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)

According to a widespread view, people often anthropomorphize machines such as certain robots and computer and AI systems by erroneously attributing mental states to them. On this view, people almost irresistibly believe, even if only subconsciously, that machines with certain human-like features really have phenomenal or subjective experiences like sadness, happiness, desire, pain, joy, and distress, even though they lack such feelings. This paper questions this view by critiquing common arguments used to support it and by suggesting an alternative explanation. (...) Even if people’s behavior and language regarding human-like machines suggests they believe those machines really have mental states, it is possible that they do not believe that at all. The paper also briefly discusses potential implications of regarding such anthropomorphism as a popular myth. The exercise illuminates the difficult concept of anthropomorphism, helping to clarify possible human relations with or toward machines that increasingly resemble humans and animals. (shrink)

One reason why the problem of other minds keeps cropping up in modern philosophy is that we seem to have conflicting intuitions about our access to the mental lives of others. On the one hand, we are inclined to think that it is wrong to claim, like Cartesian dualists must, that the minds of others are essentially inaccessible to direct experience. But on the other hand we feel that it is equally wrong to claim, like the behaviorists, that the mental (...) lives of others are completely accessible to an outside spectator. This paper attempts to address the problem of the accessibility of other minds while staying faithful to both these intuitions. Central to this undertaking is the idea that we express our mental lives in our bodily behavior. With a firm grasp of the notion of expression, as it is developed in the writings of Wittgenstein and Levinas, we can understand how other minds can be directly perceivable and yet retain a certain inaccessibility. The key is to emphasize the difference between the expressive appearance of a human being and the way an object appears in perception. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s remarks on religious and magical practices are often thought to harbour troubling fideistic and relativistic views. Unsurprisingly, commentators are generally resistant to the idea that religious belief constitutes a ‘language‐game’ governed by its own peculiar ‘rules’, and is thereby insulated from the critical assessment of non‐participants. Indeed, on this fideist‐relativist reading, it is unclear how mutual understanding between believers and non‐believers (even between different sorts of believers) would be possible. In this paper I do three things: (i) show why (...) the fideist‐relativist reading of Wittgenstein is not wildly implausible (Sections 1–2); (ii) argue that, despite its initial plausibility, this reading fails to take into account Wittgenstein’s naturalism (Sections 3–4); and (iii) explain what sort of naturalism this is, and how it sheds light on Wittgenstein’s remarks on religious belief (Sections 5–6). (shrink)

If X loves Y does it follow that X has reasons to love a physiologically exact replacement for Y? Can love's reasons be duplicated? One response to the problem is to suggest that X lacks reasons for loving such a duplicate because the reason-conferring properties of Y cannot be fully duplicated. But a concern, played upon by Derek Parfit, is that this response may result from a failure to take account of the psychological pressures of an actual duplication scenario. In (...) the face of the actual loss of a loved one and the subsequent appearance of a duplicate, how could we resist the inclination to love? Drawing upon duplication scenarios from Parfit and from Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, this paper will argue that there could be reasons for X to come to love a duplicate of Y but that these would not be identical with the reasons that X had (and may still have) to love Y. Nor (in the case of an agent with a normal causal history) could they be reasons for a love that violates the requirement that love is a response to a relationship and therefore takes time to emerge. (shrink)

Acknowledgements: thanks go to Margarita Mauri who arranged for an earlier version of this paper to be delivered at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Barcelona in 2011. I have incorporated several useful and improving comments made by Margarita and colleagues.

Throughout the development of an "ethic of care" different from an "ethic of justice," the relationship between the two has been problematic. Are they theories between which one must choose? Are they complementary? Are they domain-specific? In support of my view that neither is adequate by itself, I here examine the private domain of care of the dying by intimates, and find there important issues both of care and of justice.

Kevin T. Fitzgerald, S.J.; Knowledge Without Wisdom: Human Genetic Engineering Without Religious Insight, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical.

Abstract.My focus is on the problem of plant closings, which have become increasingly common as the deindustrialization of America has proceeded since the early 1980s. In a well‐known article, Joseph William Singer proposed that workers who sued to keep a plant open in the face of a planned closure might appropriately be regarded as possessing a reliance‐based interest in the plant that merited some protection. I seek to extend this sort of argument in two ways. In the first half of (...) the paper, I point to the way in which “tacit obligation” emerges in friendship between persons in the absence of explicit commitments. Employers and employees are of course not as such friends. But I argue that the development of tacit obligations binding friends provides a useful analogy for understanding the growth of similar tacit obligations binding plant owners to workers and local communities. In the second half, I draw on Margaret Radin's work on property and identity to ground a related argument. I suggest that the potential contribution of plants—and the traditions and networks of relationships they help to create and sustain—to the identities of workers and communities provides reason for at least some legal protection of employee and community interests. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to demonstrate the continuing relevance of Wittgenstein’s approach to the problem of freedom of the will, primarily as expounded in his “Lectures on Freedom of the Will”. My overall aim is to show how Wittgenstein works to reconfigure the debates about freedom of the will so that it can be confronted as the kind of problem he thinks it ultimately is: an ethical and existential problem. Not published until 1989, the LFW have received scant critical attention. I (...) argue that Wittgenstein’s approach is highly distinctive in a way that makes it significantly less vulnerable than its closest cousins to certain powerful lines of critical attack. Chapter One brings out the distinctiveness of the LFW, especially vis-à-vis a putatively Wittgensteinian form of compatibilism, exemplified by Kai Nielsen. Albeit in different ways, Wittgenstein and Nielsen are both concerned to show why being caused to act, e.g. by the laws of nature, does not equate to being compelled to act, e.g. against one’s will. Unlike Nielsen, however, Wittgenstein further recognises that showing the compatibility of freedom and natural laws establishes no more than the logical consistency of holding people responsible, given determinism, and so cannot itself constitute a defence of our practices. Chapter Two introduces, as a still closer comparison with Wittgenstein, P. F. Strawson’s practice-based defence of interpersonal, ‘reactive’ attitudes. I argue that the same correlation between a belief in freedom of the will and the primitive expression of ‘reactive’ attitudes/feelings is central also to the LFW. However, I further argue that certain major lines of criticism of Strawson’s practice-based defence of our current practices, familiar in the critical literature, do not in the same way threaten Wittgenstein’s defence of a broader practice-based approach, one that encompasses both reactive and non-reactive attitudes. Chapters Three and Four deal with the difficulties arising from the recognition that our most entrenched and ‘natural’ attitudes are non-reactive rather than reactive, including attitudes that are properly called ‘fatalistic’. Chapter Three develops a response to Galen Strawson’s criticism that if reactive and non-reactive attitudes are both equally expressive of human nature, then any merely descriptive approach to these attitudes will be incapable of resolving the fundamental question of which of these sorts of attitude we ought to adopt. Finally, Chapter Four examines Wittgenstein’s sustained interest in forms of life, especially religious forms of life, which appear to give equal weight to both reactive and non-reactive attitudes. (shrink)