Šiuo straipsniu naujai persvarstoma viena svarbiausių romantinės meilės teorijų šiuolaikinėje filosofijoje – meilės kaip vienio teorija. Remiantis iš transpersonalinio tyrimo kylančiais pastebėjimais, straipsnyje klausiama, ar nebūtų verta pripažinti, kad meilė neatsiejama nuo stipraus vienio jausmo. Taigi autorius laikosi nuostatos, kurios šiuolaikinėje filosofijoje nesilaiko niekas. Šiame kontekste straipsnyje taip pat glaustai apžvelgiamas vienas iš svarbiausių meilės kaip vienio variantų – vienio su Dievu. Straipsnis baigiamas pasiūlymu, kad, kalbant apie išsipildžiusią meilę, būtų prasmingiau kalbėti apie ryšius, o ne apie santykius.

Lovers often disagree. We may reject the specific goals our loved ones pursue or the broad values they hold. Some philosophers suggest that such evaluative conflict makes romantic love in its ideal form deficient. I argue that this is mistaken. On the contrary, our ideal of love holds that we can love people for ‘who they are’ (as we say), even as we profoundly disagree with them. My argument draws on intuitive cases from screwball comedy about love amid conflict, love (...) across political party lines, as well as ‘forbidden’ love across religions and cultures. At a deeper level, I sketch an ideal of love I call intimate independence and argue that this ideal is (i) fully compatible with any evaluative conflict, (ii) embedded in our ordinary attitudes towards mature love between equals, and (iii) an ideal worth achieving. As long as intimate independence is a compelling ideal, deep conflict will not seem like an obstacle to true love. The ideal reminds us that love can bring together people with radically different points of view, and that to insist on shared ends or values is thus to miss a part of the meaning and power of love. (shrink)

Psychologists often characterize the infant’s attachment to her primary caregiver as love. Philosophical accounts of love, however, tend to speak against this possibility. Love is typically thought to require sophisticated cognitive capacities that infants do not possess. Nevertheless, there are important similarities between the infant-primary caregiver bond and mature love, and the former is commonly thought to play an important role in one’s capacity for the latter. In this work, I examine the relationship between the infant-primary caregiver bond and love. (...) I argue that while these very early attachments do not represent genuine love, a fuller understanding of them can inform extant philosophical views of love. (shrink)

We often use the term “attachment” to describe our emotional connectedness to objects in the world. We become attached to our careers, to our homes, to certain ideas, and perhaps most importantly, to other people. Interestingly, despite its import and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the topic of attachment per se has been largely ignored in the philosophy literature. I address this lacuna by identifying attachment as a rich “mode of mattering” that can help to inform certain aspects of agency (...) and emotion. First, drawing on insights from Ancient stoicism and developmental and clinical psychology, I suggest that the relevant form of attachment involves a felt need for its object and a particular relationship between the object and the attached agent’s sense of security. I then argue that these features serve to distinguish the attitude from the more philosophically familiar notion of caring. Finally, I show that recognizing this form of attachment as a distinct mode of mattering has important implications for understanding grief. (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)

Many Christian theorists notice that love should contain, in additional to benevolence, some kind of interpersonal or unitive component. The difficulty comes in trying to provide an account of this unitive component that is sufficiently interpersonal in other-love and yet is also compatible with self-love. Eleonore Stump is one of the few Christian theorists who directly addresses this issue. Building upon the work of Thomas Aquinas, Stump argues that love is constituted by two desires: the desire for an individual’s good (...) and the desire to be united to that individual. Stump further develops the desire for union within this Thomistic understanding of love, and she maintains that her developed account not only captures the robustly interpersonal nature of one’s love of another but is also compatible with the love of oneself. Unfortunately, Stump’s way of making sense of this latter claim introduces a significant inconsistency in her analyses of the desire for union in self-love and other-love. Nevertheless, the most important features of Stump’s Neo-Thomistic account are salvageable. For there is a way of understanding love’s desire for union that emerges out of Thomas’s views on love and is compatible with the desiderata suggested by Stump, only does not have the same difficulties that beset Stump’s account. What is offered, then, is a modification of Stump’s account that might better serve her purposes. The resulting view of love, however, is one not only relevant to Stump. Rather, the view that emerges is a broadly Thomistic conception of love that is plausible in its own right and captures a certain biblical emphasis on the relational or interpersonal nature of love. (shrink)

The nature of blame is not to be identified solely with a judgment, or an overt act, or an angry emotion. Instead, blame should be identified with a sentiment: more specifically, a multi-track disposition that manifests itself in various different emotions, thoughts or actions in a range of different circumstances. This paper aims to argue for these two claims. I start by arguing that blame is not solely a judgment, overt act, or an angry emotion. Then I develop the view (...) that blame is a sentiment. In doing so, I also show how viewing blame as a sentiment avoids objections that justifies us in dismissing the previous accounts. In addition, I argue that it significantly affects other inquiries concerning blame. I end by answering a skeptical challenge that there cannot be an illuminating and unifying analysis of blame. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s account of moral responsibility in “Freedom and Resentment” has been widely influential. In both that paper and in the contemporary literature, much attention has been paid to Strawson’s account of blame in terms of reactive attitudes like resentment and indignation. The Strawsonian view of praise in terms of gratitude has received comparatively little attention. Some, however, have noticed something puzzling about gratitude and accountability. We typically understand accountability in terms of moral demands and expectations. Yet gratitude does not (...) express or enforce moral demands or expectations. So, how is it a way to hold an agent accountable? In a more general manner, we might ask if there is even sense to be made of the idea that agents can be accountable—i.e., “on the hook”—in a positive way. In this paper, I clarify the relationship between gratitude and moral accountability. I suggest that accountability is a matter of engaging with others in a way that is basically concerned with their feelings and attitudes rather than solely a matter of moral demands. Expressions of gratitude are a paradigmatic form of this concerned engagement. I conclude by defending my view from the objection that it leads to an overly generous conception of holding accountable and suggest in reply that moral responsibility skeptics may not help themselves to as many moral emotions as they might have thought. (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)

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)

Current analytical philosophies of romantic love tend to identify the essence of such love with one specific element, such as concern for the beloved person, valuing the beloved person or the union between the lovers. This paper will deal with different forms of the union theory of love which takes love to be the physical, psychic or ontological union of two persons. Prima facie, this theory might appear to be implausible because it has several contra-intuitive implications, and yet, I submit, (...) it is more coherent and attractive than it seems to be. I shall distinguish three specific models and thereby offer a differentiated account of the union theory which has not previously been provided in the literature. I will claim that two of these models should be rejected. I shall then defend the third model against certain possible objections ; but nevertheless, I shall conclude by showing how this model, too, faces further significant objections which ultimately expose the limits of the union theory of love. In conclusion, I will sketch the outlines of a non-reductive cluster theory of love. (shrink)

Speaking roughly, there are two competing accounts of the basis of love. First, the appraisal view: love is based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved. Second, the bestowal view: love is not based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved, but love is based in the lover, who then bestows value onto the beloved. While both models deserve due attention, the bestowal model is of present concern. Despite numerous virtues, the bestowal model faces (...) trenchant objections. In this paper, I outline and defend a version of bestowal love, according to which bestowal love is based in the lover’s motivating reasons, and which preserves the virtues while overcoming the difficulties facing bestowal love. (shrink)

Le modèle évaluatif de l’amour est centré sur l’objet et basé sur les raisons : l’amour se fonde sur des raisons dérivées des propriétés appréciables de l’aimé. Le modèle attributif de l’amour est axé sur le sujet et non fondé sur les raisons : l’amour n’est pas basé sur des raisons dérivées des propriétés appréciables de l’aimé, mais provient plutôt de l’amant. Dans cet article, je mélange ces modèles opposés dans le but de préserver leurs vertus et de surmonter leurs (...) difficultés. Je propose un compte rendu de l’amour basé sur des motifs et axé sur le sujet : l’amour éclot chez l’amant mais, en lui, il repose sur les raisons qui motivent l’amant. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt has a comprehensive and, at times, compelling, account of love, which are outlined in several of his works. However, he does not think that romantic love fits the ideal of love as it ‘includes a number of vividly distracting elements, which do not belong to the essential nature of love as a mode of disinterested concern’. In this paper, I argue that we can, nonetheless, learn some important things about romantic love from his account. Furthermore, I will suggest, (...) conversely, that there is distinct value in romantic love, which derives from the nature of the relationship on which it is based. Frankfurt tries to take agape and reformulate it so that it can also account for love of particular people. Whilst he succeeds, to some extent, in describing parental love, he fails to accurately describe romantic love and friendship, and, moreover, overlooks what is distinctly valuable about them. Although it was not his intention to describe romantic love, by failing to include features such as reciprocity in his account of love, Frankfurt leaves no room for a kind of love that is important and valuable to many people. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that the focus of love is ‘the beloved herself’—but what does this actually mean? Implicit in J. David Velleman’s view of love is the intriguing suggestion that to have ‘the beloved herself’ as the focus of love is to respond to her essence. However, Velleman understands the beloved’s essence to amount to the universal quality of personhood, with the result that the beloved’s particularity becomes marginalized in his account. I therefore suggest an alternative. Based on Søren (...) Kierkegaard’s analysis of the self, I demonstrate that the beloved being ‘herself’ is determined by a quality—selfhood—that is both essential and particular to her. To have as the focus of love ‘the beloved herself,’ I claim, is to respond to this quality, which is to respond to her individual essence. (shrink)

Shame is one of the more painful consequences of loving someone; my beloved’s doing something immoral can cause me to be ashamed of her. The guiding thought behind this paper is that explaining this phenomenon can tell us something about what it means to love. The phenomenon of beloved-induced shame has been largely neglected by philosophers working on shame, most of whom conceive of shame as being a reflexive attitude. Bennett Helm has recently suggested that in order to account for (...) beloved-induced shame, we should deny the reflexivity of shame. After arguing that Helm’s account is inadequate, I proceed to develop an account of beloved-induced shame that rightly preserves its reflexivity. A familiar feature of love is that it involves an evaluative dependence; when I love someone, my well-being depends upon her life’s going well. I argue that loving someone also involves a persistent tendency to believe that her life is going well, in the sense that she is a good person, that she is not prone to wickedness. Lovers are inclined, more strongly than they otherwise would be, to give their beloveds the moral benefit of the doubt. These two features of loving—an evaluative dependence and a persistent tendency to believe in the beloved’s moral goodness—provide the conditions for a lover to experience shame when he discovers that his beloved has morally transgressed. (shrink)

Although anxiety is frequently seen as a predominantly negative phenomenon, some recent researchers have argued that it plays an important positive function, serving as an alert to warn agents of possible problems or threats. I argue that not only can one’s own, first-personal anxiety perform this function; because it is possible for others—in particular, one’s friends—to feel anxious on one’s behalf, their anxious feelings can sometimes play the same role in our functioning, and make similar contributions to our well-being. I (...) distinguish between a number of kinds of cases in which what I call proxy anxiety serves a positive function, including Anxiety Avoidance (where there is good reason for an agent to avoid becoming anxious herself, but can benefit from a friend’s anxiety on her behalf), Anxiety Omission (where an agent fails to become anxious due to a malfunctioning anxiety-generating system), long-term commitments involving dispositions to feel other-directed proxy anxiety, and cases in which proxy anxiety can help reduce or relieve excessive anxiety. A person’s friends, it is argued, are particularly well positioned to help regulate deficient and/or excessive anxieties, precisely because friends are close enough to care for and identify with the agent, but at the same time distant enough to maintain a relatively objective perspective. I conclude by examining connections between proxy anxiety and theories of well-being. (shrink)

Do children have a right to be loved? An affirmative answer faces two immediate challenges: (i) a child's basic needs can be met without love, therefore a defence of such a right cannot appeal to the role of love in protecting children's most basic needs, and (ii) since love is non-voluntary, it seems that there cannot be a corresponding duty on the part of parents to love their child. In this essay, I defend an affirmative answer that overcomes both of (...) these challenges. First, I argue that the right of children to be loved is grounded in the value of children leading meaningful lives. Second, I argue that the right of children to be loved gives rise to a duty on the part of the state to do all that it legitimately can to ensure that procreation and parenting follows from a truly voluntary decision on the part of its citizens. -/- . (shrink)

This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my child, and my friend. This task has typically proceeded hand-in-hand with philosophical analyses of these kinds of personal love, analyses that in part respond to various puzzles (...) about love. Can love be justified? If so, how? What is the value of personal love? What impact does love have on the autonomy of both the lover and the beloved? (shrink)

Many think that love would be a casualty of free will skepticism. I disagree. I argue that love would be largely unaffected if we came to deny free will, not simply because we cannot shake the attitude, but because love is not chosen, nor do we want it to be. Here, I am not alone; others have reached similar conclusions. But a few important distinctions have been overlooked. Even if hard incompatibilism is true, not all love is equal. Although we (...) have only minimal control over love, it can be more or less authentic. I develop my position by considering the fictional trope of love potions and the implications of a futuristic psychotropic, Lovezac—Viagra for the heart. But I am not as optimistic as some. Even though free will skepticism would not jeopardize love-the-feeling, there are reasons to think that loving relationships might not be immune. (shrink)

Although we can try to explain why we love, we can never justify our love. Love is neither based on reasons, nor responsive to reasons, nor can it be assessed for normative reasons. Love can be odd, unfortunate, fortuitous, or even sadly lacking, but it can never be appropriate or inappropriate. We may have reasons to act on our love, but we cannot justify our loving feelings. Shakespeare's Bottom is right: "Reason and love keep little company together now-a-days." Indeed, they (...) keep none and they never kept any: there are no justifying reasons for love. (shrink)

This paper examines the surprisingly central role of sympathetic love within Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy. It shows that such love fulfils a range of metaphysical functions, and highlight an important shift in Cavendish’s account vis-a-vis earlier conceptions: sympathetic love is no longer given an emanative or mechanistic explanation, but is naturalized as an active emotion. It furthers investigate to what extent Cavendish’s account reveals a rift between the realm of nature and the realm of human sociability, and whether this rift really (...) prompts an inward turn, as some interpreters have suggested. (shrink)

This thesis defends a novel interpretation of the normative foundations of Hegel’s mature social and political philosophy. It argues that autonomous agency is grounded in a drive to comprehend ourselves, which gives us an aim to which we are inescapably committed as agents. It argues that this aim ultimately makes it rational to cultivate and act out of a feeling of “ethical love”, which is a positive evaluative attitude towards the goods of other individuals that, in turn, implies a commitment (...) to the social and political institutions Hegel outlines in his theory of Sittlichkeit, or ethical life. Ethical love is the ultimate way in which individuals make themselves comprehensible to themselves; ethical life is the way in which they express that love. It is for this reason that acting autonomously ultimately requires participating in such institutions. I suggest that this interpretation avoids some of the shortcomings of alternative approaches to this matter. Chapter 1 introduces the notion of autonomous agency as underpinned by a drive towards self-comprehension. In chapter 2, I argue that this drive operates both with respect to our individual identities and developmentally, over time, in that agents characterised by this drive are led ultimately to conceive of themselves as “persons”, in Hegel’s technical sense: as agents who are rationally compelled to recognise others. In chapters 3 and 4, I show that there is a tension between these two aspects of our identities, and that Hegel’s theory of objective mind is effectively the working out of this tension. (shrink)

It seems better to love virtue than vice, pleasure than pain, good than evil. Perhaps it's also better to love virtuous people than vicious people. But at the same time, it's repugnant to suggest that a mother should love her smarter, more athletic, better looking son than his dim, clumsy, ordinary brother. My task is to help sort out the conflicting intuitions about what we should love. In particular, I want to address a problem for the no-reasons view, the theory (...) that love cannot be rationally justified. Since it seems better to love good people rather than evil villains, it appears that there are indeed reasons for (or, at least, against) love. Is it coherent to talk this way and deny that love can be justified? I think so and will explain how. (shrink)