On May 6, Dr. Juričková held a 3-hours long workshop with the third year bachelor’s degree students of Badij Mohktar University in Annaba, Algeria, focused on friendship.

The session started with the description of pictures depicting groups of friends from film and television. The students had to identify who the pictured people are, what are their relations, and what personal qualities they display in interaction with each other.

This was followed by a discussion on what friendship is, what qualities are important in it, which form can it have, and lots more, where students were encouraged to share their own personal experience from/about frienships.

Afterwards, the students were presented with 4 philosophical accounts of friendship from different historical periods, from Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and C. S. Lewis. The students had to discuss which of the characteristics of friendship defined by these men are still relevant nowadays, in orderto observe that human relationship do not change that much throuought history, no matter how much the society develops technologically.

After a break, we continued with developing our own definitions / theories on friendship.

In the last activity, the students had to imagine a situation that a student from Slovakia would come to Annaba for an Erazmus exchange program for 6 months. They had to advise this student on how to find new friends in Annaba, what to do and not to do to find them, and how to maintain friendship with people back home.