This article details how Martha Nussbaum has heightened the potential tension between love and respect, flagged by Kant, by strengthening what each requires. She elaborates the particularism and disruptiveness of love while insisting on a cosmopolitanism of respect. The article suggests that dealing with this tension will require developing a more detailed theory of institutional justice, one that can extend to the international arena.

Is love essential to ethical life, or merely a supplement? In Kant’s view, respect and love, as duties, are in tension with each other because love involves drawing closer and respect involves drawing away. By contrast, Irigaray says that love and respect do not conflict because love as passion must also involve distancing and we have a responsibility to love. I argue that love, understood as passion and based on (...) class='Hi'>respect, is essential to ethics. (shrink)

Sex, Love, and Gender is the first volume to present a comprehensive philosophical theory that brings together all of Kant's practical philosophy — found across his works on ethics, justice, anthropology, history, and religion — and provide a critique of emotionally healthy and morally permissible sexual, loving, gendered being. By rethinking Kant's work on human nature and making space for sex, love, and gender within his moral accounts of freedom, the book shows how, despite his austere and even (...) anti-sex, cisist, sexist, and heterosexist reputation, Kant's writings on happiness and virtue (Part I) and right (Part II) in fact yield fertile philosophical ground on which we can explore specific contemporary issues such as abortion, sexual orientation, sexual or gendered identity, marriage, trade in sexual services, and sex- or gender-based oppression. Indeed, Kant's philosophy provides us with resources to appreciate and value the diversity of human ways of loving and the existential importance of our embodied, social selves. Structured on a thematic basis, with introductions to assist those new to Kant's philosophy, this book will be a valuable resource for anyone who cares about these issues and wants to make sense of them. -/- Alternatively: Sex, Love, and Gender identifies a set of possibilities that define human beings’ sexuality. These sets come with their own concepts, which specify how the possibilities are realized and what effects they have on our lives lived together. Partly the task is descriptive. The description has to be plausible. Plausibility comes from the phenomenology (and not the other way around). Partly the task is normative. The normative content also has to be plausible. Plausibility here comes from vindicating the principles that underwrite the possibilities that define human beings’ sexualities and sexual experiences and behaviors lived by human beings and from the philosophical explanations and conclusions that follow. Overall plausibility, then, comes from discursive analysis of alternatives, from a priori argument, and, in the evaluative case, from showing how the Kantian account of a good life fits with reasonable conceptions of goodness consistent with the phenomenology of human lives. Although this exploration leads us, as we will see, to most corners of Kant’s practical philosophy, including his metaethics and metaphysics, the main focus is on an account of human sex, love, and gender explored explicitly with respect to happiness and ethics (virtue) and justice (right). It is because of this focus that the book is divided into two parts: Part 1 (“Human Sexuality and Virtue”) and Part 2 (“Human Sexuality and Right”). (shrink)

While the opposition between love and hate is a recurrent and legitimate topos of our thinking, little attention has been devoted to the question of whether other aversive affective states such as fear, anger, disgust, or contempt might be regarded as contraries of love. In this paper, I explore this issue by focusing on the particular case of fear. My aim is to argue that love and fear are asymmetric opposites. The paper begins with a discussion of (...) “the asymmetry thesis”, as found in the works of some early phenomenologists such as Scheler and Kolnai. According to this thesis, love is a much broader, multifaceted, and ubiquitous phenomenon than hate. One important consequence of this thesis is that love might admit other aversive affective states as its opposites, fear being one of them. Next, I offer an analysis of the nature of love and fear by focusing on four central elements of both states: their targeted objects, their typical evaluations, their qualitative feel, and the action tendencies inherent to each of them. It is argued that, in several respects, love and fear exhibit contrary features so that they can be regarded as being opposite affective states despite their asymmetric nature. I proceed to analyze the phenomenon of the “fear of intimacy” as a possible case of ambivalence in which love and fear are experienced toward one and the same object. The final part of the paper summarizes the main findings and extracts some conclusions for further research. (shrink)

A central reason that undergirds the significance of evo-devo is the claim that development was left out of the Modern synthesis. This claim turns out to be quite complicated, both in terms of whether development was genuinely excluded and how to understand the different kinds of embryological research that might have contributed. The present paper reevaluates this central claim by focusing on the practice of model organism choice. Through a survey of examples utilized in the literature of the Modern synthesis, (...) I identify a previously overlooked feature: exclusion of research on marine invertebrates. Understanding the import of this pattern requires interpreting it in terms of two epistemic values operating in biological research: theoretical generality and explanatory completeness. In tandem, these values clarify and enhance the significance of this exclusion. The absence of marine invertebrates implied both a lack of generality in the resulting theory and a lack of completeness with respect to particular evolutionary problems, such as evolvability and the origin of novelty. These problems were salient to embryological researchers aware of the variation and diversity of larval forms in marine invertebrates. In closing, I apply this analysis to model organism choice in evo-devo and discuss its relevance for an extended evolutionary synthesis. (shrink)

The 1981 Dahlem conference was a catalyst for contemporary evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-devo). This introductory chapter rehearses some of the details of the history surrounding the original conference and its associated edited volume, explicates the philosophical problem of conceptual change that provided the rationale for a workshop devoted to evaluating the epistemic revisions and transformations that occurred in the interim, explores conceptual change with respect to the concept of evolutionary novelty, and highlights some of the themes and patterns in (...) the different contributions to the present volume, Conceptual Change in Biology: Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives on Evolution and Development. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Love and Christian Ethics: Tradition, Theory, and Society eds. by Frederick V. Simmons and Brian C. SorrelsMichael Le ChevallierLove and Christian Ethics: Tradition, Theory, and Society Edited by Frederick V. Simmons and Brian C. Sorrels WASHINGTON, DC: GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. 400 pp. $119.00 / $39.95Fredrick Simmons and Brian Sorrels present an impressive, cohesive volume of essays by twenty-two leading scholars who engage different facets of (...) class='Hi'>love and theological ethics. although dedicated to gene outka—thus setting the broad theme and establishing his work as a privileged point of reference throughout the volume—Love and Christian Ethics should not be confused with a Festschrift. it accomplishes far more in intellectual diversity and depth, making a significant contribution to scholarship.The volume is organized into three sections: tradition, theory, and society. across the first section, the authors address love within major sources and figures, treating scripture, greek philosophy, augustine, aquinas, Kant, and Kierkegaard. Far from a textbook presentation, each essay marks out its own argument regarding the place of love in the respective subject. The second section is devoted to major theoretical questions raised within scholarship on love and ethics, addressing topics like the relation of eudaimonism to love (a running thread that emerges in the book), forgiveness, friendship, and evolution. The final section moves into the field of practice, application, and society, including an essay critically engaging implicit presentations of love found in the law, another treating love and international development, and one poignant essay by Mark D. Jordan calling for a moratorium on strong pronouncements in sexual ethics until ethicists can cultivate a loving knowledge of sex. This final section also includes reflections on love in the Jewish and Muslim traditions. Simmons's introduction and William Werpehowksi's afterword provide useful bookends. although no single thesis blandly governs this volume as a whole—incorporating complementary, divergent, and competing positions—in constructing this volume, Simmons and Sorrels argue that love is not eclipsed in Christian ethics but has a rich and variegated tradition. Werpehowski appraises [End Page 210] the volume as a whole, identifying key threads that emerge, like relations of love to eudaimonism and the theme of neighbor love.The volume is admirable in its breadth and depth. It offers a robust encounter with major figures and questions, providing historical recovery as well as critical and constructive engagement. That said, depth can work against breadth, with essays like Oliver O'Donovan's demanding a familiarity with Augustine Confessions that will send the reader back to his or her bookcases. Missing too are other notable figures and topics, such as the Protestant Reformers, Christian mystics, and feminist ethicists. Nevertheless, these gaps do not diminish the volume as a whole. I found myself again and again excited by the insights offered by the contributors, unsettling easy assumptions regarding the relation between eudaimonia and love, illustrating the depths of accounts of friendship for thinking about polity and mediating institutions, and cautioning against overconfidence in sexual ethics as its boundaries destabilize.Love and Christian Ethics would benefit scholars, teachers, and students alike. Its broad engagement with contemporary scholarship on love makes it a useful starting point for any researcher dipping or diving into this field. Introducing professors to key and sometimes obscured questions within figures and topics, it can round out lectures and help introduce students to the growing edge of scholarship on love. It would serve as a useful reference for any upper division or graduate course engaging with this significant, but often ignored, theme in Christian ethics.Rare is it to find a book that embodies the very theme it presents. These essays on love are a scholarly gift of the best sort—one not diminished but enhanced in its sharing.Michael Le ChevallierUniversity of ChicagoCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In one form or another an elevated, pleasure-transcending view of love is common, we might say natural. For readers of Latin poetry Catullus is perhaps the most impressive spokesman. In many respects, of course, Catullus is special. His particular values and choice of terminology, in his time and situation, mark him out from his crowd; in the Roman world indeed, ‘whole love’, perhaps rather its utterance, is hard to document before him. But a belief that love is (...) powerful and profound, an important if not the most important thing in life, this is not a rarity. Roman tombstones attest to love and devotion, and myths inherited from Greece enshrine love's power, endurance, and transcendence. (shrink)

Writing of Terence'sAndria(‘The Girl from Andros’) in 1952, Duckworth said: ‘In theAndriathe second love affair is unusual; Charinus’ love for a respectable girl whose virtue is still intact has been considered an anticipation of a more modern attitude towards love and sex. More frequently in Plautus and Terence the heroine, if of respectable parentage, has been violated before the opening of the drama (Aulularia, Adelphoe), or she is a foreigner, a courtesan, or a slave girl' (Duckworth (1952), (...) p. 158). Perhaps in 1993 it does not seem quite so ‘modern’ that Charinus is not only in love with a respectable virgin but wishes to marry her. (shrink)

In the psychological literature, love is often seen as a construct inseparable from that of close, interpersonal relationships. As a result, it has been often assumed that the same motivational factors underlie both phenomena. This often leads researchers to propose that love does not exist in itself—that it is an emotion which stems solely from a need for attachment, fulfillment of reproductive aims, or for social exchange. The popular cultural imagination, however, perceives love as a unique, mysterious, (...) altruistic, ever-lasting bond between two people—a vision of love which is at odds with its supposed psychological origins. We propose that an ideal of love and its enactment in our culture is a result of two intertwining factors. Within the last few centuries, interpersonal relationships and love have replaced religion as islands of existential comfort. Toward this end, lovers project illusory meaning on their partners. The laborious and turbulent process of withdrawing these projections can lead to what many thinkers think “love” is: bestowal of value on another, and consequent respect for, and care for that person, unmotivated by one's own needs, within the context of a real relationship. (shrink)

The fact that Kantian beneficence is constrained by Kantian respect appears to seriously restrict the Kantian's moral response to agents who have embraced self-destructive ends. In this paper I defend the Kantian duties of love and respect by arguing that Kantians can recognize attempts to get an agent to change her ends as a legitimate form of beneficence. My argument depends on two key premises. First, that rational nature is not identical to the capacity to set ends, (...) and second, that an agent's conception of her happiness is not identical to the satisfaction of her ends. (shrink)

The relationship between love/care and justice was one of the key tensions from which care ethics originated; to this very day it is subject of debate between various streams of thought within care ethics. With some exceptions most approaches have in common the belief that care and justice are mutually exclusive concepts, or at least as so different that their application is situated on different levels. Hence, both are complementary, but distinct, so that there is no real interaction. This (...) paper aims to investigate whether, and if so, how, a deeper understanding of Ricoeur’s thoughts on this matter enriches the relationship between care and justice with respect to care ethics. This connection suggests itself from Ricoeur’s interpretation of the relationship as a dialectical one in which the logic of superabundance and the logic of equivalence meet. Care enables people to see the face and individuality of the one, ‘le chacun,’ within the anonymous structures of justice that tend to reduce all human beings to the anonymous each, ‘le on’; justice in its turn is the precondition for love to become incarnated and made real. What may this view—of care and justice standing in close connection, in which they correct and strengthen each other—add to the understanding of concrete practices of care? (shrink)

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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 304-317 [Access article in PDF] Sovereign Love and Atomism in Racine's Bérénice Ellen Mcclure ALTHOUGH CRITICS HAVE NOTED links between the new science of the seventeenth century and the works of La Fontaine and Molière, 1 a similar influence of Epicureanism or even Cartesianism upon French classical tragedy is harder to trace. No two areas of seventeenth-century cultural life would seem farther apart (...) than the emerging science, with its rejection of Aristotelian categories as inadequate to experienced reality, and classical French tragedy, with its antimaterialism and claims to universal truth often bolstered by references to none other than Aristotle himself. Yet René Pintard reminds us that the 1660s and 1670s—the period when many of the tragedies we regard as "classical" were written—saw a strong renewal of interest in the philosophies articulated in the first half of the century. 2 So widespread was this interest that Pierre Gassendi's friend and follower Bernier was able to publish an edition and translation of the philosopher's works in 1674-1675 which proved to be a resounding success. It is hard to believe that the much-discussed new science somehow missed writers of tragedies, especially given the extensive contacts between Molière, La Fontaine and Racine.In this article, I demonstrate this influence by positing that Racine's play Bérénice, ostensibly a reworking of a well-known love story that Corneille was also producing on the Paris stage at the same time, is in part a reflection on the pressing question of what holds the universe together. Through his exploration of the possibility of satisfactory love between two independent sovereigns, Racine explores issues that the revival of Epicureanism had brought into the philosophical foreground. This reading of the play brings into focus the incredibly [End Page 304] important, yet too-often neglected, 3 role of Antiochus, the character whom Racine invented for his version of the play. I will show that his tragic in-betweenness offers a necessary alternative to Titus' and Bérénice's valorization of self-contained sovereignty. I Before embarking on a close reading of the play itself, however, I would like to offer a brief survey of the debate to which I believe Racine refers. Both Michel Foucault and Timothy Reiss have identified the seventeenth century as a transitional period between the age of correspondences exemplified in Aristotelian philosophy and the age of representation and quantification that characterized eighteenth-century thought. 4 This transition, however, was far from smooth, as philosophers sought to articulate a universe whose separate and radically de-hierarchized elements remained somehow joined together.For most seventeenth-century philosophers, the sacrifice of Aristotelian categories and scholasticism in no way lessened the imperative for a sense of divine order and causation. Gassendi's often self-contradictory efforts to reconcile Epicurus and Christianity provide perhaps the most striking example of this transitional struggle. The atomism posited by Epicurus through Lucretius posed particular difficulties for a Christian worldview. A world governed by the chance interactions of atoms eliminates any sense that things happen for a purpose; God cannot be the benevolent author and overseer of the universe. Gassendi's equal respect for atomism and for Christianity should be read as evidence of the profound struggle between separateness and interconnection (or, as Gassendi would call it, harmony) taking place during this period. 5 For, as Bloch points out, although Gassendi partially reconciled the demands of the two systems by situating atoms in an uncreated, infinite, and contiguous space and time, he continued to hold to the profoundly troubling existence of the void in the universe. Once again, the chief objection to the void implicit in atomism was religious, since if God is everywhere, the void cannot exist, and likewise, God cannot create nothing. The revival of stoicism supplied instead a vision of the universe ultimately comprised and held together by an ethereal pneuma that some neo-Stoics did not hesitate to identify as a sort of divine presence. 6 Descartes himself made heroic attempts, in his Principes... (shrink)

Scientific explanation is a perennial topic in philosophy of science, but the literature has fragmented into specialized discussions in different scientific disciplines. An increasing attention to scientific practice by philosophers is (in part) responsible for this fragmentation and has put pressure on criteria of adequacy for philosophical accounts of explanation, usually demanding some form of pluralism. This commentary examines the arguments offered by Fagan and Woody with respect to explanation and understanding in scientific practice. I begin by scrutinizing Fagan's (...) concept of collaborative explanation, highlighting its distinctive advantages and expressing concern about several of its assumptions. Then I analyze Woody's attempt to reorient discussions of scientific explanation around functional considerations, elaborating on the wider implications of this methodological recommendation. I conclude with reflections on synergies and tensions that emerge when the two papers are juxtaposed and how these draw attention to critical issues that confront ongoing philosophical analyses of scientific explanation. (shrink)

In a cryptic passage of the "Doctrine of Virtue" (§ 23), Kant underscores the relation between the two kinds of ethical duties to others, which he calls duties of love and duties of respect. The paper will explore the issues concerning this relation, and try to clarify the meaning of it for Kant’s overall account of the duties towards others. I suggest that (1) Kant thereby highlights the role of a previously unconsidered class of duties, and highlights that (...) that novelty changes the traditional picture of other-regarding morality. (2) Most importantly, Kant shows that through their reciprocal connection both duties of love and duties of respect can be related to the obligatory end of the happiness of others. (shrink)

Voices from the gay community -- Biblical understandings -- Findings from the sciences -- Constitutional framework for public policy -- Same-sex marriage : pluralism -- Anti-Discrimination laws -- Voices from younger Christians -- Churches and the LGBT community -- Case study conversations about LGBT people and issues -- Conclusion: a possible way forward.

The monotheistic religions that valorize love typically believe that their love for God should be extended to God's creatures and, in particular, to one's fellow human beings. Yet, in practice, the love of the Christian or Muslim or Hindu monotheist doesn't always extend to the love of the religious other. Precisely how, then, should the adherents of the major monotheistic religions respond to the obvious diversity of these religions? The arguments of philosophical theology largely depend on (...) what John Henry Newman called our "illative sense" or faculty of informal reasoning. Even the most fully developed illative sense can vary from one person to another, however. As a consequence, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu monotheists are unlikely to fully agree on matters of philosophical theology. I argue that this precludes neither mutual respect, though, nor a rational adherence to the philosophical and theological views of one's own tradition. (shrink)

One way to read Kierkegaard’s Works of Love is as an all out assault on the Enlightenment ideal of moral autonomy from a religious point of view. Kant is the locus classicus of this ideal, just as Descartes and Locke are, respectively, for the correlative ideals of epistemic and political autonomy. Since these three components belong to the central core of what we have come to think of as the modern understanding of the subject, Kierkegaard’s critique has a distinctively (...) postmodern flavour. But, as we shall see, it is postmodern precisely by the way it is biblically premodern.The first thing Kant says about the relation of religion to morality in his ‘Fourth Critique’ is that “morality does not need religion at all.” Because morality presupposes “man as a free agent who, just because he is free, binds himself through his reason to unconditioned laws, it stands in need neither of the idea of another Being over him, for him to apprehend his duty, nor of an incentive other than the law itself, for him to do his duty.”Kant has a more positive way of relating morality and religion. “Religion is the recognition of all duties as divine commands.” But this moral role of religion is qualified in three important ways. First, it presupposes only faith and not theoretical knowledge of God. Second, as we have already seen, the God relation cannot play any essential role either in determining the content of my duty or in motivating me to do it. The autonomy of the moral agent precludes both possibilities. Third, it involves no “special duties” to God “over and above the ethico-civil duties of humanity ...”Kierkegaard will agree to the first proviso . But his ethics is theonomous, and thus heteronomous, and he will vigorously reject the second and third constraints on the ethics of divine command he develops in Works of Love. (shrink)

THE CENTRALITY OF "SYMPATHY" to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments points to the centrality of love in the book. While Smith delineates a somewhat unusual, technical sense of "sympathy", his actual use of the term frequently slips into its more ordinary sense of "compassion" or affectionate fellow feeling. This no doubt intentional equivocation on Smith's part helps suffuse the book with these themes, to the point that, without much exaggeration, one could say that the Theory of Moral Sentiments (...) is generally about love: our need for love and sympathy, love as friendship, self-love, the love of praise and praiseworthiness, the love of beauty. Even in the Wealth of Nations, our loves are thought to be very important in explaining our behavior. Smith is unusual among modern moral philosophers in according so central a place to love in this broad sense, although of course Christianity made love a central theme in reflection on ethical life, and philosophers such as Hutcheson made benevolence a key virtue in their ethical systems. However, it is not our purpose to examine Smith's critique of Hutcheson or indeed of any of his predecessors. Rather we aim in this paper to reflect on his treatment of this topic. We shall do so in part by means of comparisons with Aristotle and Plato, first with respect to friendship and then with respect to love generally. Smith's writing is replete with classical references, raising the issue of the degree to which his thought is "ancient" or "modern." Friendship is arguably the pinnacle of social relations for the ancients, and thus it provides us with a useful device for determining the degree to which Smith's thought embodies classical moral and philosophical principles. The subtlety of Smith's interweaving of traditions will become visible as we reflect not just on the ways Smith's thought exhibits classical conceptions of friendship and love, but also on the ways he departs from them. For in at least one important respect, love is a closed book from Smith's standpoint, and thus, as it turns out, also at odds with classical friendship. (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 paper provides an overview of the Integrative Justice Model (IJM) for impoverished populations that was introduced in the marketing literature in the year 2009. The IJM was developed as a normative ethical framework to guide the growing corporate interest in the base of the pyramid (BoP) market to be fair and just to all parties but particularly the impoverished customer. In an impersonal marketplace that often exploits the less advantaged participant, the IJM provides five characteristics of “just” market situations. (...) These are an authentic non-exploitative engagement, value co-creation, investment in future consumption, stakeholder interest representation and long-term profit management. At the heart of the IJM is love that flows from a recognition of the inherent dignity of those at the BoP and the need to respect and uphold that dignity in the marketplace. The hope is that as companies embrace the IJM in their functioning it will result in a marketplace that is fair, just, humanistic and loving. (shrink)

For both John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum, the concept of love plays a significant role in moral psychology. Rawls views the sense of justice as grounded in parental love, and continuous with love of mankind. Nussbaum’s recent defence of patriotism revives the emotio n of love as essential for political contexts. I argue that love ought to play a substantial part in the shaping of global politics, and that a moral psychology of love based (...) merely on a combination of Rawls’s and Nussbaum’s accounts fails to produce an ad equate ground for conceptualizing moral motivation with respect to addressing transnational concerns of justice. I contend that by critically synthesizing Rawls’s and Nussbaum’s conceptions of love and moral psychology with resources from Kant’s ethics, it is possible to develop a more attractive, and potentially politically effective, conception of love of human beings in the framework of political liberalism. (shrink)

L’article se propose d’explorer ce qui est dit du mariage et de l’amour dans la correspondance d’une famille bourgeoise qui couvre plusieurs générations sur un large xixe siècle. Trois épisodes ont été retenus qui permettent d’observer bien des tensions entre mariage arrangé et mariage d’inclination. D’abord, au début du siècle, la correspondance d’un jeune homme à l’aube d’une brillante carrière scientifique explicite les « raisons » sociales et économiques qui déterminent son choix matrimonial. Puis, dans les années 1840-1843, l’échange entre (...) fiancés montre comment se construit le sentiment amoureux dans le respect de l’autorité parentale et des conventions en vigueur. Enfin, en 1858, autre moment stratégique dans le processus d’ascension sociale, la correspondance résonne des tractations menées par la famille pour conclure une union d’intérêt. À toutes ces étapes, il apparaît que les femmes assument leur destin social, qui est vécu et écrit comme une responsabilité face au cheminement des hommes de la famille. (shrink)

There has been a good deal of interest in recent years in what Franz Brentano had to say about the notion of ‘intentional objects’ and about intentionality as a criterion of the mental. There has been less interest in his classification of mental phenomena. In his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint Brentano asserts and argues for the thesis that mental phenomena can be classified in terms of three kinds of mental act or activity, all of which are directed towards an (...) immanent object. These are, respectively, presentation, judgment and what he calls the phenomena of love and hate. Once again, less interest has been shown in what he has to say about the last of these three than in what he says about the others. I wish to take Brentano's views as the point of departure for a discussion of love and hate, since these notions seem to me to have a good deal of philosophical interest, for at least two main reasons. First, I have recently had some concern with the part that personal relations play in our understanding of others and of ourselves, and love and hate seem to be very important elements in such relations. Second, love and hate have long seemed to me to provide important counter-examples to some prevalent philosophical theories about the emotions. I shall take this issue first. (shrink)

According to one historic view of liberal education, such education is incompatible with the express pursuit of civic goods. Call that view ‘pure liberal education’. Students engaged in pure liberal education are set free, temporarily, from utilitarian concerns, for a course of study aimed at intrinsic goods—most notably knowledge but also the formation of a virtuous mind. Proponents claim that a direct pursuit of civic goods would compromise the mode, matter, and/or integrity of pure liberal education—that is, its freedom from (...) utilitarian concern, its wide-ranging and intrinsically valuable subject matter, and its commitment to following the truth wherever it leads. In reply, I offer a pedagogy that requires (almost) no departure from the pure liberal ideal yet which reserves a modest, though important, place for civic formation. That place emerges from the fact that academic and civic life ‘overlap’ in an important respect: both involve a conversation and thus a common set of virtues. The latter consist in those practices and dispositions that enable the conversation to go well, by encouraging mutual understanding and the formation of true beliefs. The existence of this overlap provides a way for pure liberal educators, who already expressly influence their students’ academic formation, to likewise influence their civic formation. It consists in teachers consciously developing those virtues in their students, along with an awareness of the virtues’ relevance for civic life. This pedagogy retains the matter and integrity of pure liberal education, with only brief introductions of the practical mode. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Descartes on Love and/as ErrorByron WillistonBut if this medicine, love, which cures all sorrow With more, not only be no quintessence, But mixed of all stuffs, paining soul, or sense, And of the sun his working vigour borrow, Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use To say, which have no mistress but their Muse, But as all else, being elemented too, Love sometimes (...) would contemplate, sometimes do.1One of philosophy’s most enduring questions is inspired by Plato’s Euthyphro: do we love something because it is lovable, or is it lovable because we love it?2 Perhaps nowhere is this problem more intractable than in Descartes’s theory of love. In his view love is the concrete attempt on the part of humans to develop an ethical reciprocity which ideally fulfils the need both to discover and to create value. The strict disjunction of the Platonic question is to this extent somewhat misleading because Descartes is genuinely challenged by the respective demands of both sides of the question. It would therefore be a mistake to fasten on one side of this distinction to the utter exclusion of the other.But the temptation to do precisely this with Descartes is strong indeed. This is a temptation which extends even to ethical matters, in which Descartes seems loathe to subordinate the search for certainty to merely contingent practical demands. In addressing the problem of moral weakness he writes, for [End Page 429] example, that “the strength of the soul is inadequate without knowledge of the truth.”3 The call to live in the light of certain truths—moral or otherwise—is so persistent a theme for him that the burden of proof would seem to be on those who want to claim that this is nevertheless not so in certain areas. The bulk of this paper is thus devoted to showing that, despite some appearances, Descartes is not concerned overmuch with the problem of attaining certainty and avoiding error in love judgments. He wants us to see love as a complex psycho-physical phenomenon which cannot be reduced to the desire to obtain true judgments about the world.To focus the discussion I examine Irving Singer’s philosophy of love as presented in The Nature of Love and especially his hermeneutic distinction between “appraisal” and “bestowal,” a distinction which maps felicitously onto the Platonic disjunction as sketched above. Singer criticizes the Cartesian theory of love as excessively “appraisive,” that is, as relying too heavily on an objective standard as guarantor of the worth of beloved objects. I maintain on the contrary that this interpretation distorts what Descartes’s texts tell us. By arguing that the will, with no necessary input from the appraising intellect, is paramount in love judgments, I show that love for Descartes is largely an imaginative means of “bestowing” value which as such does not require either the guidance or the corroboration of objective criteria. The bestowal theory warrants, rather, the free subjective creation of value. The distinction which Singer uses to criticize Descartes is thus turned to Descartes’s favor.I. Before getting to that argument, however, we need to examine the place which love as a specific passion has within the overall economy of the third notion primitive,4 that is, the union of body and soul as distinct from the treatment of these elements as mutually separate. Passions are for Descartes a species of thought. In a general sense all “perceptions” are passions of the soul. They represent the world to the will which then acts in some way on them (“action” is taken as the other species of thought). Now of these perceptions generally considered, some are caused by the external objects of the senses5 and some by the natural appetites and affections of the body.6 There are, however, those perceptions “whose effects we feel as being in the soul itself....”7 These are strictly speaking the “passions” of the soul; and despite our not always being able to locate their proximate cause,8 they may be stimulated by the [End Page 430] “fortuitous movement of the spirits,”9 by intellectual judgments, or by external... (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that there is an important asymmetry between a duty to love and a duty to not love: there is no duty to love as a fitting response to someone’s very good qualities, but there is a duty to not love as a fitting response to someone’s very bad qualities. The source of the asymmetry that I discuss is the two-part understanding of love: the emotional part and the evaluative commitment (...) part. One cannot directly, or “at will,” control an emotional response, but one can undermine any commitment one would normally have under the circumstances. Thus, the feeling of love is not a duty, though being disposed to act a certain way with respect to the person one has the feelings for is controllable. (shrink)

Philosophy of Molecular Medicine: Foundational Issues in Theory and Practice aims at a systematic investigation of a number of foundational issues in the field of molecular medicine. The volume is organized around four broad modules focusing, respectively, on the following key aspects: What are the nature, scope, and limits of molecular medicine? How does it provide explanations? How does it represent and model phenomena of interest? How does it infer new knowledge from data and experiments? The essays collected here, authored (...) by prominent scientists and philosophers of science, focus on a handful of mainstream topics in the philosophical literature, such as causation, explanation, modeling, and scientific inference. These previously unpublished contributions shed new light on these traditional topics by integrating them with problems, methods, and results from three prominent areas of contemporary biomedical science: basic research, translational and clinical research, and clinical practice. (shrink)

In Justice in Love, Nicholas Wolterstorff argues for a unique ethical orientation called “care-agapism.” He offers it as an alternative to theories of benevolence-agapism found in Christian ethics on the one hand and to the philosophical orientations of egoism, utilitarianism, and eudaimonism on the other. The purported uniqueness and superiority of his theory lies in its ability to account for the conceptual compatibility of love and justice while also positively incorporating self-love. Yet in attempting to articulate a (...) “bestowed worth” account of human dignity—in which dignity is given by divine love and respected in acts of justice—Wolterstorff leans on an unstable characterization of how love and the good are conceptually interwoven. As a result, his reader cannot be sure about the theoretical superiority of care-agapism. Moreover, Wolterstorff's attempt to value self-love and at the same time reject eudaimonism depends on a dubious interpretation of Augustine carried over from Justice: Rights and Wrongs, which itself further depends on a mischaracterization of the possible varieties of eudaimonism. This mistake is unfortunate because, on a closer reading of Augustine, one finds an agapistic account of eudaimonism that could have significantly helped Wolterstorff's overall account of the complementary relation of love and justice. (shrink)

Writing of Terence'sAndria(‘The Girl from Andros’) in 1952, Duckworth said: ‘In theAndriathe second love affair is unusual; Charinus’ love for a respectable girl whose virtue is still intact has been considered an anticipation of a more modern attitude towards love and sex. More frequently in Plautus and Terence the heroine, if of respectable parentage, has been violated before the opening of the drama (Aulularia, Adelphoe), or she is a foreigner, a courtesan, or a slave girl' (Duckworth (1952), (...) p. 158). Perhaps in 1993 it does not seem quite so ‘modern’ that Charinus is not only in love with a respectable virgin but wishes to marry her. (shrink)

I reconsider the relation between love and respect in Kantian ethics, taking as my guide Iris Murdoch's view of love as the fundamental moral attitude and a kind of attention to individuals. It is widely supposed that Kantian ethics disregards individuals, since we don't respect individuals but the universal quality of personhood they instantiate. We need not draw this conclusion if we recognise that Kant and Murdoch share a view about the centrality of love to (...) virtue. We can then see that respect in the virtuous person cannot be blind to the individual, as critics of Kantian ethics contend. My approach contrasts recent efforts to assimilate Kantian respect to Murdochian love, which overlook Murdoch's distinctive claims about the singularity of moral activity. This idea is not as un-Kantian as it seems, and it should inform any Kantian ethics that aims to address the charge about individuals. (shrink)

Influenced by Sachs’ (2001) ‘activist identity’ I propose that pre-service teacher education or initial teacher education (ITE), as I will refer to it, could, and indeed should, encourage a new form of teacher; the ‘teacher-agent.’ This teacher-agent would be aware of the pressures and dictates of the neo-liberal educational culture and its ensuing performative discourse, and choose to resist it, in favour of a more holistic view of education. This view of education encourages inclusive, creative and democratic forms of education (...) concerned with encouraging a social conscience in children and young people, as well as seeing education as concerned with the whole child. These more holistic approaches to education could include pedagogical approaches such as Philosophy for Children (P4C), Rights’ Respecting Education and Slow Pedagogy, which can not only provide a more balanced understanding and deeper experience of education for both teachers and pupils, but can also help teachers to resist the debilitating impact of the neo-liberal performative discourse, potentially also thus impacting on their wellbeing and ability to retain their integrity as professionals. This may also have the potential to halt the rapid exodus of new teachers from the profession. It is my contention, that engaging with pedagogies such as P4C in this new iteration of ITE could help not only to encourage the Student Teacher-Agent, but also, as a consequence, develop the Citizen-Agent in the children they are teaching. In this paper I consider four key areas where I propose P4C could play a role in this alternative model of Initial Teacher Education; Democracy in action, the teacher as Teacher-Facilitator, a space for co-construction of knowledge, and encouraging Social Justice. (shrink)

In drawing on my own research and collaborative work with Karl Pribram, I show that love and power play a central role in psychosocial evolution. When these relations are coupled in a self-regulating system of cooperative interactions, brain growth is stimulated, mind and agency develop, and stable forms of collective social organization are generated. Focusing on the endogenous dynamics of social collectives, the article is organized in four parts. Part I summarizes evidence from developmental neuropsychology and social science to (...) show that stable psychosocial organization, across the human life span, is associated with social interaction organized along two dimensions. One dimension involves love, positive affective attachment, and the second involves power, social regulation of the aroused affective energy. Part II draws on Piaget's theory of cooperation and Bradley and Pribrams' theory of communication to describe how mind and agency are generated, and how stable organization is produced, respectively, from the relations involved in the arousal and regulation of affective energy. Combining elements of the two theories, Part III presents a sketch of a holographic model of collective organization in which goal-directed behavior is generated by a feed-forward process involving imaging and information processing of interaction along the two dimensions. Part IV shows how the model accounts for the emergence of human agency within the context of a more general evolutionary theory, such as Laszlo's. The article concludes with a discussion of my approach for building a "fully human theory of evolution.". (shrink)

How much privacy must be sacrificed by the partners in a romantic relationship? I begin by showing that we are obligated to reveal to our lovers information about ourselves that we believe could possibly cause them to withdraw their affections from us. If we were to conceal this information, then the lover would be mistaken about whom they loved, yet continue to respect obligations towards, and make sacrifices for, us. I conclude, though, by discussing some problems with both the (...) intelligibility of this obligation and our ability to fulfil it. These problems arise from epistemological and metaphysical problems connected with the notion of a self. (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.

I have argued we are not free in the sense required for moral responsibility, while at the same time a conception of life without this type of free will would not be devastating to morality or to our sense of meaning in life, and in certain respects it may even be beneficial (cf. Pereboom 2001). In ..

Feminist scholars have critically analyzed the effects of sex segregation in numerous social institutions, yet sex-segregated sport often remains unchallenged. Even critics of sex-segregated sport have tended to accept the merits of women-only teams at face value. In this article, we revisit this issue by examining the underlying assumptions supporting women’s and girls’ teams and explore how they perpetuate gender inequality. Specifically, we analyze the 14 U.S. court cases wherein adolescent boys have sought to play on girls’ teams in their (...) respective high schools. The courts’ decisions reveal taken-for-granted, essentialist assumptions about girls’ innate fragility and athletic inferiority. While the courts, policy makers, and many feminist scholars see maintaining teams for girls and women as a solution to the problem of boys’ and men’s dominance in sport, the logic supporting this form of segregation further entrenches notions of women’s inferiority. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Romeo and Juliet Talking about Sex and Love Plain Sex Loving Sex between Non‐Lovers Being Embodied A Primary Emotional Awareness Back to Romeo and Juliet: A Variety of Attitudes towards Sex without Love.

Through the framework of Ricoeur’s philosophy, Fredriksson and Eriksson develop an influential ethics of the caring conversation, which instructs nurses to have caritas, self-esteem, and autonomy on one hand and to engage respectfully and responsibly in caring conversations on the other. This article brings the ethics of the caring conversation into dialogue with Ricoeur’s philosophy again. While Fredriksson and Eriksson draw upon Ricoeur’s little ethics, this article relies on Ricoeur’s dialectic of love and justice. The dialogue throws light on (...) other aspects of caritas, which is vital in Fredriksson and Eriksson’s ethics. It shows a need for nurses to strike a balance between love and justice and, also, to cultivate love. (shrink)

The question of how well we need to be known, to be loved, is considered. A ‘second-person’ model is argued for, on which love requires that the beloved’s demands to be known be respected. This puts pressure on the idea that lovers need to make a beloved’s interests their own, taking that to require comprehension of the beloved’s interests: a lover would have to appreciate the normative intelligibility and motivating force of an interest. The possibility of love with (...) failure of comprehension is defended, using illustrations from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. (shrink)