In this article, I argue that the practice of civil disagreement has robust epistemic benefits and that these benefits enable meaningful forms of reconciliation—across worldview lines and amid the challenging information environment of our age. I then engage two broad groups of objections: either that civil disagreement opposes, rather than promotes, clarity, or else that it does little to help it. If successful, my account gives us reason to include civil disagreement among what Mill calls “the real morality of public (...) discussion,” a fact that should stir us to take more seriously the decline of civility in contemporary life. (shrink)

Many biologists and philosophers have worried that importing models of reasoning from the physical sciences obscures our understanding of reasoning in the life sciences. In this paper we discuss one example that partially validates this concern: part-whole reductive explanations. Biology and physics tend to incorporate different models of temporality in part-whole reductive explanations. This results from differential emphases on compositional and causal facets of reductive explanations, which have not been distinguished reliably in prior philosophical analyses. Keeping these two facets distinct (...) facilitates the identifi cation of two further aspects of reductive explanation: intrinsicality and fundamentality. Our account provides resources for discriminating between different types of reductive explanation and suggests a new approach to comprehending similarities and differences in the explanatory reasoning found in biology and physics. (shrink)

The study’s goal was to provide an educational intervention in Algebra through GeoGebra that would boost students’ confidence, improve their learning, and correct their most minor mastered skills, allowing them to improve their Algebra performance. The research design was quasi-experimental, with 40 nonrandomly chosen participants comprising the GeoGebra and control groups. Mean and standard deviation was employed to describe the algebra performance and confidence of the respondents. At the same time, independent and dependent t-tests were used to determine the students’ (...) significant difference in algebra performance and confidence in the pre-and post-test between the control and GeoGebra groups. GeoGebra effectively improved algebra confidence, enhanced learning, and remedied the students’ least mastered skills. GeoGebra is recommended as an instructional material in teaching and learning Algebra and can be extended to other mathematics content areas. (shrink)

Robert Wilson’s The Eugenic Mind Project is a major achievement of engaged scholarship and socially relevant philosophy and history of science. It exemplifies the virtues of interdisciplinarity. As principal investigator of the Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada project, while employed in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alberta, Wilson encountered a proverbial big ball of mud with questions and issues that involved local individuals living through a painful set of memories and implicated his institutional home in (...) outstanding moral obligations. It is engaged scholarship because it required building relationships with affected persons and taking responsibility for his institution’s legacy, as well as transforming Wilson’s own outlook along the way. It is socially relevant philosophy and history of science because it brings to light issues that remain salient today, especially how eugenic themes are ubiquitous in societal discourse and evinced in everyday decisions. It is interdisciplinary because to accomplish this type of analysis requires intellectual gymnastics that range over diverse domains of research: from standpoint theory and disability studies to oral history and governmental policy; from the evolutionary biology of prosociality and variation to conceptual questions about the categorization of human traits and types. (shrink)

This study's focus was to determine students' English competency level after exposure to video lessons as supplemental materials. The respondents of the study were 139 Grade 9 students of Mahaplag National High School coming from four sections enrolled for School Year 2022-2023. Quasi-experimental method of research particularly the pretest-posttest design was utilized in the study. Frequency counts, mean percentage score, weighted mean, standard deviation, and paired samples T-test were utilized in data analysis. Results of the study revealed that the competency (...) level of the students on all three learning competencies before the exposure to video lessons is in the poor category. On the other hand, it was revealed in the study that after exposure to video lessons and through the administered post-test, students’ competency levels improved, which now belongs to the fair category. As to the student’s acceptance level of video lessons as supplemental materials, it was found that students positively accept video lessons as supplemental materials for selected English 9 competencies. It was also ascertained that there was a statistically significant increase in the scores of the students on all three competencies after exposure to video lessons. Furthermore, there was a significant increase in students' overall scores on the three competencies. From the results of the study, it can be concluded that video lessons can be a great supplemental material in teaching English 9 competencies. (shrink)

This essay begins with the assumption that many of our moral disputes have deeper roots in disagreement over worldview propositions. If this is true, and if there is a fact of the matter about worldview propositions, such that one could know the truth of at least some of them, then this makes it possible for one to maintain one’s moral beliefs, even despite the persistent, pervasive disagreements so common today. I argue that this holds true even when those debates include (...) supposed peers and when the worldview propositions themselves are highly disputed. (shrink)

Love, S. (2007). Using somatic awareness as a guide for making healthy life choices. Somatics Magazine- Journal Of The Mind/Body Arts and Sciences, Volume XV, Number 2, pages 40-43. (Silver Love is same person as author Martha C. Love).

Reduction and reductionism have been central philosophical topics in analytic philosophy of science for more than six decades. Together they encompass a diversity of issues from metaphysics and epistemology. This article provides an introduction to the topic that illuminates how contemporary epistemological discussions took their shape historically and limns the contours of concrete cases of reduction in specific natural sciences. The unity of science and the impulse to accomplish compositional reduction in accord with a layer-cake vision of the sciences, the (...) seminal contributions of Ernest Nagel on theory reduction and how they strongly conditioned subsequent philosophical discussions, and the detailed issues pertaining to different accounts of reduction that arise in both physical and biological science (e.g., limit-case and part-whole reduction in physics, the difference-making principle in genetics, and mechanisms in molecular biology) are explored. The conclusion argues that the epistemological heterogeneity and patchwork organization of the natural sciences encourages a pluralist stance about reduction. (shrink)

For the full text of this article see "Download Options PhiPapers Archive and click Download from Archive" at the bottom of this page. First 500 words of article: To my surprise last spring, an article titled “Gut Almighty”, which briefly explained the latest emotion theories on how intuition comes from the gut, was featured in Psychology Today (Flora, 2007) at the same time that my article on gut instinctual somatic responses and healthy life choices was published in Somatics Spring 07 (...) issue (Love, 2007). I wondered if two articles published on the gut in one month might surely be a record, as the gut has not seemed to have so much attention in the media since Gershon’s (1998) book acclaiming it through his neurological research to have a mind of its own. -/- In the months I awaited the publication of my article, I reread Gershon’s (1998) book and it was again delightful to me to read that a scientific investigation actually uncovered evidence that the gut has a separate capacity to generate and record vital responses and functions as what he calls our second brain. Gershon outlines the biological functions of the gut as being its own intelligent brain and having its own vitality that is in communication with, but not dependent upon, the head brain. As I combed through his book and shared emails with my colleague, Robert Sterling, it became quite clear to us that Gershon’s work was supportive of the clinical findings in the work we did as guidance counselors in the 70s. Our work centered around assisting people to assess the meaning of their experiences through an awareness on the empty-full instinctual feeling responses that they identified in the gut region of the body. We found with the people that we counseled that these gut responses were linked to the dynamic struggles of balancing the two needs of the person for acceptance and for feeling in control of one’s own responses (the freedom to respond naturally), and that these two needs were instinctual and necessary to fulfill on a moment to moment basis for continued vitality of the person. Similar to Gershon’s findings, it was also our conclusion that the gut area of the body contains a feeling response center that holds a relationship to the thinking processes of the person, but is a separate response center from the thinking head responses and certainly not dependent upon it. -/- Feeling inspired by Gershon’s (1998) work and the attention recently given to the gut in the literature and media, I decided to write a second article for Somatics that further explains the specific technique of the Somatic Reflection Process (SRP). The intention of this article is to answer the questions about the process that I have been asked in the past year by many friends and colleagues who read my first article last Spring on the findings of Robert Sterling’s and my somatic work as guidance counselors. I am including both the method and a protocol for facilitating the SRP, as well as a brief summary of a recent research study using the SRP protocol presented (Love, 2005). (shrink)

The allure of perennial questions in biology: temporary excitement or substantive advance? Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9533-5 Authors Alan C. Love, Department of Philosophy, Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota, 831 Heller Hall, 271 19th Ave. S, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0310, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Judgments of plausibility involve appearance of the truth or reasonableness, which is always a function of background knowledge. What anyone will countenance is conditioned by what they already know (or think they know). Marc Kirschner (professor of systems biology at Harvard) and John Gerhart (professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California—Berkeley) aim to show that molecular, cellular, and developmental processes relevant to the generation of phenotypic variation in anatomy, physiology, and behavior demonstrate how evolutionary processes, especially (...) the origins of novelty, are plausible. The outstanding question for Kirschner and Gerhart concerns not the modification of structures but their origination—a question unanswered by the theoretical framework of the modern synthesis. (shrink)

Book Review: What Genes Can’t Do By Lenny Moss .

The aim of this study was to investigate the predictive relationship of peer group influence, teacher-student interaction and indiscipline to students' dropout tendency in evening continuing education programmes. The context of this study is the southern senatorial district of Cross River State, Nigeria. The study adopted a predictive correlational research design, and the sample comprised 554 students randomly selected from 11 centres in the district. This represents 20% of the total population of students. The instrument used for data collection was (...) a questionnaire titled: "Social Indicators and Dropout Tendency Scale" (SIDTS). The researchers collected the data that were analysed using Pearson product-moment correlation and multiple linear regression analyses at the .05 level of significance. The results revealed that peer group influence, teacher-student interaction and level of indiscipline collectively and individually predicted dropout tendency among students in evening continuing education programmes. It was recommended, among others, that the teachers discover diverse ways of making their teaching process lively by devising ways of engaging the students in the learning process by forming discussion groups that will promote healthy peer groups, which will increase their eagerness to come to school. (shrink)

This paper aimed to discover the coping, initiatives, constraints, and challenges public secondary school teachers encounter in the new normal education. The central question of this paper lies in "What are the adapting and coping mechanisms of teachers and students in the distance learning modality amidst the pandemic?". This paper used the qualitative research design and employed a phenomenological approach to investigate secondary public-school teachers' coping mechanisms and initiatives in the new normal education. This paper focused on twelve public secondary (...) school teachers in Cagayan, Philippines. The research's findings are: (1) Most teachers encountered substantial challenges due to a lack of resources, student supervision, and duties. (2) Most teachers were constrained by the advent of the digital era. (3) Public-school teachers cope with their students' needs by employing effective initiatives and teaching strategies. (4) Despite their weariness and stress, teachers report positive outcomes such as tremendous enthusiasm and building connections with the school community. Meanwhile, the schools' adaptation to distant learning should be guided and encouraged by the following policies and concepts:(1) Access to technology for students. (2) Regular monitoring and feedback (3) Providing curriculum and instruction of the highest quality. Through this paper, teachers may benefit from adopting various coping techniques and activities for the new normal education. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands (...) Kraut's Kripkean analogy, and I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of love. (shrink)

This paper raises an underappreciated paradox for classical theism. Love seems to be an inherently biased and partial relation. Justice seems to require the opposite, detached impartiality (think of the attributes of the just judge). But if these are conceptual facts, then classical theism is guilty of ascribing inconsistent attributes to God: perfect love and perfect justice. I resolve this paradox in a manner that weighs in favor of the principle of divine simplicity.

While much has been written on love, the question of how romantic love differs from friendship love has only rarely been addressed. This chapter focuses on shedding some light on this question. I begin by considering goal-oriented approaches to love. These approaches, I argue, have the resources needed to account for the differences between friendship love and romantic love. But purely goal-oriented accounts fail on account of their utilitarian gloss of our loved ones. Even (...) when they circumvent this criticism, they make the mistake of conflating the motivational tendencies of love for its constitutive characteristics. I then turn my attention to David Velleman's account of love as a moral emotion but argue that his view lacks the resources to account for the differences between romantic love and friendship love. I then go on to sketch a socially situated account of love that does better in this respect. I conclude by reflecting on the normativity of love. (shrink)

The debate on love's reasons ignores unrequited love, which—I argue—can be as genuine and as valuable as reciprocated love. I start by showing that the relationship view of love cannot account for either the reasons or the value of unrequited love. I then present the simple property view, an alternative to the relationship view that is beset with its own problems. In order to solve these problems, I present a more sophisticated version of the property (...) view that integrates ideas from different property theorists in the love literature. However, even this more sophisticated property view falls short in accounting for unrequited love's reasons. In response, I develop a new version of the property view that I call the experiential view. On this view, we love a person not only in virtue of properties shaped by and experienced in a reciprocal loving relationship, but also in virtue of perspectival properties, whose value can be properly assessed also outside of a reciprocal loving relationship. The experiential view is the only view that can account not only for reciprocated love's reasons, but also for unrequited love's reasons. (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)

Grau and Pury (Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5, 155–168, 2014) reported that people’s views about love are related to their views about reference. This surprising effect was however not replicated in Cova et al.’s (in press) replication study. In this article, we show that the replication failure is probably due to the replication’s low power and that a metaanalytic reanalysis of the result in Cova et al. suggests that the effect reported in Grau and Pury is real. We (...) then report a large, highly powered replication that successfully replicates Grau and Pury 2014. This successful replication is a case study in the challenges involved in replicating scientific work, and our article contributes to the discussion of these challenges. (shrink)

What kind of mental phenomenon is romantic love? Many philosophers, psychologists, and ordinary folk treat it as an emotion. This chapter argues the category of emotion is inadequate to account for romantic love. It examines major emotion theories in philosophy and psychology and shows that they fail to illustrate that romantic love is an emotion. It considers the categories of basic emotions and emotion complexes, and demonstrates they too come short in accounting for romantic love. It (...) assesses the roles of culture and evolution in shaping the romantic love phenomenon and evaluates the ways in which the norms of rationality that are applied to standard emotions fail to apply to love. It considers the category of sentiments and argue that despite coming close, it does not adequately capture the nature of romantic love. Finally, the chapter makes a case for love being best characterized as a syndrome. (shrink)

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)

This essay presents an ideal for modern Western romantic love.The basic ideas are the following: people want to form a distinctive sort of plural subject with another, what Nozick has called a "We", they want to be loved for properties of certain kinds, and they want this love to establish and sustain a special sort of commitment to them over time.

In this paper, we introduce an enactive account of loving as participatory sense-making inspired by the “I love to you” of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Emancipating from the fusionist concept of romantic love, which understands love as unity, we conceptualise loving as an existential engagement in a dialectic of encounter, in continuous processes of becoming-in-relation. In these processes, desire acquires a certain prominence as the need to know (the other, the relation, oneself) more. We build on (...) Irigaray’s account of love to present a phenomenology of loving interactions and then our enactive account. Finally, we draw some implications for ethics. These concern language, difference, vulnerability, desire, and self-transformation. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for philosophers to name disinterestedness, or some like feature, as an essential characteristic of love. Such theorists claim that in genuine love, one’s concern for her beloved must be non-instrumental, non-egocentric, or even selfless. These views prompt the question, “What, if any, positive role might self-interestedness play in genuine love?” In this paper, I argue that attachment, an attitude marked primarily by self-focused emotions and emotional predispositions, helps constitute the meaning and import of (...) at least some kinds of adult reciprocal love. In this way, attachment represents a type of self-interestedness that not only contributes positively to such relationships but is also essential to them. (shrink)

People loved for their beauty and cheerfulness are not loved as irreplaceable, yet people loved for “what their souls are made of” are. Or so literary romance implies; leading philosophical accounts, however, deny the distinction, holding that reasons for love either do not exist or do not include the beloved’s distinguishing features. In this, I argue, they deny an essential species of love. To account for it while preserving the beloved’s irreplaceability, I defend a model of agency on (...) which people can love each other for identities still being created, through a kind of mutual improvisation. (shrink)

The idea that love changes who we are is widely shared, and has been mostly explored from a stance in the middle stage of love (i.e., when people already love each other). But how do we get there? And what happens when love ends? In this chapter, I explore how self-understanding may be shaped in different ways at different stages of love through the notions of narrative and existential feeling. As I will argue, love (...) gains narrative momentum at the beginning, which is maintained during the middle, and ultimately extinguished at the end. This momentum is triggered and later sustained by the existential feeling that ‘things make sense’, which keeps the lovers oriented towards each other. (shrink)

According to a traditional conception, romantic love is both constant - if someone loves another, they continue to love them - and exclusive - if someone loves another, they love only the other. In this paper, we argue that the essentiality of constancy and exclusivity is incompatible with the possibilities of fission - roughly speaking, of one person becoming two - and fusion - roughly speaking, of two people becoming one. Moreover, if fission or fusion are possible, (...) then constancy and exclusivity are obligatory features of love only if there are moral dilemmas. We conclude by suggesting this casts doubt on the constancy and especially the exclusivity of love. (shrink)

If you love someone, is it good to believe better of her than epistemic norms allow? The partiality view says that it is: love, on this view, issues norms of belief that clash with epistemic norms. The partiality view is supposedly supported by an analogy between beliefs and actions, by the phenomenology of love, and by the idea that love commits us to the loved one’s good character. I argue that the partiality view is false, and (...) defend what I call the epistemic view. On the epistemic view, love also issues norms of belief. But these say simply that you should adhere to epistemic norms in forming and maintaining beliefs about loved ones. I offer two arguments for the epistemic view. The first appeals to the emotional responses of love, which, when sensitive to what the loved one is really like, can make love great and be morally transformative. The second is a new argument for why caring for a loved one requires true beliefs about him. We see that there may be some boundaries, such as stuffy traditions, that love is right to defy, but that epistemic boundaries are not among them. (shrink)

Consider two commonly cited requirements of love. The first is that we should love people for who they are. The second is that loving people should involve concern for their well-being. But what happens when an aspect of someone’s identity conflicts with her well-being? In examining this question, I develop an account of loving someone in spite of something. Although there are cases where loving in spite of is merited, I argue that we generally do wrong to (...) class='Hi'>love people in spite of who they are, even where it appears that some aspect of their identity is in tension with their well-being. (shrink)

Beauvoir discusses various kinds of personal love in her work, including maternal love, lesbian love, friendship, and heterosexual love. In her portrayal of heterosexual love, she draws a distinction between two main types, inauthentic and authentic. Authentic love is “founded on mutual recognition of two liberties,” always freely chosen and sustained. It requires that the lovers maintain their individuality, while at the same time acknowledging each other’s differences. Inauthentic love is founded on inequality (...) between the sexes, on submission and domination. It prevents both women and men from experiencing freedom, comradeship and the joy of loving. This distinction is, I argue, applicable also to other types of love. Unlike Sartre, Beauvoir believes authentic love is possible. I contrast their respective views. Towards the end, I consider Beauvoir’s idea of authentic love in light of her concept of moral freedom, and argue that Beauvoir’s authentic love foreshadows feminist notion of “relational autonomy.”. (shrink)

The rationalist lover accepts that whom she ought to love is whom she has most reason to love. She also accepts that the qualities of a person are reasons to love them. This seems to suggest that if the rationalist lover encounters someone with better qualities than her beloved, then she is rationally required to trade up. In this paper, I argue that this need not be the case and the rationalist lover can have just about as (...) normal if not a better romantic life than anyone could hope for. This is because we often do possess most reason to love our beloveds. To see why this is so, we have to think more carefully about (i) how we come to possess reasons for love and (ii) the higher-order reasons that govern whether we should seek or refrain from possessing said reasons. Reflection on these issues leads to what I call the Possession-Commitment Account of Love’s Reasons. I use this account to address additional worries for love rationalism and highlight how being rational about love can potentially get us out of romantic messes. I conclude that if being a rationalist about love is plausible after all, then we have reason to hope that being rational about other areas of our practical lives is plausible as well. (shrink)

In “Tragedy and Resentment” Ulrika Carlsson claims that there are cases when we are justified in feeling non-moral resentment against someone who harms us without wronging us, when the harm either consists in their attitude towards us or in the emotional suffering triggered by their attitudes. Since they had no duty to protect us from harm, the objectionable attitude is not disrespect but a failure to show love, admiration, or appreciation for us. I explain why unrequited love is (...) the wrong example to use when arguing for the possibility of justified non-moral resentment—and why, therefore, Carlsson’s claim remains unsubstantiated. Pace Carlsson, people who fail to return our love are not best described as harming us, but as merely failing to benefit us by saving us from harm. Moreover, their role in the causal chain that results in our coming to harm is insufficient to warrant our resentment; more plausibly, we ourselves play a greater and more direct causal role in this process. This is a welcome result: Responding with resentment to someone’s failure to return our love indicates that our love has not taken the form of a genuine gift. When we put conditions on successful gifting by allowing for justified resentment if the gift is not returned we are not in fact giving gifts but making a bid for an exchange: I love you so that you love me back. (shrink)

The central focus of this article is to provide a new “Love Argument” for the necessary truth of the Latin “model” of the doctrine of the Trinity—termed “Latin Trinitarianism”—from an a priori standpoint. This new argument, called the Agápēic Argument, will be formulated in light of the metaphysical notions of a “trope,” introduced by D. C. Williams, and “multiple location,” posited by Antony Eagle, and the ethical concept of agápē, proposed by Alexander Pruss. Doing this will provide a specific (...) argument that provides strong grounds for affirming the necessary truth of the Trinity, without, however, being subject to the primary objections that have been often raised against the existing versions of the argument. (shrink)

This paper argues that, by construing emotion as epistemologically subversive, the Western tradition has tended to obscure the vital role of emotion in the construction of knowledge. The paper begins with an account of emotion that stresses its active, voluntary, and socially constructed aspects, and indicates how emotion is involved in evaluation and observation. It then moves on to show how the myth of dispassionate investigation has functioned historically to undermine the epistemic authority of women as well as other social (...) groups associated culturally with emotion. Finally, the paper sketches some ways in which the emotions of underclass groups, especially women, may contribute to the development of a critical social theory. (shrink)

This article offers a new account of the moral substance of shame. Through careful reflection on the motives and intentional structure of shame, I defend the claim that shame is an egocentric and morally blind emotion. I argue that shame is rooted in our desire for social affirmation and constituted by our ability to sense how we appear to others. What makes shame egocentric is that in shame we are essentially concerned about our own social worth and pained by the (...) perception of our self as socially worthless. In itself, shame entails no morally pertinent concern about others or understanding of what is morally significant. I contrast shame with the possibility of relating to others—and to oneself—with love and care. Indeed, I propose that love is essential for moral understanding and motivation. The argument of the article unfolds through critical appraisals of the main strategies for defending the moral value of shame. First, against the claim that shame entails respect for others, I argue that shame's sensitivity to the opinions of others is motivated by egocentric self-concern. Second, against the view that shame over failures to live up to moral values is morally valuable, I argue that regardless of whether the values guiding our shame are moral or not, the perspective of shame is oblivious to their moral meaning. Third, against the claim that shame is crucial for self-understanding, I argue that the desire for affirmation that drives shame is a powerful source of self-deception. (shrink)

This article aims to provide an a posteriori argument from love for the Trinity. A reformulation of the argument from love is made by proposing a novel version of the argument that is situated within an objective, empirical, natural theological framework. Reformulating the argument in this specific manner will enable it to ward of an important objection that is often raised against it, and ultimately render this argument of great use in establishing the necessity of the Trinity.

What reasons do we have to use certain concepts and conceptions rather than others? Approaching that question in a methodologically humanistic rather than Platonic spirit, one might seek “reasons for concept use” in how well concepts serve the contingent human concerns of those who live by them. But appealing to the instrumentality of concepts in meeting our concerns invites the worry that this yields the wrong kind of reasons, especially if the relevant concerns are nonmoral ones. Drawing on Susan Wolf’s (...) work on the moral/nonmoral distinction and the neglected role of reasons of love, I argue that this worry is misplaced, and in fact overlooks some of our most important reasons to prefer certain concepts over others. Yet a lingering worry remains, namely that the value of concepts does not just lie in what they are good for. Drawing on another strand in Wolf’s work, I explore the question whether concepts can be valuable good-for-nothings, and show how this ultimately also underscores the importance of reasons of love as reasons for concept use. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the relation between modern transhumanism and Nietzsche’s philosophy of the superhuman. Following Loeb, I argue that transhumanists cannot claim affinity to Nietzsche’s philosophy until they incorporate the doctrine of eternal recurrence to their project of technological enhancement. This doctrine liberates us from resentment against time by teaching us reconciliation with time and something higher than all reconciliation. Unlike Loeb, however, I claim that this “something higher” is not a new skill (prospective memory), but rather a (...) love for the past in the form of loving that aspect of it that is still with us, namely, the will to power itself, which is the engine of all life. Love of the past is thus equivalent to love of life. Since human beings are conscious incarnations of the will to power, in our case, love of life manifests itself as love of our humanity or love for that aspect of ourselves that connects us to each other, for we recognize it to be the same in all of us. Thus, learning this kind of love enables us to joyfully coordinate our wills in the pursuit of Zarathustra’s superhuman ideal without turning it into a destructive mockery of itself. While learning this kind of love would facilitate a joyful version of transhumanism, I conclude by suggesting that it is unlikely to be achieved through technological interventions of the sort envisioned by transhumanists. Instead, it requires the kind of participatory pedagogical program that Nietzsche thought his Zarathustra would fulfill. (shrink)

A common approach in the philosophy of love defines love as caring about one another and promoting one another's interests, aims and values. The view faces several problems and has been re-formulated to avoid them. However, here I argue that a larger re-formulation of the definition of love is needed in order to accommodate three instances of what I call 'non-harmonious' relationships. I identify three types of non-harmonious love (featuring problematic interests, opposing interests and neutral interests (...) the lovers do not care about) and ultimately claim that our definition of love must incorporate conflict and self- interest, and we should then abandon the excessive focus on the sharing of values. (shrink)

The sci-fi premise of the 2002 film Solaris allows director Steven Soderbergh to tell a compelling and distinctly philosophical love story. The “visitors” that appear to the characters in the film present us with a vivid thought experiment, and the film naturally prods us to dwell on the following possibility: If confronted with a duplicate (or near duplicate) of someone you love, what would your response be? What should your response be? The tension raised by such a far-fetched (...) situation reflects a tension that exists in real life: that between an attraction to qualities possessed by a person and attraction to the person in a manner that transcends such an attachment to qualities. In short, this cinematic thought-experiment challenges us to reflect on what we really attach to when we fall in love: is it the person, or is it merely the cluster of characteristics the person manifests? Which sort of attachment is appropriate? Which is philosophical defensible? The protagonist Chris Kelvin’s ambivalence at encountering this bizarre possibility is gripping because it tracks our own ambivalence about such matters. Frankly most of us don’t know just how we would react to such a situation. The thought that accepting and embracing such a “visitor” involves a violation to the original person is natural and pervasive, especially if the acceptance comes with a failure to acknowledge the distinction between the original person and the “visitor”. At the same time, a deep attraction to such a person would surely also be entirely natural and perhaps even inescapable. We, like Kelvin, are torn in different directions by this (thankfully) far-fetched possibility. One philosopher who affirms that accepting a duplicate as though it were the original is the rational thing to do is Derek Parfit. His argument for “the unimportance of identity” is both powerful and radical, and though I’ll be critical of his approach, in the final section of the paper I suggest that it does offer up the resources for an intriguing interpretation of the end of this complex and ambiguous film. (shrink)

Can love be an appropriate response to a person? In this paper, I argue that it can. First, I discuss the reasons why we might think this question should be answered in the negative. This will help us clarify the question itself. Then I argue that, even though extant accounts of reasons for love are inadequate, there remains the suspicion that there must be something about people which make our love for them appropriate. Being lovable, I contend, (...) is what makes our love for them appropriate, just as being fearsome is what makes our fear of certain situations appropriate. I finally propose a general account of this property which avoids the major problems facing the extant accounts of reasons for love. (shrink)

Victor Eremita proposes that the reader understand parts I and II of Either/Or as parties in a dialogue; most readers in fact view II as a devastating reply to I. I suggest that part I be read as a reaction or follow-up to Kierkegaard’s dissertation. Much of part I presents reflective characters who are aware of their freedom but reluctant or unable to adopt the ethical life. The modern Antigone and the Silhouettes are sisters of Alcibiades—failed students of Socrates. I (...) articulate and defend their modes of loving, which are significantly different from Don Giovanni’s and Johannes the Seducer’s purely aesthetic approaches to love. Such feminine love, I argue, dwells in the disputed territory between passion and action, substance and freedom, the aesthetic and the ethical. Antigone’s love is a passion she both suffers and tries to appropriate. The Silhouettes’ devotion to their beloved makes them dependent on him. I defend this dependence even though it is undoubtedly a form of despair. By appealing to Sartre’s account of love, I argue moreover that this love involves a recognition and appraisal of the beloved absent in the love exemplified by Fear and Trembling’s knight of infinite resignation. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Bernard Williams’ claim that an appealing conception of love can come into conflict with impartial morality. First, I explain how Williams’ claim can survive one strategy to head off the possibility of conflict. I then examine J.D.Velleman’s Kantian conception of love as another possible way to reject Williams’ claim. I argue, however, that Velleman’s attempt to transcend love’s partiality in his account of love produces an unappealing and unconvincing ideal. This is (...) made particularly clear, I suggest, by the analysis that Velleman is forced to give of the kind of case that generated Williams’ observations in the first place. Thus Velleman’s account should be rejected. (shrink)

Why be moral? Why, in the language of Adam Smith, act on what you think is praiseworthy even when it does not get you praise from other people? Because, answers Smith, you love praiseworthiness. But what is this love of praiseworthiness, and where does it come from? In this article, 1) I argue that we start to love praiseworthiness when we redirect our love of praise away from other people toward the ‘impartial spectator’-aspect of ourselves, and (...) 2) show how this fits with evidence that the rudimentary moral compass which guides us early in childhood needs correction through socialisation to develop into a mature moral conscience. (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 article begins by tracing two issues to be kept in mind in discussing the theme of love as far back as Aristotle: on the one hand the polysemy of the term philia in Aristotle, and on the other hand the fact that there is a focal or core meaning of philia that provides order to that polysemy. Secondly, it is briefly suggested that the same issues are, mutatis mutandis, central for understanding the discussion of love or Liebe (...) by Hegel, the central classic reference in debates on recognition. Thirdly, by pointing out a certain ambiguity in Harry Frankfurt’s recent work on love, the article focuses more closely on the thought that love in the simple sense which Aristotle had pinpointed as the focal meaning of philia, which is arguably at the core of Hegel’s discussion of Liebe, and which still forms at least one of the core senses of the term, is a ‘personifying’ attitude of recognition. Finally, drawing on the above points the article addresses the question whether love as a form of recognition is restricted to intimate relations such as those between family-members, ‘lovers’, close friends and so on, or whether it has applications in interhuman relations more broadly. The answer to this question, it is suggested, is essential for the viability of ethically substantial notions of solidarity beyond circles of close acquaintances, whether within the civil society, across nations, or towards future generations. (shrink)