I begin to suggest an alternative to the notion of vision based in alienation and hostility put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. I diagnose this alienating vision as a result of a particular alienating notion of space presupposed by their theories. I develop lrigaray's comments about light and air to suggest an alternative notion of space that opens up the possibility that vision connects us to others rather than alienates us from them.

Examining, for a symposium on xenophilia, the views of some of the period’s most open-minded and tolerant thinkers, as well as the historical development of Christian writers’ treatment of Muslims, this article considers whether the term Islamophilia can be applied to any Christian’s attitudes during the Middle Ages. The analysis considers what qualifies as an expression of love for Muslims, the distinction between positive regard for Islam and positive regard for Muslims, and whether Islamophilia essentializes Muslims in the same (...) way that Islamophobia does. The author argues that any search for Christian Islamophilia must be broad enough to encompass evidence found in unexpected places. For instance, due to the Christian belief that Muslims who did not convert to Christianity would suffer eternally, a desire to convert them may well qualify as a stance of love toward them, despite the offense to modern sensibilities that such implies. Paradoxically, indifference toward Muslims’ religion, such as on the part of neighbors or business partners, might also have a place in a discussion of Islamophilia, precisely because it rejects essentialism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Looking at Love an Ethics of VisionMieke Bal (bio)Kaja Silverman. The Threshold Of The Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996.“The eye can confer the active gift of love upon bodies which have long been accustomed to neglect and disdain,” writes Kaja Silverman in her most recent book, The Threshold of the Visible World. The sentence neatly summarizes her project. “The active gift of love” is the (...) central concept of this book and indicative of the utopian dimension of the theory of love she develops.With Lacan as her primary interlocutor, she sets out to answer a question of one of her students: “does psychoanalysis have a theory of love?” Strange as it might seem, psychoanalysis, so often associated with an excessive interest in sexuality, has not seemed to believe in love. Within the rigorous framework of a discipline that has no use for love and theorizes a bleak view of human nature, Silverman sets out to think through the questions that every parent is at a loss, yet needs, to address: what is love, how can choices in love be culturally encouraged, reoriented, or discouraged? Lacan’s texts on the imaginary order and the visual field, and the imaginary’s stubborn presence within the symbolic order, remain a key resource for those who, like Silverman, wish to understand and analyze, critique and refocus contemporary culture with an eye open to contradictions and complexities. 1The ground for love, the ability to love, is idealization, Silverman claims. Without idealization life would be unbearable, but idealizing is influenced by cultural norms and values that we internalize from early childhood on. Silverman’s project—”to articulate the psychic and aesthetic conditions under which we might be carried away from both ideality and the self, and situated in an identificatory relation to [culturally] despised bodies” [2]—is an attempt to put pressure on two elements of this interaction, “idealization” and “self,” but as she does so she acknowledges the force of the transhistorical, heavy, thick structure of the psyche that is hard, if not impossible, to change.This project, the development of an “ethics of vision,” forms a key part within the larger framework of Silverman’s work. In her first book, The Subject of Semiotics, she argues for and explains the semiotic status of psychoanalysis and the indispensable contribution of psychoanalysis to semiotics. The book remains a valuable handbook for an understanding of the importance of such divergent theorists as De Saussure and Benveniste, Kristeva and Peirce, Freud and Lacan, and the theorists of suture for a coherent and comprehensive theory of culture. One example that will speak to many a cultural analyst is the way Silverman disentangles, and then connects again, the often conflated conceptual pairs of metaphor and metonymy, condensation and displacement, and paradigm and syntagma, showing that the first pair is situated on the level of interactions between the signifier and [End Page 59] the signified, the second on the level of the signified, and the third on the level of the structuration of the signifier. 2With this book, then, Silverman lays the foundation for a psychoanalytical semiotic that is nevertheless radically cultural in orientation: no conflation or confusion of psyche and culture, no flattening of the one through the other, but an integration that demonstrates convincingly that what happens within a psyche is irrevocably cultural and that every cultural expression entertains a relationship with one or more psyches. The structural similarities and interactions between the two then seem self-evident. But how these interactions work is explained in a manner that renders them analyzable.Silverman is in the habit of raising questions that remain unanswered, and devoting her next book to them. The Subject devoted much attention and analytical energy to filmic images, notably through suture theory, in which the technique of “shot-reverse shot” is central. This technique consists of successive images: first of a character looking at something, and then of what that character presumably sees. This would be the cinematic equivalent of what narratology calls transitions of focalization, likewise a technique used to “suture” image to diegetic character in order to stimulate identification. As in narratology, the question then arises: what exactly... (shrink)

This article investigates the role of shame in shaping the epistolary form and aesthetic structure of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I argue that the epistolary framing presents a crisis in the development of Celie's shamed self‐consciousness. To explain the connection between shame and Celie's self‐consciousness, I build on Jean Paul Sartre's theory of existentialism and explore three phases of Celie's evolution as it is represented in three phrases that I identify as significant transitions in the text: “I am,” “But (...) I'm here,” and “It mine.” The first section examines how shame fractures Celie's self‐consciousness; the second focuses on how Celie positions and locates herself in the world; and the third explains how Celie mobilizes shame by connecting her self‐consciousness to a past that is shameful but also generative. I conclude by considering the novel's emergence in the Cosby/Reagan era in order to illuminate the mutual constitution of black familial pride and black racial shame. (shrink)

The star-nosed mole is aptly named. Its distinctive snout consists of 22 tendrils ringing a pair of nostrils and, from some angles, the entire setup resembles a misshapen star. The tendrils are fleshy and look a bit like fingers, and, like fingers, they have a certain dexterity. But why? Why does the mole have such a singular appendage as opposed to something more ordinary? What is the function or purpose of this bizarre structure? From the dedicated work of Ken (...) Catania, of Vanderbilt University, and colleagues, it appears that the appendage facilitates rapid handling of small prey items, making it advantageous for an organism whose diet consists of tiny invertebrates. We might therefore hazard that this feature arose evolutionarily because it conferred this benefit. But the matter is difficult to resolve, because current utility does not permit a straightforward inference of a reason for existence. -/- A correction has been published: BioScience, Volume 72, Issue 7, July 2022, Page 708. (shrink)

This article analyses reaction to the ideologically inspired murder of a soldier, Lee Rigby, in central London by two converts to Islam, Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo. The focus of the analysis is upon the contrast between how the event was reacted to by the UK National Press and on social media. To explore this contrast, we undertook a corpus-assisted discourse analysis to look at three periods during the event: the initial attack, the verdict of the subsequent trial and (...) the sentencing of the murderers. To do this, we constructed and analysed corpora of press and Twitter coverage of the attack, the conviction of the suspects and the sentencing of them. The analysis shows that social media and the press are intertwined, with the press exerting a notable influence through social media, but social media not always being led by the press. When looking at social media reaction to such an event as this, analysts should always consider the role that the press are playing in forming that discourse. (shrink)

We live in a world which is more connected than ever before. We can now send messages to a friend or colleague with a touch of a button, can learn about other’s interests before we even meet them, and now leave a digital trail behind us—whether we intend to or not. One question which, in proportion to its importance, has been asked quite infrequently since the dawn of the Internet era involves exactly how meaningful all of these connections are. To (...) what extent can we love another if we only communicate via social technology? What value does visiting a friend have which e-mailing him or texting him does not? “Social Media, Love, and the Look of the Other” attempts to answer these questions by applying the framework of social communication established by Jean-Paul Sartre to the realm of social media. Sartre writes that in all communications with the other, we face the look of the other—or our own perception of how the other judges us. The direction in which the look points determines, to a large degree, the character of any interaction with others. How does social media affect the nature of this look? Particularly, this inquiry seeks to discover the nature of the object to which this look points—and what implications, in cases where the look is not directed at ourselves, this has on our ability to develop and share concern for others. (shrink)

In a short piece written most likely in the 1690s and given the title by Loemker of “On Wisdom,” Leibniz says the following: “...we see that happiness, pleasure, love, perfection, being, power, freedom, harmony, order, and beauty are all tied to each other, a truth which is rightly perceived by few.”1 Why is this? That is, why or how are these concepts tied to each other? And, why have so few understood this relation? Historians of philosophy are familiar with (...) the fact that both Spinoza and Leibniz place strong emphasis on the notion of power in giving their accounts of the human passions. But, while many scholars have explicated the relation between power and the passions (especially in Spinoza’s philosophy), there has been considerably less attention given to the nature of perfection and its relation to both power and the passions.2 Consider the following passages from Spinoza and Leibniz in which these two thinkers seem to bring together the issue of perfection and passion. In Ethics IIIp11s, Spinoza says the following: We see, then, that the Mind can undergo great changes, and pass now to a greater, now to a lesser perfection. These passions, indeed, explain to us the affects of Joy and Sadness. By Joy, therefore, I shall understand in what follows that passion by which the Mind passes to a greater perfection. And by Sadness, that passion by which it passes to a lesser perfection. The affect of Joy which is related to the Mind and Body at once I call Pleasure or Cheerfulness, and that of Sadness, Pain or Melancholy.3 And, in the Monadology §49, Leibniz says this: “The creature is said to act externally insofar as it is perfect, and to be acted upon [patir] by another, insofar as it is imperfect.”4 In other words, for Spinoza, the primitive passions of joy and sadness are cases in which a being’s perfection is increasing or decreasing, while, for Leibniz, any passion, it would.. (shrink)

Reductive explanations are psychologically seductive; when given two explanations, people prefer the one that refers to lower-level components or processes to account for the phenomena under consideration even when information about these lower levels is irrelevant (Hopkins, Weisberg, and Taylor 2016). Maybe individuals assume that a reductive explanation is what a scientific explanation should look like (e.g., neuroscience should explain psychology) or presume that information about lower-level components or processes is more explanatory (e.g., molecular detail explains better than anatomical (...) detail). Philosophers have been analyzing reduction for more than half a century (Hüttemann and Love 2016), but neither of these possibilities is a consensus view (even if psychologically applicable). Instead, there is widespread agreement that the landscape of reductionism is complicated, especially in biology (Brigandt and Love 2017). Increasing scrutiny of actual practices within biology and other sciences has often provoked the questions (paraphrasing Alasdair MacIntyre): Whose explanation? Which reductionism? Marie Kaiser’s book—Reductive Explanation in the Biological Sciences—is a decisive intervention into these discussions, offering a wealth of helpful distinctions and new analyses with a healthy focus on scientific practices of explanation. (shrink)

In this paper, I endeavor to provide a critical examination of a recent pioneering work that engages Jean-Paul Sartre’s insights in analyzing social media interactions – Michael Lopato’s “Social media, love, and Sartre’s look of the other: Why online communication is not fulfilling?”. I shall show that in so far as Sartrean insights are concerned in Being and Nothingness, Lopato misconstrued what Sartre really meant with the Look of the Other and love, and is mistaken in (...) appropriating such insights in arguing that online interactions are not fulfilling. I shall proceed by first discussing Sartre’s third region of being which is being-for-others which will comprise of the Look of the Other and the two attitudes to retrieve one’s freedom. Second, I shall flesh out the arguments of Lopato. Lastly, I shall present my critique of Lopato’s arguments which constitutes my reply to his work. (shrink)

Lantian et al.’s (2024) “Prescription for Love” target article raises fascinating issues concerning the use of love drugs to strengthen and/or maintain love in romantic relationships. The conclusio...

ABSTRACTThe Jewish-Catholic philosopher and Carmelite Edith Stein offers a rich notion of love, based on an original phenomenology, which resulted from an active engagement with her teachers Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, and was later enriched and deepened by incorporating religious philosophical and theological ideas. In order to locate Stein’s original thinking, the essay will first introduce the two thinkers by whom she was most clearly influenced, and show how Stein contrasted the ‘nothing’, as it is presented in Husserl’s (...) other pupil Martin Heidegger’s existentialist analysis, with the fullness of being to which the human person aspires, and which is given through love. Her phenomenological thinking, based on the intersubjective approach to its object, ultimately leads Stein to a triple philosophical statement about love: Love is a principle of being, a principle of knowledge and a principle of relationship. The passage through theology verifies what has been said philosophically about its relationship to God, in whom love ultimately finds its completion. The three basic principles of love complement and correct each other, to the point not only of issuing in an analysis of the phenomenon ‘love’ but of also opening up an ethics of love. (shrink)

This volume features original essays on the philosophy of love. The essays are organized thematically around the past, present, and future of philosophical thinking about love. In section I, the contributors explore what we can learn from the history of philosophical thinking about love. The chapters cover Ancient Greek thinkers, namely Plato and Aristotle, as well as Kierkegaard's critique of preferential love and Erich Fromm's mystic interpretation of sexual relations. Section II covers current conceptions and practices (...) of love. These chapters explore how love changes over time, the process of falling in love, envy in romantic partnerships, and a new interpretation of grand-parental love. Finally, Section III looks at the future of love. These chapters address technological developments related to love, such as algorithm-driven dating apps and robotic companions, as well as the potential of polyamory as a future romantic ideal. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in moral philosophy and social and political philosophy who are working on issues related to philosophy of love. (shrink)

Within the corporate social responsibility research field, the construct of organizational reputation has been extensively scrutinized as a crucial mediator between the firm CSR engagement and valuable organizational outcomes. Yet, the existing literature on organizational reputation suffers from substantive divergence between the studies in terms of defining the construct’s domain, dimensional structure, and the methodological operationalization. The current study aims to refine the organizational reputation construct by reconciling varying theoretical perspectives within the construct’s definitional landscape, suggesting a holistic but parsimonious (...) triadic view on the organizational reputation construct for customer stakeholders. Based on commonly used extant organizational reputation measures, we theoretically and empirically develop the customer-based triadic organizational reputation scale and position it as a superordinate multidimensional construct influencing three distinct first-order dimensions: product and service efficacy, societal ethicality, and market prominence. Results show that the proposed triadic conceptualization of organizational reputation is theoretically defensible, and the resulting scale is cross-culturally generalizable and performs well compared with existing, longer measures of organizational reputation. Together, the organizational reputation model developed here suggests that, for cognitive economy and functional efficiency, customers will access a second-order reflective model of organizational reputation as the default implicit attitude, which in turn will activate reflections of the implicit attitude in the form of first-order dimensions. (shrink)

This book discusses the complexities of love and the nature of erotic passion as these appear in the great love stories of the world. Starting with the story of Romeo and Juliet and its roots in European Christianity, the authors uncover hidden depths of cultural and universal significance in famous romantic tales of the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent-'Layla and Majnun', 'Heer and Ranjha', 'Sohni and Mahinwal', 'Vis and Ramin', and 'Radha and Krishna'. Moving westward again, Kakar (...) and Ross look at the Greek myth of Oedipus, the Celtic saga of Tristan and Isolde, the tragic drama of Hamlet, the legend of Phaedra and Hippolytus, and a contemporary handling of the love theme in the writings of Vladimir Nabokov. This new edition, published after 25 years of the first edition, includes an Epilogue which re-evaluates the authors' assertions about romantic and erotic love in the context of contemporary psychoanalysis and modern literary theory. (shrink)

For Erasmus, the two fountains streaming milky juice—a new mother’s breasts—represent powerful symbols of love and authority. Erasmus describes the mother’s breasts as fountains oozing love to the sucking child. Elizabeth Clinton extends the image of Mother to represent God, reminding the nursing mother that when she looks on her sucking child, she should remember that she is God’s new born babe, sucking His instruction and His word, even as the babe sucks her breast. Dorothy Leigh extends the (...) image of the nursing mother to an image of Christ himself. Mother’s love, especially a breast-feeding or “lying in” mother’s love, is one of the most authoritatively gendered representations of love. Issues of gender and authority converge often around the image of the breast-feeding mother. Drawing on the image of the nursing mother, Dorothy Leigh and other early modern writers actively engaged in the most contentious and public debates of their day, including the authority of men, preachers and kings. (shrink)

In search of our highest capacities, cognitive scientists aim to explain things like mathematics, language, and planning. But are these really our most sophisticated forms of knowing? In this paper, I point to a different pinnacle of cognition. Our most sophisticated human knowing, I think, lies in how we engage with each other, in our relating. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind have largely ignored the ways of knowing at play here. At the same time, the emphasis on discrete, rational (...) knowing to the detriment of engaged, human knowing pervades societal practices and institutions, often with harmful effects on people and their relations. There are many reasons why we need a new, engaged—or even engaging—epistemology of human knowing. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making takes steps towards this, but it needs deepening. Kym Maclaren’s idea of letting be invites such a deepening. Characterizing knowing as a relationship of letting be provides a nuanced way to deal with the tensions between the knower’s being and the being of the known, as they meet in the process of knowing-and-being-known. This meeting of knower and known is not easy to understand. However, there is a mode of relating in which we know it well, and that is: in loving relationships. I propose to look at human knowing through the lens of loving. We then see that both knowing and loving are existential, dialectic ways in which concrete and particular beings engage with each other. (shrink)

A psychoanalyst looks at the portrayal of love in poems from Homer to Shakespeare, discusses Freud's writings on love, and examines the relationship between narcissism and love.

This introductory philosophy text offers a clear, concise look at six major ideas of love: erotic love, Christian love, romantic love, moral love, love as power, and mutual love.

The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love offers a wide array of original essays on the nature and value of love. The editors, Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts, have assembled an esteemed group of thinkers, including both established scholars and younger voices. The volume contains thirty-three essays addressing both issues about love as well as key philosophers who have contributed to the philosophy of love, such as Plato, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Murdoch. The topics range from (...) central issues about the nature and variety of love, the possibility of its rational justification, and whether it is an emotion, to the significance of love for law, economics, morality, and free will. The volume also contains an introduction to the subject as well as essays on love’s relation to jealousy, biotechnology, religion, knowledge, and several other topics. This wide-ranging handbook will be a key resource for specialists working on the philosophy of love, and a helpful guide for those looking to learn more about the area. (shrink)

J. David Velleman has argued that what it makes sense to care about out of love for someone is the unimpeded realisation of her autonomy. Although Velleman refers to both Kantian and perfectionist notions of autonomy, a close look at his argument shows that the form of autonomy that he employs actually amounts instead to personal autonomy. I argue that there are in fact no value constraints on the objects of autonomous choice on this account of autonomy. The (...) upshot of this claim is that a person may exercise personal autonomy without satisfying many other important normative demands. This suggests that Velleman’s endorsement of the unimpeded realisation of one’s beloved’s autonomy is wrong, insofar as a beloved’s autonomous choice may, in securing her personal interests, thwart her achievement of important goods, especially moral goods. In such cases, we have reason to hinder the unimpeded realisation of our beloved’s autonomy, precisely out of love for her. (shrink)

"[L]ove is not merely a contributor - one among others - to meaningful life. In its own way it may underlie all other forms of meaning....by its very nature love is the principal means by which creatures like us seek affective relations to persons, things, or ideals that have value and importance for us. I. The Look of Love.

This book is in fact a kind of mosaic, composed from both a concluding act and an act of commencement.

Downton Abbey is, at its most basic, a story driven by intimate, romantic relationships: Mary and Matthew, Bates and Anna, Sybil and Branson, Lord and Lady Grantham, and many others. As viewers, we root for (or against) these characters as they fall in love, quarrel, break up, reconcile, have children, and deal with separation and death. But what do we get out of this? Is it merely an emotional “rush,” or is it something more meaningful? In this essay, I’ll (...) attempt to answer this question by examining how the relationships portrayed in Downton Abbey might look to the characters of Plato’s Symposium, one of the first (and most famous) philosophical treatments of love. The residents of Downtown Abbey provide ideal models for exploring and critiquing the various “theories of love” offered by the Symposium’s characters. Thomas’s defense of James, for example, provides a great illustration of Phaedrus’s claim about the relationship between love and courage, while Mary’s early struggles illuminate Pausanias’s suggestion that “pure” love can be achieved only by following (well-designed) social rules. By contrast, Bates and Anna help give content to Aristophanes’ s idea that love involves finding your “missing half,” while Carson’s and Mrs. Hughes’ relationship exemplify the sort of “order” celebrated by Eryximachus. Edith, for her part, seems to have fallen for Agathon’s sophistical claim that romantic love can only truly be experienced by the young and beautiful. Finally, Socrates’s famous account of the “ladder of love” can be seen most vividly in the transformative relationship of Sybil and Bronson. Along the way, we’ll consider what is really meant by “Platonic love,” and consider what the characters of Downton Abbey can teach about this invaluable philosophical concept. (shrink)

"In this concluding volume of his impressive study of the history of Western thought about the nature of love, Irving Singer reviews the principal efforts that have been made by 20th-Century thinkers to analyze the phenomenon of love.... [T]he bulk of the book is taken up with critical accounts of the modern thinkers who have systematically called into question the possibility itself of love as a union of distinct human selves. For the most part, these critiques are (...) effectively executed, and they bring a high level of critical acumen to bear on skeptical theses about love that are now too often accepted as truisms."—Frederick A. Olafson, _Los Angeles Times Book Review_ "Irving Singer... has developed a method of historical analysis flexible enough to deal with all kinds of love, from Greek homosexual love in Plato, to the _philia_ and _agape_ of the New Testament, to the courtly love of medieval romance, to the Romantics, for whom love was magic.... [This] final volume brings us to the present. In 'The Modern World,' Singer offers readings of Freud, Proust, and Sartre, among others. He shows how their work was formed in reaction to the 19th-century ideal of 'merging' of the identities of lover and beloved. More often than not, the great modern writers portray love as impossible, as a field of failure and regret.... This masterpiece of critical thinking is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round."—Thomas D'Evelyn, _Christian Science Monitor_ "This is the third of a three-volume history of the philosophy of love. It begins with Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and treats Freud, Proust, Bergson, D. H. Lawrence, G. B. Shaw, Santayana, Sartre, and others in the twentieth. Although the author's approach is primarily historical, he intersperses critical remarks throughout. Most of the major themes which are discussed by philosophers of love make their way into this history, including friendship, sexual love, and the distinction between love that is based on the value of the beloved and love that bestows value on the beloved. Singer devotes a number of pages to his own views on falling in love, being in love, and staying in love.... Singer's exposition is lucid and organized; his criticisms are insightful."—_Ethics_ "In this third volume of historical overview of the development of the Western conception of love, Singer uses writers, philosophers, and psychologists to provide the reader with an overview of love in the late 19th and 20th century.... Analyzing authors such as Tolstoy, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, and Shaw and philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Santayana, as well as Freud, Singer... links each contributor's thoughts to the influence of previous writers and also provides some psycho-historical insight into their personal lives that might have been either a source or direct result of their views. In this final volume, Singer proceeds to look at not just the 'great men' influence but also provides a chapter overviewing scientific contributions to our understanding of love.... Singer's work is a significant contribution to understanding the social construction of important, abstract social and personal values. By tracing love through different historical periods through a variety of voices, Singer has created a rich history of the struggle between the ideal and the real, between the dreams of what love should provide and the reality of what relationships have been in each historical period. By personalizing the voice through psychohistorical analysis, Singer also provides insight into the shaping of ideas through the intimate struggles of the shapers."—Mark V. Chaffee, _Contemporary Psychology_. (shrink)

This article looks at the discourses of love through an analysis of the ‘stratification of intimacy’ within lesbian families. I suggest that traditional discourses of love effectively reify our emotions into socially prescribed categories, where ‘mature love’ is conflated with sex and desire. The love that mothers feel for their child is set apart, ‘instinctive’, wholly separate to adult love. However this ‘stratification of intimacy’ obscures the lived experiences and feelings of many parents. In this (...) article the author argues that whom we love is culturally constituted: it is unnecessarily quantified whereby monogamy is read as the sign of true love. I illustrate how lesbian mothers’ location on the social margins enables them to construct new ‘patterns of love’ within their ‘families of choice’ in ways that challenge these traditional discourses of love. This theoretical analysis is based upon ‘patterned variations’ drawn from qualitative research with 20 lesbian families with children living within the Yorkshire region in the UK. (shrink)

In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre explains love as a strategy for achieving control over "being-for-others," the objectified aspect of the self-imposed by others' defining looks. Two contemporaneous fictions by Sartre, The Room (1939) and Dirty Hands (1948), expand the notions of love and of being-for-others in surprising directions. Dirty Hands shows the creative, productive potential of being-for-others: Hugo's reliance on the other for his self-definition paradoxically generates his decisive embrace of being for-itself. The Room dramatizes the role (...) of the family in constituting a child's subjectivity: Eve's family situation explains her ontological imprisonment in the dimension of being-for-others. The two stories' tolerant vision of the complex social and psychological reasons for adopting being-for-others as one's dominant modality contrasts with Sartre's rigorous critique of reliance on being-for-others as a form of bad faith in Being and Nothingness. The fictions' enlarged perspective on human love and on being-for-others provides a framework for complicating and critiquing the ontological categories presented in Being and Nothingness. (shrink)

Explore the importance of love with the youngest readers in a wonderfully accessible way. Even little children have big questions about life. Plato believed showing and receiving love makes us wise, and Love with Plato brings his philosophy to the youngest thinkers. Asking young readers what being loved feels like to them and how they can show others love prompts questions about how we treat one another and ourselves. This book will lead to inspiring conversations about (...) loving people for what is on the inside, and helping others do the same. Look for all six Big Ideas for Little Philosophers board books: Equality with Simone de Beauvoir, Happiness with Aristotle,Imagination with René Descartes, Kindness with Confucius, Love with Plato, and Truth with Socrates. (shrink)

While Kierkegaard creates characters who represent various ways of existing as lovers in the aesthetic and the ethical spheres, namely, Johannes the Seducer and Judge William, he does not have a corresponding character for love in the religious sphere. Is there truly only marginal space for romantic love in Kierkegaard’s religious sphere, or did his own personal history prevent him from being able to imagine what that might look like? This paper examines a commonly overlooked discourse, “On (...) the Occasion of a Wedding,” for Kierkegaardian insights on erotic love in the religious sphere. Against understanding erotic love as a moment (in the aesthetic sphere), or a duty (in the ethical sphere), this paper explores how “On the Occasion of a Wedding” recasts erotic love as gift. Kierkegaard stages the “imagined occasion” of a wedding as a phenomenological reduction through which love presents itself with gift‐like characteristics. Respecting the gift‐status of love transforms the lover into a grateful recipient rather than a seducer or a conqueror. This paper concludes that the proper response to love as gift would be neither to refuse it in favor of nihilistic uncertainty nor to possess it through triumphalistic objectivity, but to humbly embrace both its “already” and its “not yet” dimensions. (shrink)

McTaggart takes love seriously. He rejects rival accounts that look to reduce love to pleasure, moral approbation or a fitting response to someone’s qualities. In addition, he thinks that love reveals something about the structure of the universe, and that in absolute reality, we could all love each other. In this paper, I follow McTaggart in his rejection of rival accounts of love, but distance myself from his own account of love in absolute (...) reality. I argue that in claiming that we could all love each other, he fails to adequately account for an important part of the phenomena of love, namely chemistry. (shrink)

"[L]ove is not merely a contributor - one among others - to meaningful life. In its own way it may underlie all other forms of meaning....by its very nature love is the principal means by which creatures like us seek affective relations to persons, things, or ideals that have value and importance for us. I. The Look of Love.

Why do people enter devoted relationships when they can continue looking for better partners? The “strategic ignorance” account holds that remaining ignorant about alternative partners is a signal that you are a high‐quality partner. Despite this intuition, the authors show that evolution favors a “look while allowing your partner to look” strategy, unless the costs of being rejected by a looking partner are extremely high. Thus, the origins of love must be found elsewhere.

Luminaries like Martin Luther King, Jr. urge that Black Americans love even those who hate them. This can look like a rejection of anger at racial injustice. We see this rejection, too, in the growing trend of characterizing social justice movements as radical hate groups, and people who get angry at injustice as bitter and unloving. Philosophers like Martha Nussbaum argue that anger is backward-looking, status focused, and retributive. Citing the life of the Prodigal Son, the victims of (...) the Charleston Church shooting, Gandhi, and King, she claims that we should choose love instead of anger – not only in our intimate relationships but also in the political realm. Buddhist monk and scholar, Śāntideva, argued that anger is an obstacle to love. Anger leads to suffering. Love frees us from suffering. All this makes an initially compelling case against anger at racial injustice. In addition, although philosophers Jeffrie Murphy and Antti Kauppinen argue that anger communicates self-respect and valuing, respectively––they make no connection between agape love and anger. In this essay I’ll show that the love King and others have in mind––agape love––is not only compatible with anger at hateful racists and complicit others, but finds valuable expression in such anger. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love offers a wide array of original essays on the nature and value of love. The editors, Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts, have assembled an esteemed group of thinkers, including both established scholars and younger voices. The volume contains thirty-three essays addressing both issues about love as well as key philosophers who have contributed to the philosophy of love, such as Plato, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Murdoch. The topics range from central (...) issues about the nature and variety of love, the possibility of its rational justification, and whether it is an emotion, to the significance of love for law, economics, morality, and free will. The volume also contains an introduction to the subject as well as essays on love’s relation to jealousy, biotechnology, religion, knowledge, and several other topics. This wide-ranging handbook will be a key resource for specialists working on the philosophy of love, and a helpful guide for those looking to learn more about the area. (shrink)

Can posthumous love be rationally comprehensible for us to talk about? In this research article, I look into some Renaissance writings on Christian ethics that talk about posthumous love as if there are some virtues in it that deserve to be praised. I try to show that the most notable virtues that can be seen in posthumous love are honesty in love as well as the intention to keep a promise to cherish the eternal (...) class='Hi'>love in married couples even after their death. If it is accepted that posthumous love is considered a morally rational virtue for these Renaissance Christian writers, there will still be a question, namely, on what criterion it should be based for us to talk about that promise. In this article, I show that the reverence of true love and faithfulness in love can be found in medieval Christian and Renaissance philosophy throughout Christian theological writings, especially in Robert Grosseteste’s notion of caritas. Next, I argue, based on Nicholas Rescher’s definition of rationality as human resource and Huw Price’s anthropological explanative power of concepts, that keeping a promise of posthumous love is a rational virtue. My argument is based on an idea that rationality is durable. This is because, as I will also argue, love is invincible. durability thesis of rationality reflected in the invincibility-of-love thesis through Rescher’s erotetic principle in metaphysical questioning strengthened with Price’s respond-dependence. (shrink)

Can posthumous love be rationally comprehensible for us to talk about? In this research article, I look into some Renaissance writings on Christian ethics that talk about posthumous love as if there are some virtues in it that deserve to be praised. I try to show that the most notable virtues that can be seen in posthumous love are honesty in love as well as the intention to keep a promise to cherish the eternal (...) class='Hi'>love in married couples even after their death. If it is accepted that posthumous love is considered a morally rational virtue for these Renaissance Christian writers, there will still be a question, namely, on what criterion it should be based for us to talk about that promise. In this article, I show that the reverence of true love and faithfulness in love can be found in medieval Christian and Renaissance philosophy throughout Christian theological writings, especially in Robert Grosseteste’s notion of caritas. Next, I argue, based on Nicholas Rescher’s definition of rationality as human resource and Huw Price’s anthropological explanative power of concepts, that keeping a promise of posthumous love is a rational virtue. My argument is based on an idea that rationality is durable. This is because, as I will also argue, love is invincible. durability thesis of rationality reflected in the invincibility-of-love thesis through Rescher’s erotetic principle in metaphysical questioning strengthened with Price’s respond-dependence. (shrink)

Philosophers have long been interested in love and its general role in morality. This volume focuses on and explores the complex relation between love and justice as it appears within loving relationships, between lovers and their wider social context, and the broader political realm. Special attention is paid to the ensuing challenge of understanding and respecting the lovers’ personal autonomy in all three contexts. Accordingly, the essays in this volume are divided into three thematic sections. Section I aims (...) at shedding further light on conceptual and practical issues concerning the compatibility or incompatibility of love and justice within relationships of love. For example, are loving relations inherently unjust? Might love require justice? Or do love and justice belong to distinct moral domains? The essays in Section II consider the relation between the lovers on the one hand and their broader societal environment on the other. Specifically, how exactly are love and impartiality related? Are they compatible or not? Is it unjust to favor one’s beloved? Finally, Section III looks at the political dimensions of love and justice. How, for instance, do various accounts of love inform how we are to relate to our fellow citizens? If love is taken to play an important role in fostering or hindering the development of personal autonomy, what are the political implications that need to be addressed, and how? In addressing these questions, this book engenders a better understanding both of conceptual and practical issues regarding the relation between love, justice, and autonomy as well as their broader societal and political implications. It will be of interest to advanced students and scholars working on the philosophy of love from ethical, political, and psychological angles. (shrink)

In the philosophy of love, the possibility of loving a non-human animal is rarely acknowledged and often explicitly denied. And yet, loving a non-human animal is very common. Evidently, then, there is something wrong with both “human-focused” accounts (e.g. Niko Kolodny, Troy Jollimore), which assume we can only love human beings, and “person-focused” accounts (e.g. David Velleman, Bennett Helm), which understand the nature of love in terms of its being essentially directed toward those with a capacity for (...) normative self-reflection (i.e. “persons”). Even aside from the experiences of those who love a non-human animal, on which I draw, we already have reason to be worried about these latter, “person-focused,” views, insofar as they deny the possibility of loving the various human beings who do not meet their criteria for “personhood,” including at least some human beings with “severe” or “profound” cognitive disabilities. With this in mind, I argue that what we need is the (broader) notion of a “somebody” as a distinctive kind of love-object. This is the notion of a kind of presence of which we are acutely aware when, for example, we look into another’s eyes and see that there is “somebody home.” With this presence, there is a possibility of “togetherness,” and I suggest that it is precisely in the realm of togetherness that the possibility of love arises; the kind of love we speak of when we speak of loving our friends, family and romantic partners, and also, I argue, our animal companions. (shrink)

Processing of emotional speech in the absence of visual information relies on two auditory channels: semantics and prosody. No study to date has investigated how blindness impacts this process. Two theories, Perceptual Deficit, and Sensory Compensation, yiled different expectations about the role of visual experience (or its lack thereof) in processing emotional speech. To test the effect of vision and early visual experience on processing of emotional speech, we compared individuals with congenital blindness (CB, n = 17), individuals with late (...) blindness (LB, n = 15), and sighted controls (SC, n = 21) on identification and selective-attention of semantic and prosodic spoken-emotions. Results showed that individuals with blindness performed at least as well as SC, supporting Sensory Compensation and the role of cortical reorganisation. Individuals with LB outperformed individuals with CB, in accordance with Perceptual Deficit, supporting the role of early visual experience. The LB advantage was moderated by executive functions (working-memory). Namely, the advantage was erased for individuals with CB who showed higher levels of executive functions. Results suggest that vision is not necessary for processing of emotional speech, but early visual experience could improve it. The findings support a combination of the two aforementioned theories and reject a dichotomous view of deficiencies/enhancements of blindness. (shrink)

Most philosophers would agree that loving one’s romantic partner (i.e., being in love) is, in principle, a good thing. That is, romantic love can be valuable. It seems plausible that most would then think that the process leading to being in love—i.e. falling in love—can be valuable too. Surprisingly, that is not the case: among philosophers, falling in love has a bad reputation. Whereas philosophy of love has started to depart from traditional (and often (...) unwarranted or false) tropes surrounding romantic life, this tendency has not yet reached the analysis of falling in love. The phenomenon continues to be looked at mostly through a compendium of generalisations taken as metaphysical truths—the view of falling in love being akin to “losing one’s mind” or “not being able to think about anything else”. Here, I analyse some of these generalisations to show that although they may reflect some experiences of what falling in love feels like, they wrongly reduce falling in love to two related, but distinct, phenomena: limerence and infatuation. My aim is to refine the current terminology to lay the foundations for a neutral view of falling in love. (shrink)

A brief philological look at a key argument in Plato’s “Lysis” reveals Plato’s philosophical interpretation of generic love, or ‘philia’, to be an asymmetrical form of possessive desire, where the interests of the self predominate.

This paper focuses on the relationship between love (romantic, friendship) and moral integrity. More specifically, it looks into the conditions that need to be satisfied for the two to conflict with each other. After giving a general characterization of moral integrity and explaining some crucial moral aspects of love, both culled from the literature on integrity and on love, I provide two cases of couples whose love clashes with their integrity, one of a vegan in (...) class='Hi'>love with a non-vegan, and another of a pro-choicer in love with a pro-lifer. I then argue that love and integrity conflict when the following conditions are satisfied: (1) the lover's integrity tracks real and worthwhile values; (2) these values are important to the lover; (3) these values are contrary to those of the beloved's; (4) the beloved acts on the beloved's values; and (5) the lover cannot justify the beloved's values. I conclude with some remarks about the actual satisfaction of these conditions—on how frequently such conflicts occur. (shrink)

This is the English translation of Chapters Two and Three of Painless Civilization, which was published in Japanese in 2003. In this volume, I examine the problems of painless civilization from the perspective of philosophical psychology and ethics. I discuss how the essence of love is transformed in a society moving toward painlessness and how the painless stream penetrates each of us and makes us living corpses. In order to tackle the problems of painless civilization, we must look (...) inside our inner world because the “desire of the body” that lurks within us is the ultimate cause of our society’s movement toward painlessness. Love and the meaning of life are the central topics of discussion in the following chapters. Because the original manuscript was written in 1998, the discussion of social issues may seem slightly dated, especially when it comes to reproductive technologies and juvenile delinquency, but I believe my central argument here has not aged at all; on the contrary, I think the times have finally caught up with my theory of painless civilization. I hope readers will join me in thinking deeply about the essence of contemporary civilization. (Painless Civilization 1 is also available on PhilPapers.) . (shrink)

In Solo: A Star Wars Story, the debonair Lando Calrissian is clearly in love with the artificially intelligent droid L3‐37. There are lots of friendships between droids and humans in Star Wars. This chapter looks at the relationship between Lando and L3‐37 in Solo and argues that they exhibit all the hallmarks not just of friendship, but of love. A friendship between people who both seek to gain from the relationship is one of utility, while a friendship between (...) people who simply enjoy each other's company is one of pleasure. Droids are the kinds of beings that can be good friends, as is clearly supported throughout the Star Wars canon. One potential concern is that droids smarter than humans might take advantage of an inferior organic life form by having a sexual relationship with them. (shrink)

What does Le Premier Homme bring specifically to our understanding of Camus’s view of love? The novel allows us to understand love as love of specific human individuals, as well as love of life and the world, and a sense of the frailties of love. While many commentaries have touched on the idea of the importance of love in this work, they have tended to focus more on the disguised autobiographical elements concerning the people (...) in Camus’s life. They have also centred on the descriptive aspects of the work. What I would like to do is look at how love is presented in more depth, and show how specific kinds of love are valorized, and how these different kinds of love are all connected. (shrink)

In I Love to You , Luce Irigaray moves from the critique of patriarchy to an exploration of the ground for a possible inter-subjectivity between the two sexes. Continuing her rejection of demands for equality, Irigaray poses the question: how can we move to a new era of sexual difference in which women and men establish lasting relations with one another without reducing the other to the status of object? Drawing upon Hegel, Irigaray proposes a dialectic appropriate to each (...) sex as well as a dialectic of their relation. She argues for what she calls "sexed rights" and a right of persons based on the right to life, not the right to property. Using the results of her research into the sexing of language, Irigaray analyzes how women seek communication in discourse with the other--an other, pre-occupied with his abstract or concrete object, who does not respond. She proposes another syntax for communication, one that does not incorporate the other as the object of the subject but allows for an indirect relation. Thus "I love to you" replaces "I love you." In Irigaray's vision of the happiness possible in sexual difference, the love between a man and a woman finds its "reason" not in property or children, but in its own place within the couple. Arguing passionately for a new language of personal relations, I Love to You looks toward a future where nihilism can be overcome by "love in sexual difference.". (shrink)