loneliness and Emotional Resonance": Kaitlyn Creasy (CSUSB), Friday, December 5 Message-ID: <0D466035-9C18-4A15-9D72-ABC74338D073@ucmerced.edu> Hello philosophers and friends of philosophy! Next week (after Thanksgiving) we?ll be having TWO talks by Kaitlyn Creasy of CSU San Bernardino. The Thursday talk is meant for the general public, and will be in UC Merced on Main (1635 M Street) with free street and lot parking nearby. Friday?s talk is for an academic audience (including students!) and will be on campus in COB 129. As usual, both talks are free and open to the public. If you?re a student at another school or community college faculty, contact me and I can subsidize your parking for the Friday talk. Kaitlyn Creasy (CSU San Bernardino) How to be Lonely UC Merced on Main: 1635 M Street Thursday, December 4, 6-7pm Everyone experiences loneliness at some time or other. Even so, some of the situations in which we find ourselves lonely can surprise us. While we might expect to feel lonely in a room full of strangers, for example, we typically don't expect to feel lonely in the presence of loved ones. To make better sense of the wide variety of circumstances in which loneliness may arise, I begin by exploring several distinct causes of loneliness with the help of concrete (including real-life) examples. Then, after reflecting on the features of human existence to which loneliness calls our attention, I will suggest that loneliness, although painful, may have positive potential. As an experience that can reveal what and who matters to us, loneliness may offer opportunities for self-knowledge and meaningful personal transformation, depending on how we relate to it. Kaitlyn Creasy (CSU San Bernardino) Loneliness and Emotional Resonance COB 129 Friday, December 5, 3:30-5pm Loneliness is a painful feeling that arises when our desires for recognition or connection are not fulfilled (or are perceived to be unfulfilled). But there are many forms of meaningful recognition and countless forms of connection that we may need or desire, not all of which can be offered even by those who love and appreciate us. Building on my work on the importance of particular recognition and affirmation for assuaging loneliness, in this talk I explore what I call deep forms of recognition, affirmation, and personal connection, forms that necessarily involve emotional engagement or experiences of emotional resonance. I then contend that these deep forms of recognition, affirmation, and connection, when present, play a distinctive role in the amelioration of loneliness: they allow the individual to feel more at home in her world, in part by allowing her to make (shared) sense of it. Finally, I show that attending to certain of the conditions that make these forms of recognition, affirmation, and connection possible-e.g., shared forms of life and complementary sensibilities between individuals helps us make sense of cases of loneliness tied to the presence or absence of particular empirical others. [Kaity Creasy Talk 2 Poster.jpeg][Kaitlyn Creasy.png] ----- Dan Hicks Associate Professor and Chair Department of Philosophy University of California, Merced Pronouns: they/them/their -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Kaity Creasy Talk 2 Poster.jpeg Type: image/jpeg Size: 123283 bytes Desc: Kaity Creasy Talk 2 Poster.jpeg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Kaitlyn Creasy.png Type: image/png Size: 379746 bytes Desc: Kaitlyn Creasy.png URL: