Kant on sex gives most philosophers the following associations: a lifelong celibate philosopher; a natural teleological view of sexuality; a strange incorporation of this natural teleological account within his freedom-based moral theory; and a stark ethical condemnation of most sexual activity. Although this paper provides an interpretation of Kant’s view on sexuality, it neither defends nor offers an apology for everything Kant says about sexuality. Rather, it aims to show that a reconsidered Kant-based account can utilize his many worthwhile (...) insights and that making Kant’s account of sexuality more consistent with his own basic philosophical commitments results in a compelling approach to the complex and complicated phenomena of sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation. (shrink)

An almost poetic, symbolistic approach in analyzing Schopenhauer, "Some Thoughts on Schopenhauer: The Metaphysics of The Sexual Love" accounts for the logic behind why we love in the scheme of empiricism and instinct. The review is a short commentary revolving around the beliefs of Schopenhauer and exemplifies our understanding of human love in the abstract while promoting a realistic, almost sardonic perspective.

In some cultures, people tend to believe that it is very important to be sexually exclusive in romantic relationships and idealise monogamous romantic relationships; but there is a tension in this ideal. Sex is generally considered to have value, and usually when we love someone we want to increase the amount of value in their lives, not restrict it without good reason. There is thus a call, not yet adequately responded to by philosophers, for greater clarity in the reasons (...) §why it might be reasonable for a couple to adopt a policy of sexual exclusivity. This article argues that we cannot justify the demand for sexual exclusivity by a need to protect the relationship from the risk of one partner ‘trading-up’, or by appealing to jealousy. However, sexual exclusivity can be intelligible if it supports the romantic relationship and helps to distinguish it from other relationships. Nonetheless, sexual exclusivity ought not to be the hegemonic social norm that it currently is in some societies because this diminishes the potential value it might have and gives the idea of faithfulness the wrong focus. (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.

In this chapter, Natasha McKeever and Luke Brunning consider (sexual) jealousy in romantic life. They argue that jealousy is best understood as an emotional response to the threatened loss of love or attention, to which one feels deserving, because of a rival. Furthermore, the general value of jealousy can be questioned, and jealousy’s instrumental value needs to be balanced against a range of potential harms. They assess two potential ways of managing jealousy (which are not mutually exclusive)—firstly by (...) adopting a policy of monogamy and secondly by engaging in emotional work. Neither of these methods is easy, and neither will solve jealousy altogether, but Brunning and McKeever argue that the second strategy should be taken more seriously. (shrink)

Sex is an important part of human life. It is a source of pleasure and intimacy, and is integral to many people’s self-identity. This chapter examines the opportunities and challenges posed by the use of AI in how humans express and enact their sexualities. It does so by focusing on three main issues. First, it considers the idea of digisexuality, which according to McArthur and Twist (2017) is the label that should be applied to those ‘whose primary sexual identity (...) comes through the use of technology’, particularly through the use of robotics and AI. While agreeing that this phenomenon is worthy of greater scrutiny, the chapter questions whether it is necessary or socially desirable to see this as a new form of sexual identity. Second, it looks at the role that AI can play in facilitating human-to-human sexual contact, focusing in particular on the use of self-tracking and predictive analytics in optimising sexual and intimate behaviour. There are already a number of apps and services that promise to use AI to do this, but they pose a range of ethical risks that need to be addressed at both an individual and societal level. Finally, it considers the idea that a sophisticated form of AI could be an object of love. Can we be truly intimate with something that has been ‘programmed’ to love us? Contrary to the widely-held view, this chapter argues that this is indeed possible. (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.

It is usually taken for granted that romantic relationships will be sexual, but it seems that there is no necessary reason for this, as it is possible for romantic relationships to not include sex. Indeed, sometimes sex is a part of a romantic relationship for only a relatively short period of it. Furthermore, scientific explanations of the link between sex and love don’t seem fully satisfying because they tell us only about the mechanics of sex, rather than its (...) meaning or phenomenology. Therefore, the question of why it is that the archetypal romantic relationship includes sex, calls for philosophical analysis, yet it has been under-explored in philosophy. In this paper, I attempt to remedy this. I argue that sex is important to romantic love because it partly constitutes, builds, and expresses four of the central goods of a romantic relationship: 1) pleasure, 2) union, 3) intimacy, and 4) vulnerability and care. Thus, sex can be, and often is, an important vehicle for romantic love, though it is not essential for it. (shrink)

This chapter examines the ethical matters that arise from Schopenhauer’s discussions of sexual love and sexual practices. It presents Schopenhauer's remarks on “pederasty”, among other “unnatural lusts”, and attempts to disentangle Schopenhauer’s judgements on these practices from the principles that guide them. It considers these practices in the light of Schopenhauer's ethics of asceticism and his ethics of compassion and concludes that Schopenhauer’s objections to them are not always moral in nature, strictly speaking, and where they are (...) moral, they are not always based on the “unnaturalness” of the practices, but rather the harm that he supposes they may cause. (shrink)

What is love? Is it an uncontrollable emotion? Is it, instead, socially shaped, both an emotion and a social practice? Can the bonds of care and affection between humans and non-human animals be said to be on a par with parent-child relationships between humans? Do parents owe love to their children – and do mothers and fathers, respectively, owe it to different degrees? Do subversive weddings challenge normative ideals about love? What is the significance of love (...) for the value of close personal or family relationships? All these questions and more are discussed in the articles included in this special issue. The contributors draw from a variety of disciplines including philosophy, sociology, political science, religious studies, and history, as well as from empirical work that they have undertaken in Canada, Belgium, Portugal, or Romania. From these different perspectives and experiences, each contribution addresses important questions about love and its relation to sexuality, monogamy, friendship, the family, parenthood, or society in general. (shrink)

Irigaray’s engagement with Aristotelian physics provides a specific diagnosis of women’s ontological and ethical situation under Western metaphysics: Women provide place and containership to men, but have no place of their own, rendering them uncontained and abyssal. She calls for a reconfiguration of this topological imaginary as a precondition for an ethics of sexual difference. This paper returns to Aristotelian cosmological texts to further investigate the topologies of sexual difference suggested there. In an analysis both psychoanalytic and phenomenological, (...) the paper rigorously traces a teleological and oedipal narrative implicit in the structure of the Aristotelian cosmos, in which desire for the mother is superseded by love for the father. Further, the paper argues that this narrative is complicated by certain other elements in the Aristotelian text—aporias involving the notion of boundary and the relationship between space and time, the fallenness of the feminine, and the ineliminably aleatory qualities of matter. The paper concludes that such elements may provide material for disrupting this teleology of gender, opening onto not merely an ethics of sexual difference, but providing space and place for a proliferation of non-normative, queer, transgender and intersex modes of sexed and gendered subjectivity. (shrink)

Objectophilia (also known as Objectum-Sexuality) involves romantic and sexual attraction to specific objects. Objectophiles often develop deep and enduring emotional, romantic, and sexual relations with specific inanimate (concrete or abstract) objects such as trains, bridges, cars, or words. . The determinants of objectophilia are poorly understood. The aim of this paper is to examine the determining factors of objectophilia. We examine four hypotheses about the determinants of objectophilia (pertaining to fetishism, synesthesia, cross-modal mental imagery, and autism) and argue (...) that the most likely determining factors of objectophilia are the social and non-social features of autism. Future studies on the determinants of objectophilia could enhance our understanding and potentially lessen the marginalization experienced by objectophiles. (shrink)

When people now talk about a relationship as being “Platonic”, they mean that the relationship is a non-sexual friendship. But what did Plato himself say about different kinds of relationship, and how did his name come to be associated with non-sexual relationships? While Plato’s Symposium has been the center of attention for his views on love, I argue that the Phaedrus and Laws VIII provide a much clearer account of Plato’s views. In these dialogues, Plato distinguishes between (...) two kinds of love and three kinds of lover. The two kinds of love are fundamentally oriented towards different objects: one kind of love is focused on the body of the beloved and seeks to extract as much bodily pleasure from them as possible, whereas the other kind of love is focused on the soul and seeks to benefit the beloved by improving their character. There is a lover for each kind of love, and a third kind of lover who is torn between these two opposing objects of love. Notably, in the kind of love directed towards the soul, the lovers will not engage in sexual activity. I argue that this is because Plato thinks that the natural function of sex is the procreation of good children and that engaging in such an intensely pleasurable activity risks making the lovers intemperate and lacking in self-control. Thus Plato thinks that the best kind of relationship is one of love (and not just friendship) but is nonetheless non-sexual. (shrink)

In certain corners of the moral enhancement debate, it has been suggested we ought to consider the prospect of supplementing conventional methods of enhancing sexual fidelity (e.g. relationship counselling, moral education, self-betterment, etc.) with biochemical fidelity enhancement methods. In surveying this argument, I begin from the conviction that generally-speaking moral enhancement ought to expectably attenuate (or at least not exacerbate) vulnerability. Assuming conventional methods of enhancing sexual fidelity are at least partially effective in this respect – e.g., that (...) relationship counselling sometimes successfully attenuates the particular vulnerability victims of infidelity feel – then presumably the case for supplementing conventional methods with biochemical methods turns, in part, on the claim that doing so will better promote attenuation of victim vulnerability. -/- In this paper I argue that on a sufficiently sophisticated conception of what this vulnerability consists in, biochemical methods of enhancing fidelity will not expectably attenuate victims’ vulnerability. Moreover, when combined with conventional methods, biochemical methods will predictably tend to undermine whatever attenuation conventional methods expectably promote in that respect. Thus, I conclude that couples committed to saving their relationship following an instance of sexual infidelity have reason to prefer conventional methods of enhancing sexual fidelity sans biochemical methods to conventional methods plus biochemical methods. (shrink)

This encyclopedia article on the philosophy of sexuality discusses the main themes, concepts, and debates in the field, including the metaphysics (or philosophical anthropology) of sex, the morality of sexual behavior, pragmatic and utilitarian evaluations of sexuality, and sexual perversion.

5-MeO-DMT is a psychedelic substance with a short duration of action and intensive effects. Its therapeutic efficacy and practicality may significantly surpass those of classical psychedelics such as ayahuasca and LSD. -/- This retrospective ethnographic inquiry features a woman in her mid-thirties who witnessed her mother's violent suicide and its bloody aftermath at the age of three. Before and after that, her childhood was characterized by domestic violence and sexual abuse perpetrated by several members of her family and extended (...) family. In her twenties and thirties, she dated a member of the local mafia with the intention of asking him to kill her father, who had been the main perpetrator of the sexual abuse and violence. This plan was eventually not carried out, but it reflected her deep bitterness and wrath. -/- A process initiated in her early thirties involving four 5-MeO-DMT sessions and a few additional sessions with psilocybin and ayahuasca in the course of two years completely resolved her symptoms related to the abuses, to the extent that she could rebuild a functional relationship with her father and feel love and compassion towards him. This outcome, i.e., the complete reversal of her attitude and emotions towards her father, appeared highly unusual. For the last three years, the outcome had remained stable. -/- The article also presents the perspective of a female facilitator of this treatment process. The article contributes to a better understanding of the use of 5-MeO-DMT in severe traumatization as well as exemplifies the possible positive contributions of actors who are not medical professionals in resolving deep collective traumatization in societies. (shrink)

There is no specific trans perspective on romantic love. Trans people love and do not love, fall in love and fall out of love, just like everyone else. Trans people inhabit different sexual identities, different relationship types, and different kinds of loving. When it comes to falling in love as or with a trans person, however, things can get more complicated, as questions of gender and sexual identity emerge. In a study by (...) Blair & Hoskin from 2018, 87.5% of the interviewed participants said they would not consider dating a trans person (Blair & Hoskin, 2018). Among those who were open to dating trans people, a pattern emerged: the subjects were disproportionately willing to date trans men but not trans women, even if this preference did not match their own sexual identity; for example, a woman who identifies as a lesbian may be open to dating a trans man but not a trans woman. This seems like a clash of sexual and gender identities: why are women who identify as lesbians willing to date men? This chapter aims to analyze this phenomenon: love between clashing sexual and gender identities – e.g., the love between a man, who identifies as being romantically interested in men, and a trans woman, – and thereby evaluates the limits of romantic love for trans people. Limits of love, in this chapter, are conceived of as normative restrictions on whom and how we love. By exploring cases of clashing sexual and gender identities in romantic love, this chapter analyzes how trans people’s opportunities for love are often limited. (shrink)

The standard liberal sexual ethic maintains that consent is the only requirement for ethical sexual relations. While consent is certainly necessary for an adequate sexual ethic (and it’s important to know what it involves), I argue that it’s far from sufficient. The key claims that I advance are the following: (1) The consent-only model of sexual ethics affirms a “casual” view of sex and therefore it can’t make sense of and properly combat what’s worst in the (...) sexual domain: namely, the grave evil of sexual violence. (2) The consent-only model of sexual ethics fails properly to recognize the special significance of human sexuality and the nature of erotic love and its role in human sexual fulfillment and therefore it can’t make sense of and properly support what’s best in the sexual domain: namely, a committed erotic loving relationship. A more adequate sexual ethic, I maintain, would be a more traditionalist one that involves the following: it would give proper recognition to the special significance of human sexuality, avoid dehumanization in sexual desire, and encourage and support committed erotic love and its role in human fulfillment. Moreover, it would regard this as requiring that we cultivate sexual virtues such as chastity, modesty, and fidelity, and that we encourage and support life-long monogamous marriage as the proper context for human sexual relationship. (shrink)

“Love hurts”—as the saying goes—and a certain amount of pain and difficulty in intimate relationships is unavoidable. Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since adversity can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other components of a life well-lived. But other times, love can be downright dangerous. It may bind a spouse to her domestic abuser, draw an unscrupulous adult toward sexual involvement with a child, put someone under the insidious spell of a cult leader, (...) and even inspire jealousy-fueled homicide. How might these perilous devotions be diminished? The ancients thought that treatments such as phlebotomy, exercise, or bloodletting could “cure” an individual of love. But modern neuroscience and emerging developments in psychopharmacology open up a range of possible interventions that might actually work. These developments raise profound moral questions about the potential uses—and misuses—of such anti-love biotechnology. In this article, we describe a number of prospective love-diminishing interventions, and offer a preliminary ethical framework for dealing with them responsibly should they arise. (shrink)

The paper discusses how some Cartesian dualism, inherited from Sartre, is an obstacle to Beauvoir's project of a new comprehension of the feminine ‘situation', aimed at rescuing women from an 'inauthentic' self-definition. Suggestions coming from the phenomenological approach of a positive value of the bodily dimension as such, and hence of the feminine bodily dimension, are never fully spelt out, and Beauvoir falls back into the trap of grounding claims of equality between men and women on the assumption that bodily (...) differences are of limited relevance. The eventual reason for a such step back is the distorting Cartesian mirror into which Beauvoir still looks in the vain hope of discovering a disembodied self as the (Cartesian) subject of an impossible kind of liberation. This is an unpublished English version of Sergio Cremaschi, “Il concetto di eros in Le deuxième sexe di Simone de Beauvoir”, in V. Melchiorre (ed.), Amore e matrimonio nel pensiero filosofico e teologico moderno, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 1976, pp. 296-318. (shrink)

hese are replies to my critics at at Society for German Idealism and Romanticism (SGIR) Author-Meets-Critics session, Pacific APA 2021. -/- Published version of the full symposium is available on SGIR Review's homepage.

This essay is not about what love is. It is about what self-ascriptions of love do. People typically self-ascribe romantic love when a nexus of feelings, beliefs, attitudes, values, commitments, experiences, and personal histories matches their conception of romantic love. But what shapes this conception? And (how) can we adjudicate amongst conflicting conceptions? -/- Self-ascriptions of love do not merely describe the underlying nexus of attitudes and beliefs. They also change it. This essay describes how (...) conceptions of love affect romantic experience. I limn distinctions between love and obsessive infatuation and explore ways language can cultivate queer romantic preferences. Since conceptions of love are shaped, often implicitly, by terms available in one’s linguistic community, the resulting nexus of concepts and conceptions manifests linguistic luck. I suggest ways we might sculpt the language of love to better understand—and change—ourselves. Love can help us flourish and so can our “love” language. (shrink)

There is a conflict between a strictly political approach to LGBT rights, in which the battle must never cease. and the less encountered notion that individuals can let the battle settle into the background and simply get on with unpolitical life. at least unpolitical at home. The article takes the example of India as a salient place to view this conflict. As a democratic nation, India has had some limited progress in protecting LGBT rights. How its massively differentiated and traditional (...) society has adopted and tolerated this moral enjoinder is another matter. Certainly, acceptance is as important as legal recognition. But how are the politics faring at the individual level? One of the best media for feeling a nation’s political pulse is not internet or television but literature. Two current Indian authors exemplify how, at the personal level, some sexual politicking has already succeeded, in some social realms, by almost disappearing from the narrative. (shrink)

This paper uses a dilemma presented by David Benatar to explore the challenges that ‘Sexual Liberals’ face in giving a satisfactory account of sexual ethics. A satisfactory Sexual Liberal account of sexual ethics must be able to fully explain the wrongness of sexual assault without implying that sexual activity should be restricted to those in love. The assumption that this is impossible may be due to mistakes in our thinking about sexual assault. (...) However, even when such mistakes are resolved, producing a satisfactory account of sexual ethics requires Sexual Liberals to confront the significance of the sexual in human life. I describe an account of sexual desire that explains the significance of the sexual in human life without forcing us to endorse a restrictive sexual ethics. (shrink)

I show that in Epictetus’ view (1) the wise man genuinely loves (στέργειv) and is affectionate (φιλόστoργoς) to his family and friends; (2) only the Stoic wise man is, properly speaking, capable of loving—that is, he alone actually has the power to love; and (3) the Stoic wise man loves in a robustly rational way which excludes passionate, sexual, ‘erotic’ love (’έρως). In condemning all ’έρως as objectionable πάθoς Epictetus stands with Cicero and with the other Roman (...) Stoics, Seneca and Musonius Rufus, and against the Greeks of the early Stoa. Epictetus’ conception of love excludes erotic passion because of its intrinsic excessiveness and uncontrollableness, which inevitably endanger mental serenity, but includes and emphasizes the soberly rational, purely positive joy of interpersonal affiliation. Epictetus’ account of how the Stoic Sage loves is, I think, more consistent and less problematic than that of the Greek Stoics. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray argues that the way to overcome the culture of narcissism in the Western tradition is to recognize sexuate difference and to refigure subjectivity as sexuate. This article is an attempt to unpack how Irigaray’s philosophical refiguring of love as an intermediary works in this process of reimagining subjectivity as sexuate. If we trace the moments in Irigaray’s philosophy where she engages with Hegel’s dialectic, and rethinks this dialectical process via the question of sexual difference and a (...) refiguring of love, a clearer reading of her work as groundbreaking and ultimately refiguring our ontological structures becomes possible. Consequently, if we do not understand Irigaray’s radical reformulation of love, we will miss her larger ontological project and fail to properly appreciate her comments on other types of difference—for example, differences of race, tradition, religion. This article argues that as we begin to appreciate the ways in which Irigaray refigures both love and thought as the intermediary, an intermediary that fundamentally disrupts phallocentric binary logic, we can begin to imagine how refiguring the most intimate human experience of love can lead us toward the realization of an ethical political community in which difference in all forms is nourished. (shrink)

Drawing on a range of sources such as Roman oratory, love elegy, Carmina Priapea and Petronius, the paper claims that the Priapic model of Roman Sexuality entails a particularly vulnerable form of male sexuality which can best be observed in descriptions of young men in the transitional period to manhood, such as, e.g., Achilles in Statius' Achilleis.

Professor John Cowburn, S.J., not only investigates ethical theory, but he successfully discusses the religious ideas of our tradition and applies them to topics which are relevant in our everyday lives. In his book LOVE he provides a useful guide to young people.

In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), we watch the film’s protagonist, Theodore, as he struggles with the end of his marriage and a growing attachment to his artificially intelligent operating system, Samantha. While the film remains unique in its ability to cinematically portray the Lacanian contention that “there is no sexual relationship,” this article explores how our digital non-relationships can be re-approached through the medium of comedy. Specifically, when looked at through a comic lens, notable scenes from Her are examined (...) for the potential they provide in affording a self-decentrement which allows us to traverse the fantasies that structure our non-relations. (shrink)

At the heart of Plato’s theory of erōs is the ‘ascent’ of love for an individual body, through several stages, to love of Beauty itself (Symposium 210a-212b). I argue that our understanding of the psychology of this transformation would benefit especially from bringing in Plato’s views on pain from the Republic. For erōs is presented in the Symposium as including sexual desire (207b) as well as love of wisdom (210d), but the Republic takes the former to (...) be a painful desire, whereas the latter is apparently treated as painless. The ‘ascent’ of love, then, seems to involve the transformation of a painful desire into a painless one. I conclude that this transformation is best understood as a rechanneling of desire within the tripartite soul. (shrink)

The Philosopher Queen: Feminist Essays on War, Love, and Knowledge. By Chris Cuomo. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003. The Philosopher Queen is a powerful illustration of what Cherríe Moraga calls a "theory in the flesh." That is, theorizing from a place where "physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grow up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic [and, I would add, an ethics, spirituality, and epistemology] born out (...) of necessity" (Moraga 21). Cuomo's theory in the flesh combines standard philosophical essays with personal narratives and invites us to do philosophy from this joyful and witty place. Readers are invited to reframe and reexamine war, science, gender, sexuality, race, ecology, knowledge, and politics in a voice that is fearless, funny, faithful, and feminist—one that disrupts common understandings of how philosophy ought to be done. Instead philosophy should help us to "negotiate a wild, wicked world, and to provide some understanding of being and existence. The best philosophy aims to promote good and to produce knowledge, and therefore enable flourishing" (xi). Accepted philosophical approaches alone are inadequate. Life's challenges resist formulaic solutions. Knowledge is not always produced through neat deductions: truths are partial, power divides, stomachs growl, hearts are broken, and emotions influence... (shrink)

"God wants to marry us" (p. 14, 97, 122), es decir, Dios quiere casarse con nosotros, es el tema central del presente libro, y según otros autores, es también el sentido real de la Biblia. La Biblia no es un libro que nos enseña cómo encontrar a Dios, sino el libro que nos revela cómo Dios nos busca incansablemente y nos relata las innumerables veces y maneras en las que Dios trata de hacerse el encontradizo para que el ser humano (...) lo acoja en su corazón. Pues bien, este es el principal argumento del autor de este libro. La obra de Christopher West es a todas luces teológica, y nos deja ver, con sencillas palabras, la profundidad de la teología del cuerpo propuesta por el Papa Juan Pablo II. Aquí encontraremos que el significado de la vida del ser humano está impreso en su propio cuerpo, en su sexualidad. Cabe anotar que se requiere algún mínimo de conocimiento teológico para leer este libro con facilidad, y da por sentado un cierto conocimiento de la Sagrada Escritura, la cual es citada 213 veces, además de las veces que hace referencia al capítulo quinto de la carta de San Pablo a los Efesios. De todas maneras, el estilo fluido y cercano del autor, así como la mención a algunos ejemplos de la vida cotidiana, permite que el contenido del libro se vaya asimilando poco a poco. (shrink)

Men, Women, and the Mystery of Love es el libro escrito por Edward Sri, profesor del Augustine Institute de Denver, Colorado, publicado en el 2015 por la editorial Servant, en el cual toma las enseñanzas de la obra del papa Juan Pablo II titulada Amor y responsabilidad pre-sentándolas como una guía práctica, sin ser un manual seco sobre ética sexual o un tratado abstracto sobre el amor, que ayuda a los lectores a comprender la visión de Juan Pablo (...) II sobre las relaciones entre el hombre y la mujer, y las puedan aplicar en sus propias vidas. (shrink)

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 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)

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)

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)

The chapter advances two claims: first, that commitment to one’s spouse is only instrumentally valuable, adding no intrinsic value to the relationship. Moreover, commitment has costs: it partially forecloses the future, thus making one less attentive to life’s possibilities; therefore, it would be desirable for people to achieve the same goods without commitment. The second, more ambitious, claim is that commitment in general, and marital commitments in particular, are problematic instruments for securing the good of romantic and sexual (...) class='Hi'>love. It makes sense to prefer that another person’s (perhaps especially, romantic or sexual) love for you is sustained by inclination rather than commitment. In addition, the pragmatic reasons for commitment are weak in relation to activities that, ideally, are process-oriented rather than goal-oriented—such as loving another person. (shrink)