Janelle Gormley will present her research on the nature of friendship at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) on Thursday, Oct. 29, 2026, at 4 p.m. The presentation, titled “The Unity of Friendship: Friendship as a Homeostatic Property Cluster,” will take place in Arts and Science Room 202.
Gormley is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of Philosophy.
Her research challenges traditional philosophical accounts that define friendship through a set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Instead, she proposes a homeostatic property cluster approach, which understands friendship as a collection of interconnected properties maintained through their relationships with one another and their surrounding environment.
Her presentation will also examine why this approach offers advantages over disjunctive and family resemblance theories. By proposing an alternative framework for understanding friendship, Gormley aims to explain how different features can constitute friendship without each being individually necessary in every instance.
