The Rationality of Love addresses the question whether love belongs, paradoxically enough, to the realm of reason, whether love belongs to the class of responses, such as belief and action, that admit of norms of justification and rationality. Are there normative reasons to love someone? Can love be an appropriate or fitting response to an individual? Or is love, like perceptual experiences, sensations, and urges, the sort of thing we just have and (...) for which we cannot be normatively criticizable? Ordinary thinking about love seems to pull us in different directions. On the one hand, love—involving as it does lots of non-rational elements—seems to be a good example of a response we shouldn’t assess in terms of rationality. On the other hand, we find it appropriate or fitting to love certain things and not others, and we are not reluctant to ask ourselves why we love certain people. This book defends the view that love is subject to normative standards by carefully assessing the various answers to the normative question about love and by providing its own solution. An extensive critical discussion of the so-called ‘no-reasons’ view of love is given, which helps uncover important issues to be tackled by any advocate of the rationality of love. In addition, the discussion is informed by the philosophy of normativity, an area often neglected in the debate. All in all, this book provides a systematic and up-to-date discussion of a central issue in the philosophy of love. (shrink)

Kant claims that love ‘is a matter of feeling,’ which has led many of his interpreters to argue that he conceives of love as solely a matter of feeling, that is, as a purely pathological state. In this paper I challenge this reading by taking another one of Kant’s claims seriously, namely that all love is either benevolence or complacence and that both are rational. I place Kant’s distinction between benevolence and complacence next to the historical inspiration (...) for it, namely Francis Hutcheson’s very similar distinction, in order to argue that love is rational, for Kant, in that it requires certain rational capacities on the part of the agent. I conclude by illustrating that this has important implications for how we understand Kant’s conception of love more generally. (shrink)

Every scientist chooses a preferred level of analysis and this choice shapes the research program, even determining what counts as evidence. This contribution revisits Marr's three levels of analysis and evaluates the prospect of making progress at each individual level. After reviewing limitations of theorizing within a level, two strategies for integration across levels are considered. One is top–down in that it attempts to build a bridge from the computational to algorithmic level. Limitations of this approach include insufficient theoretical constraint (...) at the computation level to provide a foundation for integration, and that people are suboptimal for reasons other than capacity limitations. Instead, an inside-out approach is forwarded in which all three levels of analysis are integrated via the algorithmic level. This approach maximally leverages mutual data constraints at all levels. For example, algorithmic models can be used to interpret brain imaging data, and brain imaging data can be used to select among competing models. Examples of this approach to integration are provided. This merging of levels raises questions about the relevance of Marr's tripartite view. (shrink)

Ideologies of progress sprout from an inextinguishable hope that one day things will be better. Somewhere ahead life will be more abundant and there will be less pain and fear. Somewhere ahead there will be more rationality, objectivity, and truth. Somewhere ahead there will always be more love and compassion for others. Any combination of these and of other values could easily be extracted from the literature of progress. When writers begin with the thesis, ‘there is progress in (...) the realisation of values’, they assume two things. Firstly , they put forward a sociological-historical hypothesis according to which social changes proceed in a set direction and fall into some sort of sequential pattern, and secondly , they contrive to find that, on the whole, in this sequence, there is a linear increase in the realisation of some values which they regard as essential to humanity. A careful inspection of the second of these two assumptions discloses the belief that not only things will be getting better and better but people too. Those, then, who are ideologists of progress are committed to a coherent directionality not only in the betterment of circumstances but also in the betterment of people; in brief, social changes will be accompanied by changes in the ‘modal’ personality as well. (shrink)

Religions don’t simply make claims about the world; they also offer existential resources, resources for dealing with basic human problems, such as the need for meaning, love, identity, and personal growth. For instance, a Buddhist’s resources for addressing these existential needs are different than a Christian’s. Now, imagine someone who is agnostic but who is deciding whether to put faith in religion A or religion B. Suppose she thinks A and B are evidentially on par, but she regards A (...) as offering much more by way of existential resources. Is it epistemically rational for her to put her faith in A rather than B on this basis? It is natural to answer No. After all, what do the existential resources of a religion have to do with its truth? However, I argue that this attitude is mistaken. My thesis is that the extent to which it is good for a certain religion to be true is relevant to the epistemic rationality of faith in that religion. This is plausible, I’ll argue, on the correct account of the nature of faith, including the ways that emotion and desire can figure into faith and contribute to its epistemic rationality. (shrink)

There is no topic that attracts more attention, more energy and time and devotion, than love. As long as there's been recorded history, love has taken center seat as the inspiration for countless paintings, instigator of wars, muse of untold poets and musicians. And just as poetry, art and music have the ability to communicate something about love that is difficult to articulate with words, the same is true of mathematics. Of course, mathematics can't easily help us (...) translate the emotional side of love, emotions rarely behave in a neatly ordered, rational and easily predictable way. It is difficult to quantify the rollercoaster of romance or to define how lovers might feel via a set of simple equations. But that doesn't mean that mathematics isn't crucial to understanding love. Love, like most things in life, is full of patterns. And mathematics is ultimately the study of patterns, from predicting the weather to the fluctuations of the stock market, the movement of planets or the growth of cities. These patterns twist and turn and warp and evolve just as the rituals of love do. In [this book, the author] takes the listener on a fascinating journey through the patterns that define our love lives, tackling some of the most common yet complex questions pertaining to love: What's the chance of us finding love? What's the chance that it will last? How does online dating work, exactly? When should you settle down? How can you avoid divorce? When is it right to compromise? Can game theory help us decide whether or not to call? From evaluating the best strategies for online dating to defining the nebulous concept of beauty, Dr. Fry proves, with great insight, wit and fun, that math is a surprisingly useful tool to negotiate the complicated, often baffling, sometimes infuriating, always interesting, patterns of love. (shrink)

Weber in his early years had taken very seriously the idea that capitalism played an important, perhaps decisive, role in the life of ancient societies. Over time he came to understand the uniqueness of historical structures, and particularly of "rational capitalistic enterprises with fixed capital, free labor, the rational specialization and combination of functions, and the allocation of productive functions on the basis of capitalistic enterprises, bound together in a market economy," which characterizes the modern world. Non-market types of profit-making (...) occur in the ancient world but are not the heart of it. Weber's concept of "political capitalism" assists in explaining those acquisitive activities that possess capitalistic features without identifying the ancient forms with modern capitalism, avoiding the extremes of primitivism and anachronistic modernism. (shrink)

Kant is frequently read as saying that all self-love is bad, and the virtuous agent is one who suppresses self-love as much as possible. This paper argues that this is mistaken and that the right kind of self-love – what Kant calls rational self-love – plays an important role in a successful moral life. It shows how Kant provides a detailed taxonomy of different kinds of self-love. He contrasts the (practical) incentive of self-love with (...) the (pathological) feeling of it, self-love of benevolence with self-love of delight, and self-absorbed/selfish with rational/moral varieties of each. The paper then argues that, while the Critique of Practical Reason only identifies a self-absorbed variety of self-love of delight, self-conceit, it gains a rational counterpart in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason: “self-contentment”. This is a positive self-love of delight uniquely felt by the morally good person. It is suggested that this shift reflects Kant’s increasing appreciation of the affective dimension of the virtuous life: for imperfect human beings the moral law must not only be worth obeying, but worth loving. Thus, while for morally bad agents self-love and morality inevitably conflict, good agents can and should love themselves. (shrink)

The prominence of Bayesian modeling of cognition has increased recently largely because of mathematical advances in specifying and deriving predictions from complex probabilistic models. Much of this research aims to demonstrate that cognitive behavior can be explained from rational principles alone, without recourse to psychological or neurological processes and representations. We note commonalities between this rational approach and other movements in psychology – namely, Behaviorism and evolutionary psychology – that set aside mechanistic explanations or make use of optimality assumptions. Through (...) these comparisons, we identify a number of challenges that limit the rational program's potential contribution to psychological theory. Specifically, rational Bayesian models are significantly unconstrained, both because they are uninformed by a wide range of process-level data and because their assumptions about the environment are generally not grounded in empirical measurement. The psychological implications of most Bayesian models are also unclear. Bayesian inference itself is conceptually trivial, but strong assumptions are often embedded in the hypothesis sets and the approximation algorithms used to derive model predictions, without a clear delineation between psychological commitments and implementational details. Comparing multiple Bayesian models of the same task is rare, as is the realization that many Bayesian models recapitulate existing (mechanistic level) theories. Despite the expressive power of current Bayesian models, we argue they must be developed in conjunction with mechanistic considerations to offer substantive explanations of cognition. We lay out several means for such an integration, which take into account the representations on which Bayesian inference operates, as well as the algorithms and heuristics that carry it out. We argue this unification will better facilitate lasting contributions to psychological theory, avoiding the pitfalls that have plagued previous theoretical movements. (shrink)

Celebrated as a courtesan and poet, and as a woman of great intelligence and wit, Tullia d'Aragona (1510–56) entered the debate about the morality of love that engaged the best and most famous male intellects of sixteenth-century Italy. First published in Venice in 1547, but never before published in English, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love casts a woman rather than a man as the main disputant on the ethics of love. Sexually liberated and financially independent, Tullia (...) d'Aragona dared to argue that the only moral form of love between woman and man is one that recognizes both the sensual and the spiritual needs of humankind. Declaring sexual drives to be fundamentally irrepressible and blameless, she challenged the Platonic and religious orthodoxy of her time, which condemned all forms of sensual experience, denied the rationality of women, and relegated femininity to the realm of physicality and sin. Human beings, she argued, consist of body and soul, sense and intellect, and honorable love must be based on this real nature. By exposing the intrinsic misogyny of prevailing theories of love, Aragona vindicates all women, proposing a morality of love that restores them to intellectual and sexual parity with men. Through Aragona's sharp reasoning, her sense of irony and humor, and her renowned linguistic skill, a rare picture unfolds of an intelligent and thoughtful woman fighting sixteenth-century stereotypes of women and sexuality. (shrink)

Although democratic theorists often employ musical metaphors to describe their politics, musical practices are seldom analyzed as forms of political communication. In this article, I explore how the music of social movements, what is called "movement music," supplements deliberative democrats' concept of public discourse as rational argument. Invoking energies, motions, and voices beyond established identities and institutions anticipates a different, more musical democracy. I argue that the "women's music" of Holly Near, founder of Redwood Records and Redwood Cultural Work, exemplifies (...) this transformative power of musical sound. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 115, Issue 3pt3, Page 315-322, December 2015.

The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophycollects 39 original chapters from prominent philosophers on the nature, meaning, value, and predicaments of love, presented in a unique framework that highlights the rich variety of methods and traditions used to engage with these subjects. This volume is structured around important realms of human life and activity, each of which receives its own section: I. Family and Friendship II. Romance and Sex III. Politics and Society IV. Animals, Nature, and the Environment (...) V. Art, Faith, and Meaning VI. Rationality and Morality VII. Traditions: Historical and Contemporary. This last section includes chapters treating love as a subject in both Western and non-Western philosophical traditions. The contributions, all appearing in print here for the first time, are written to be accessible and compelling to non-philosophers and philosophers alike; and the volume as a whole encourages professional philosophers, teachers, students, and lay readers to rethink standard constructions of philosophical canons. (shrink)

I argue against the intellectualist view of love according to which we (must) love for reasons so that love is rational. Engaging primarily with the quality appraisal view of love, I concede that qualities can cause love but insist that it is misguided to think of love as having reasons. A number of features of human psychology complicate the issue of how lover relates to beloved's qualities. (a) The lover may be attracted to a (...) quality without appraising that quality reflectively. (b) Personal qualities are not perceived in isolation; rather, our assessment of one quality will affect how we perceive another. In fact, we tend to posit essences in persons, and these guide our interpretation of their other qualities. (c) We do not see persons as bundles of qualities but as unique wholes. This is due to our capacity to fetishize particulars, and it dispels the problem of fungibility. (d) We have a tendency to see meaning in things retrospectively—philosophers have mistaken this sense of meaning for rationality. The philosophical movement to incorporate love into rationality fails to recognize that there is a folk metaphysics built deep into our psyches that does not correspond to the worldview of contemporary philosophers. (shrink)

Celebrated as a courtesan and poet, and as a woman of great intelligence and wit, Tullia d'Aragona entered the debate about the morality of love that engaged the best and most famous male intellects of sixteenth-century Italy. First published in Venice in 1547, but never before published in English, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love casts a woman rather than a man as the main disputant on the ethics of love. Sexually liberated and financially independent, Tullia d'Aragona (...) dared to argue that the only moral form of love between woman and man is one that recognizes both the sensual and the spiritual needs of humankind. Declaring sexual drives to be fundamentally irrepressible and blameless, she challenged the Platonic and religious orthodoxy of her time, which condemned all forms of sensual experience, denied the rationality of women, and relegated femininity to the realm of physicality and sin. Human beings, she argued, consist of body and soul, sense and intellect, and honorable love must be based on this real nature. By exposing the intrinsic misogyny of prevailing theories of love, Aragona vindicates all women, proposing a morality of love that restores them to intellectual and sexual parity with men. Through Aragona's sharp reasoning, her sense of irony and humor, and her renowned linguistic skill, a rare picture unfolds of an intelligent and thoughtful woman fighting sixteenth-century stereotypes of women and sexuality. (shrink)

I examine three common beliefs about love: constancy, exclusivity, and the claim that love is a response to the properties of the beloved. Following a discussion of their relative consistency, I argue that neither the constancy nor the exclusivity of love are saved by the contrary belief, that love is not (entirely) a response to the properties of the beloved.

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 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)

Augustine developed one of the most profound and influential accounts of love ever offered. Led this way and that by the desires of his famously restless heart, Augustine came to view the experience of desiring as indicating a profound excess to the self. His theory of love has enduring philosophical relevance, not least because it disrupts our prevalent notion of freedom as self-determination. In contrast to our own dominant ethics of autonomy, Augustine argues that true freedom depends upon (...) what exceeds self- willing: we only become free when we are able to acknowledge our finitude, and thereby learn to love others rightly. This dissertation traces the development in Augustine’s thinking concerning the relationship between love and freedom across two pivotal texts: the De libero arbitrio and the Confessiones. I argue that what emerges in Augustine’s thought is the startling realization that genuine freedom is constituted by submission to a good beyond our anticipation, i.e., a good encountered in the experience of love. As Augustine came to see, the human person is ecstatically self-surpassing, drawn dynamically to the good through affect and rationality. Given this philosophical anthropology, the primary concern of the ethical life has less to do with autonomous willing, and more to do with properly nurturing and attuning our desire through a purifying attention. In other words, as Augustine shows us, the aim of the moral life is to allow our self-exceeding loves— viii and the good at which they aim—to form and reform the self. The following project aims to rehabilitate an Augustinian account of freedom by arguing for a renewed appreciation of the goodness of being, and for a recovery of the notion of loving-desire that constitutes our fundamental way of relating to this good. Given the fundamentally ecstatic nature of the human person revealed in love, freedom cannot be conceived purely as self-determination; as Augustine argues, we are made free by a transcendent source of our being. There is, ultimately, a deeper source of freedom than autonomous choosing: we are given our freedom in the gift of our being, and we discover this freedom by learning to love rightly. (shrink)

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)

This book is the first comprehensive study of Rousseau's rich and complex theory of the type of self-love (amour proper) that, for him, marks the central difference between humans and the beasts. Amour proper is the passion that drives human individuals to seek the esteem, approval, admiration, or love--the recognition--of their fellow beings. Neuhouser reconstructs Rousseau's understanding of what the drive for recognition is, why it is so problematic, and how its presence opens up far-reaching developmental possibilities for (...) creatures that possess it. One of Rousseau's central theses is that amour proper in its corrupted, manifestations--pride or vanity--is the principal source of an array of evils so widespread that they can easily appear to be necessary features of the human condition: enslavement, conflict, vice, misery, and self-estrangement. Yet Rousseau also argues that solving these problems depends not on suppressing or overcoming the drive for recognition but on cultivating it so that it contributes positively to the achievement of freedom, peace, virtue, happiness, and unalienated selfhood. Indeed, Rousseau goes so far as to claim that, despite its many dangers, the need for recognition is a condition of nearly everything that makes human life valuable and that elevates it above mere animal existence: rationality, morality, freedom--subjectivity itself--would be impossible for humans if it were not for amour proper and the relations to others it impels us to establish. (shrink)

Based on the author's lectures in Hong Kong, for classes on the philosophy of love, this book defends a theory of love as consisting of four types (two rational, two emotional) that tend to be experienced in three manifestations (sexuality, marriage, and friendship). Like a typical textbook, every chapter ends with a list of questions for further thought and a list of recommended further readings. The first of twelve chapters is shown here as an example.

This article studies the eugenic theories of Marathi sexological writer and novelist Narayan Sitaram Phadke, and his attempts to domesticate the modern ideal of the adult romantic couple as a yardstick of ‘emotional democracy’ in late colonial India. Locating Phadke's work against the backdrop of the Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929) and its eugenicist concerns, I argue that he conceptualized romantic love as an emotion and a form of sociability central to the state's biopolitical schemes of ensuring modern coupledom (...) but as exceeding the state's capacity to rationally order Indian sex life. Consequently, he crafted literary supplements like the bildungsroman to circulate ‘English’ idioms of emotional and corporeal intimacy in Marathi; his novels domesticated eugenic sexology for its ‘vernacular’ audiences by advocating caste-bound romantic love as the blueprint for Indian marital coupling. As exemplified by Phadke's work, an emerging Marathi discourse of love demarcated a space for the young couple to operate as a vehicle of interpersonal openness within the constraints of the upper-caste joint family. By outlining the parameters of this Brahmanical aesthetic discourse, I show that the couple became the locus of a self-styled ‘democratic’ form of emotional attachment aimed at developing a necessary dynamism within endogamous caste-based marital arrangements without radically transforming them. The science performed through the Marathi novel in the 1920s and 1930s consequently explains the increasing prominence of romantic love as a form of developmental ‘democratic’ discourse at a time when both romantic love and democracy-in-practice were widely experienced as absent from Indian society. (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)

Celebrated as a courtesan and poet, and as a woman of great intelligence and wit, Tullia d'Aragona entered the debate about the morality of love that engaged the best and most famous male intellects of sixteenth-century Italy. First published in Venice in 1547, but never before published in English, _Dialogue on the Infinity of Love_ casts a woman rather than a man as the main disputant on the ethics of love. Sexually liberated and financially independent, Tullia d'Aragona dared (...) to argue that the only moral form of love between woman and man is one that recognizes both the sensual and the spiritual needs of humankind. Declaring sexual drives to be fundamentally irrepressible and blameless, she challenged the Platonic and religious orthodoxy of her time, which condemned all forms of sensual experience, denied the rationality of women, and relegated femininity to the realm of physicality and sin. Human beings, she argued, consist of body and soul, sense and intellect, and honorable love must be based on this real nature. By exposing the intrinsic misogyny of prevailing theories of love, Aragona vindicates all women, proposing a morality of love that restores them to intellectual and sexual parity with men. Through Aragona's sharp reasoning, her sense of irony and humor, and her renowned linguistic skill, a rare picture unfolds of an intelligent and thoughtful woman fighting sixteenth-century stereotypes of women and sexuality. (shrink)

Argues that there is no one it is irrational to love, that it is rational to act with partiality to those we love, and that the rationality of doing so is not conditional on love. It follows that Anscombe and Taurek are right: you are not required to save three instead of one, even when those you could save are perfect strangers.

Mathematical developments in probabilistic inference have led to optimism over the prospects for Bayesian models of cognition. Our target article calls for better differentiation of these technical developments from theoretical contributions. It distinguishes between Bayesian Fundamentalism, which is theoretically limited because of its neglect of psychological mechanism, and Bayesian Enlightenment, which integrates rational and mechanistic considerations and is thus better positioned to advance psychological theory. The commentaries almost uniformly agree that mechanistic grounding is critical to the success of the Bayesian (...) program. Some commentaries raise additional challenges, which we address here. Other commentaries claim that all Bayesian models are mechanistically grounded, while at the same time holding that they should be evaluated only on a computational level. We argue this contradictory stance makes it difficult to evaluate a model's scientific contribution, and that the psychological commitments of Bayesian models need to be made more explicit. (shrink)

Love in general and the order of the passions -- Rational love: in itself, natural dilection as root of choice, and love's twofold structure -- Twofold beatitude and the love thereof -- Dilection for others -- Charity and love of beatitude -- Charity in faith -- Charity in glory -- An Aporia? -- Towards a resolution.

Harry Frankfurt has published On Inequality, but this is not the first time he has written about this subject. Frankfurt already criticized a rationalistic notion of equality on other occasions (Frankfurt, 1987 & 1997). In these works he says a rationalistic notion of equality cannot fit in with our belief that agents possess their own volitional necessities, which shape volitional structures of the human will. However, Frankfurt's explanatory connection between volitions, love and identification make it difficult to talk about (...) personal freedom. (shrink)

Resumo O presente artigo se encontra na interface entre literatura e religião e trata-se de um estudo da linguagem presente na obra de João da Cruz intitulada “Chama viva de amor”, utilizando-se, para tal, de alguns recursos da crítica literária. Esta obra teve a redação de seu poema realizada entre os anos de 1582-1584 e de seus comentários nos anos de 1585/86 (primeira redação) e 1591 (segunda redação). É um texto que, tanto em sua dimensão poética quanto em sua prosa, (...) retrata algumas das especificidades da forma do místico trabalhar com a linguagem ao tentar traduzir sua experiência “inefável”: ou seja, desconstrói e a reconstrói para que seja capaz de comunicar algo do vivido. Com vistas a atingir este objetivo, após uma breve introdução à vida e a obra joãocruciana, abordar-se-á brevemente a estrutura e as principais temáticas presentes na obra supracitada. A seguir, apresentar-se-á alguns dos recursos lingüísticos utilizados por João da Cruz, tais como o uso de paradoxos, antíteses e antônimos com freqüência, neologismos e arcaísmos, ressignificações de conceitos, aproveitamento da polissemia de muitos vocábulos, a forte presença de metáforas e símbolos e uma forma particular de lidar com os registros espaço-temporais e a lógica racional. Palavras-chave : João da Cruz, teologia negativa, mística, linguagem mística.The present article is placed in the isthmus of Literature and Religion, and consists of a study of the language that is present in the work of João da Cruz entitled “Chama viva de amor” (Living flame of love) , using, for such purpose, some of the Literary Criticism’s resources. This work had its poem written between 1582-1584, and its comments, in 1585/86 (first writing) and 1591 (second writing). It is a text that, as much as in its poetics dimension as in its prose, pictures some of the mystic’s method of working with the language when trying to communicate their ineffable experience: that is, deconstruct it and reconstruct it so that it can communicate something from the experienced. Aiming at that purpose, after a brief introduction to the life and work of João da Cruz, the study will approach the structure and the main themes present in the aforementioned work. Furthermore, some of the linguistics resources used by João da Cruz will be presented, such as neologisms and archaisms, concepts resignification, the use of polysemy of many words, the strong presence of metaphors and symbols, and a special way of working the spatial-temporal accounts and the rational logics. Key words: John of the Cross, negative theology, mysticism, mystical language. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 According to the Hegelian scheme re-proposed by Honneth, the first pattern of intersubjective recognition, still below the juridical mediation, is the sphere of interactions marked by affective bonds, or love. It is considered a first stage mostly because recognition is rooted in the partners' mutual dependency as needy creatures, which demand care and the emotional approval that follows it. In this sense, a constitutional lacking emerges as the fundamental character (...) of the most primitive kinds of interaction embedded in social norms. And that is important inasmuch the other stages of recognitive practices depend on this first one, in which subjects acquire capacities for rational and moral reasoning and action in the public sphere. However, one could question to what extent the same normative structure can be taking as underlying every loving relationship, as oriented by an affirmation of the subject's independence, while presupposing involuntary feelings of liking and attraction. After all, if the aspirations of reciprocal recognition in this realm are intrinsically related to very concrete features, why taking child caring, friendship and sexual encounter as referred to the same set of recognition patterns? If Honneth's recourse to psychoanalytic theory makes it clear why in all these kinds of interaction is to be found erotic contents of libidinal character, on the other hand one gets no clue on why the very different forms of satisfaction of the drives do not come into consideration. At this point it seems important to recall Georges Bataille's account of sexuality to think not only about the limits of recognition, but also its dialectical structure. The central notion of transgression helps understand why the normative grounds of intersubjective acknowledgment regarding at least some love relationships require a sort of suspension which is not the mere suppression of their validity: the violence that resides at the core of such erotic, transgressive experiences points to a disruptive effect over the features of subjective arrangement, intersubjectively formed. That is why excitement and fear, pleasure and anguish intertwine in eroticism, and desire becomes the name of a fascinating and frightening ontological excess. It is this very paradoxical character that is decisive for Bataille, for if norms need their transgression in order to exert a subjective inscription, one should not take the passage from desire to recognition as just a progressive process towards a determined form of sociality. Bataille associates a certain Durkheimian heritage with a philosophy of life to account for a libidinal economy of recognition in which desire lies at its very core. This paper proposes a reflection on what is at stake in this conceptual operation, and on the significance of the peculiar enjoyment of norms to a rethinking of the particular aspirations of recognition in love relationships. (shrink)

Hume has a special place in justifications of claims made for rational choice theory to offer a unified language and explanatory framework for the social sciences. He is invoked in support of the assumptions characterising the instrumental rationality of agents and the constancy of their motivations across different institutional settings. This paper explores the problems with the expansionary aims of rational choice theory through criticism of these appeals to Hume. First, Hume does not assume constancy. Moreover, Hume’s sensitivity to (...) the relationships between institutional setting and individual motivation owes something to the relative transparency of the plural language of vices and virtues that he employs. Second, rational choice theory’s minimal modification of Hume’s account of the relation of reason and the passions through the introduction of constraints of consistency on preferences is unstable. (shrink)

The central concern of this book is us human beings. The authors’ basic question is: ‘How is it that we can live in mutual care, have ethical concerns, and at the same time deny all that through the rational justification of aggression?’ The authors answer this basic question indirectly by providing a look into the fundaments of our biological constitution, concentrating on what they term emotioning, that is the flow of emotions in daily life that guides the flow of the (...) systemic conservation of a manner of living. Maturana and Verden-Zoller claim that the fundamental emotion that gave rise to humans as sapient languaging beings was love, and that this remains our fundament even when other emotions become socially prevalent. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problem of artificial intelligence and the challenges of “smart technologies”, which threaten the autonomy of human mind and the existence of human itself. The author states the crisis situation of contemporary culture, the existential fatigue of humanity, which manifests itself in the intention to delegate one’s own subjectivity, will and rationality to external actors – namely the Internet, artificial intelligence, and robotics. The article discovers the alienation of the fundamental quality of a thinking (...) person – intelligence – and the threat of human enslavement in the world of the near future, governed by autonomous technologies. In addition to delegating rationality to machines, there is also a tendency to transfer goal-setting to “intelligent technology”, which is gradually endowed with the ability for self-learning and self-programming, and therefore may not align its tasks with human intentions. This problem is traced back to the origins of philosophical thinking and the earliest mentions of artificial beings in mythology, theology, fiction and scientific theory, that proves eternal human strife for creation and replication of human traces in natural environment. Humanization and rationalization of outer world thus is thought as an integral feature of human activity, but it also means constant and continuing alienation of human mind due to its openness and incompleteness, that puts mankind at risk – yet therefore defines humanity as a “risky” way of being. The author considers a scenario of the doubling of reality, in which digital algorithms, computer programmes and robotics may conquer, supplant or replace the world of nature and the human world, bypassing the latter as a less effective evolutionary step. In contrast to this, the author raises the question of what is mind, what is thinking and what is a human being – and whether consciousness, reduced to corporeality, sensuality or rationality, can serve as a model for reproduction. And whether a person is capable of creating a new life without love? (shrink)

Defenders of two Rationality Views of love—the Qualities View and the Personhood View—have drawn on Iris Murdoch's philosophical writings to highlight a connection between love and a “realistic” perspective on the beloved. Murdoch does not inform the basic structure of these views—she is rather introduced as a supplement who shows that in love, we pay accurate, nuanced, unguarded, and unflinching attention to the other. In this paper, I contend that these authors have failed to see that (...) Murdoch offers a distinct view of love and is inappropriate to enlist as an ally. This is in large part because they have missed the full sense of what Murdoch means by connecting love and realism. I contend that for Murdoch, to love someone means seeing them in light of a realistic vision of what it means to be human; this includes an appreciation of the limits of freedom, the formative influence of personal history, and the nature and extent of our differences from one another. This helps us to see why Murdoch variously describes loving attention as realistic, compassionate, tolerant, and extremely difficult. It also sheds light on some important and familiar ways that we criticize one another's grounds for love. (shrink)

This paper reports a preliminary descriptive approach to the representation of the concept of love. Based on Spreading Activation Model, the word of love was presented as a stimulus to which 278 college students were asked to respond with at least 15 words/phrases that came to mind. Then top 100 love-related words/phrases with frequency above 4.3% were collected as units of analysis. Based on the interrelations among those words/phrases, a complete-linkage cluster analysis reached 5 high-order clusters, i.e. (...) the five facets of the representation of love concept: 1) ethics and responsibilities; 2) romantic experience; 3) conflict and pain; 4) rationality; 5) friendly care. The results show that word associations can fundamentally reflect some differences in cognition and culture of love. Compared with Sternberg’s triangular theory of love, the findings show differences in two clusters: “conflict and pain” and “rationality”, which are not included in the triangle of love. More importantly, this research contributes to literatures on Chinese people’s love and will also inspire future research with some meaningful results. (shrink)

Many emotions attenuate more rapidly than the significance of the considerations that gives rise to them as we accommodate ourselves to what happens. Grief often diminishes quickly, even though the dead continue to matter to us; anger often evaporates, even though the injustice to which it responds remains undiminished. Nonetheless, such accommodation seems acceptable: it would be a mistake to be persistently grieving or to be relentlessly angry. But how could it be acceptable, if the reasons for grief and anger (...) remain significant? Unlike grief and anger, whose diminution is puzzling, what seems puzzling in the case of love is its continuation. In its self-consciousness, love is endless; in loving someone, we foresee no end to our love. Yet we know that love can end: hearts are broken, lovers betrayed, and people grow apart. Does the self-consciousness of love involve a mistake? Or can we reasonably think of our love as lasting? -/- On the Temporality of Emotions argues that whereas grief and anger reasonably diminish, love can rationally be conceived as endless. Berislav Marušić draws on contemporary theories of the emotions, especially grief and love, as well as recent accounts of reasons. It puts forward an account of emotional self-consciousness as, at once, embodied and rational, and maintains that accommodation reveals an irreconcilable moment in our emotional life, a moment that philosophical reflection ought not seek to resolve, lest our emotions are conceived as too neat, and philosophy as too comforting. (shrink)

Are there normative reasons for love? More specifically, is it possible to rationally justify love? Or can we at best provide explanations for why we love? In Part I of this entry, I discuss the nature of love, theories of emotion, and what it takes to justify an attitude. In Part II, I provide an overview of the various positions one might take on the rational justification of love. I focus on the debate between defenders (...) of the no-reasons view and the reasons view. Along the way, I discuss the significance of falling in love, the problem of trading up, and the notion of irreplaceability. I evaluate attempts to justify love based on the intrinsic and the relational properties of the beloved. (shrink)

The fundamental goal of this paper is to clarify the importance of Husserl’s reflections on destiny (Schicksal) in the context of his post-WWI ethics. In the first section, I sketch Husserl’s reflections on war in his private correspondence. In the second section, I show that, in his post-WWI research manuscripts on ethics, Husserl conceptualized various forms of meaningless suffering under the heading of destiny. One of the main questions of Husserl’s post-WWI ethics can be formulated as follows: in the dark (...) horizon of senselessness, how is an ethical life possible? In the remaining sections, I show that Husserl’s reflections on this question led him to deformalize his earlier ethics and motivated him to ground his ethics of reason in an ethics of love. In the third and fourth sections, I sketch Husserl’s two fundamental answers to this question, the first of which concerns his phenomenology of love, while the second one – his phenomenological metaphysics in general, and his phenomenological teleology, in particular. While for Husserl, these answers are complementary, after clarifying Husserl’s view on the conflicts of values, I conclude with some reflections on the importance of not overlooking that these answers are analytically distinct. (shrink)

Proposing to reconcile the opposing camps of interpretation of Chaucer’s poem, with love’s irrationality condemned on one side and love’s mutuality celebrated on the other, this essay offers a balanced reading of Troilus and Criseyde. The poem’s exemplarity lies not in a systematic application of principles: “we must experience Troilus and Criseyde’s love on its human terms.” Love’s moral complexity is experienced in the passages surrounding the characters’ swooning. Such episodes prove rationality to be as (...) much of a problem as irrationality when it comes to love. Reason is particularly suspect in Criseyde’s response to the couple’s parting. (shrink)

In my Contemporary Critiques of Religion and in my Scepticism , I argue that non-anthropomorphic conceptions of God do not make sense. By this I mean that we do not have sound grounds for believing that the central truth-claims of Christianity are genuine truth-claims and that we do not have a religiously viable concept of God. I argue that this is so principally because of three interrelated features about God-talk. While purporting to be factual assertions, central bits of God-talk, e.g. (...) ‘God exists’ and ‘God loves man-kind’, are not even in principle verifiable in such a way that we can say what experienceable states of affairs would count for these putative assertions and against their denials, such that we could say what it would be like to have evidence which would make either their assertion or their denial more or less probably true. Personal predicates, e.g. ‘loves’, ‘creates’, are at least seemingly essential in the use of God-talk, yet they suffer from such an attenuation of meaning in their employment in religious linguistic environments that it at least appears to be the case that we have in such environments unwittingly emptied these predicates of all intelligible meaning so that we do not understand what we are asserting or denying when we utter ‘God loves mankind’ or ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ and the like. When we make well-formed assertions, it appears at least to be the case that a necessary condition for such wellformedness is that we should be able successfully to identify the subject of that putative statement so that we can understand what it is that we are talking about and thus understand that a genuine statement has actually been made. But, where God is conceived non-anthropomorphically, we have no even tolerably clear idea about how God, an infinite individual, occupying no particular place or existing at no particular time, and being utterly transcendent to the world, can be identified. Indeed we have no coherent idea of what it would be like to identify him and this means we have no coherent idea of what it would be like for God even to be a person or an it. He cannot be picked out and identified in the way persons and things can. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

What is the meaning of reason in our postmodern society today? Is reason a weapon of domination, or can it also serve as a means for emancipation? Is it possible for reason to understand its "other"--what it is not? Confronting such questions, Bounds of Reason is a compelling discussion of the limits and meaning of rationality as a tool for understanding the ideas of truth, justice and freedom. Emilia Steuerman explores the modernist and postmodernist controversy between Habermas and Lyotard (...) to highlight the problems encountered both by a defense of reason and by the lack of meaning that haunts a world without it. Using Kleinian theory to examine the debate as it is manifested in the main philosophical themes of this century, Steuerman argues that a rational and ethical theory of justice must take into account that which is not rational, symmetrical or transparent--namely a primitive world of love and hatred which colors and shapes our perceptions. (shrink)

We have a desire to discover and create order, and our constitution, including our rational faculties, indicates that we are predisposed for such productivity. This affinity for order and the establishment of order is fundamental to humans and naturally also leaves its mark on the medical discipline. When this profession is made subject to criticism, frequently in terms of well-used reproofs such as reductionism, reification and de-humanisation, this systematising productivity is invariably involved in some way or other. It is, however, (...) problematic that we rarely delve deeper and ask what order means, or reflect on its underlying, omnipresent and self-evident role. In order to approach this challenge, we initially and briefly place order in a conceptual and historical context. In what follows, we examine order explicitly, i.e. made an object of study, by taking a closer look at extensive multidisciplinary efforts to uncover the secrets of all its facets. Here we also try to identify some systems of order in medical science, including methodological and procedural order, which are indispensable as well as a source of problems. In the sections that follow, order is not defined as an explicit object of study, but comes to light in some exploratory and philosophising projects based on physics, mathematics and phenomenology. Each of these lets order and that which is ordered emerge in ways that may also shed light on opportunities and paradoxes in the medical domain. Key themes here include the Gordian knot of psyche – soma, the order of disorder and the patient as Other. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).