Wolterstorff on Love and Justice

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.     

Love as a Problem of Knowledge in Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Plato's Symposium

At the end of the essay “Silhouettes” in Either/Or, Kierkegaard writes, “only the person who has been bitten by snakes knows what one who has been bitten by snakes must suffer.” I interpret this as an allusion to Alcibiades' speech in Plato's Symposium. Kierkegaard invites the reader to compare Socrates with Don Giovanni, and Alcibiades with the seducer's women. Socrates' philosophical method, in this light, is a deceptive seduction: just as Don Giovanni's seduction leads his conquests to unhappy love—what Kierkegaard terms “reflective sorrow”—so the elenctic method leads Socrates' interlocutors to aporia, not to knowledge. I offer a critique of Socrates' ironic stance as a philosopher, which stance is reflected in the theory of love he presents in the Symposium, and suggest that philosophy should be modeled on the romantic love of persons—a love that can be reciprocated—not the love of an impersonal Form, a one-sided love.     

Descartes' dreams

Abstract: René Descartes is often regarded as the ‘father of modern philosophy’. He was a key figure in instigating the scientific revolution that has been so influential in shaping our modern world. He has been revered and reviled in almost equal measure for this role; on the one hand seen as liberating science from religion, on the other as splitting soul from body and man from nature. He dates the founding of his philosophical methods to the night of 10^th November 1619 and in particular to three powerful dreams he had that night. This article utilizes Descartes' own interpretations of the dreams, supported by biographical material, as well as contemporary neuroscientific and psychoanalytic theory, to reach a new understanding of them. It is argued that the dreams can be understood as depicting Descartes' personal journey from a state of mind‐body dissociation to one of mind‐body deintegration. This personal journey may have implications for a parallel journey from Renaissance to modern culture and from modernity to post‐modern culture.     

Thinking About a Word—Love,for Example

What is it we do when we philosophize about a word? How are we to act as we ask the philosophical question par excellence, “What is … ?” These questions are addressed here with particular focus on Troy Jollimore's Love's Vision and contemporary theories of love. Jollimore's rationalist account of love, based on a specific understanding of “reasons for love,” illustrates a particular philosophical mistake: When we think about a word, we are prone to believe that even though “the sense of the word” that we investigate may be up for grabs, the other words we use when we do these investigations are not. Jollimore's exploration of love is guided by specific conceptions of “reasons” and “rationality” that remain unquestioned. The article argues that we may have to rethink a great number of words as we embark on the task of uncovering the sense of one word.     

Works of Love in a World of Violence: Kierkegaard,Feminism, and the Limits of Self‐Sacrifice

Feminist scholars adopt wide‐ranging views of self‐sacrifice: their critiques claim that women are inordinately affected by Christianity's valorization of self‐sacrifice and that this traditional Christian value is inherently misogynistic and necrophilic. Although Søren Kierkegaard's Works of Love deems Christian love essentially sacrificial, love, in his view, sets significant limits on the role of self‐sacrifice in human life. Through his proposed response to one who requests forgiveness, “Do you now truly love me?” Kierkegaard offers a model of forgiveness that subverts traditional ideals of the self‐sacrificing and submissive woman while keeping love central. The question asserts self‐love, involves redoubling and double danger, and expresses a refusal to imitate Christ's suffering. I propose a reading in keeping with Grace Jantzen's vision for a feminist philosophy of religion, which reads against the grain and “seeks to break through to new ways of thinking that may open up divine horizons.” My reading is further supported by Kierkegaard's contention that everything essentially Christian bears a double meaning. In light of the subversive potential found in the discrepancy between apparent love and actual love, as well as the duty to name the sin of one who has behaved in an unloving manner, I argue that Kierkegaard's philosophy of love resists simplistic understandings of self‐sacrificing love.     

In Defense of Trait‐Based Love

It is widely believed that a person's 1 traits can function as reasons for loving her. (Many a metropolitan rag, for instance, carries lonely hearts ads that attest to this belief with their laundry lists of coveted characteristics.) Notable contemporary work in the philosophy of love has taken the rejection of this premise as its point of departure. As far as I can tell, none of that work has engaged with a careful philosophical exposition of the view under discussion. In the following pages, I will defend the idea of trait‐based love against three of its critics and one of its advocates. I will discuss work on this topic by Harry Frankfurt, Niko Kolodny and David Velleman, arguing that their criticisms fail and that the alternatives they offer to trait‐based love create more difficulties than they solve. What these authors have in common is a deflationary approach to love that reduces it to a beneficent disposition, a valuing relationship and a visceral form of moral regard, respectively. I will compare these to the multiplex, nuanced depiction of trait‐based love in Plato's Symposium. While it is plausible that love can motivate a beneficent disposition, develop in relationships and entails moral regard, I will argue that the attempt to reduce it to any of the foregoing fails. Frankfurt, Kolodny and Velleman reject trait‐based love in part because they think it would differ in unacceptable ways from the love most of us practice. Plato advocates the cultivation of a love that in some respects resembles the picture of trait‐based love the contemporary authors balk at. However, unlike those critics, he appreciates that trait‐based love need not resemble the ideal he proposes. His richer view of love accounts for elements such as need and feeling that the contemporary thinkers are driven to implausibly bracket as distractions. As I will try to show, the most compelling criticisms of Platonic love do not tell against its responsiveness to the loved one's traits. I will argue that trait‐based love is consistent with an intuitive picture of love and that this commonsense approach is more defensible than competing views in these texts. These authors' disagreements about what can count as reasons for love are bound up with the differences in what each takes love to be. Thus, in the course of arguing for trait‐based love, I will critically assess their various proposals as to the nature of love.     

Diotima and Demeter as Mystagogues in Plato's Symposium

Like the goddess Demeter, Diotima from Mantineia, the prophetess who teaches Socrates about eros and the “rites of love” in Plato's Symposium, was a mystagogue who initiated individuals into her mysteries, mediating to humans esoteric knowledge of the divine. The dialogue, including Diotima's speech, contains religious and mystical language, some of which specifically evokes the female‐centered yearly celebrations of Demeter at Eleusis. In this essay, I contextualize the worship of Demeter within the larger system of classical Athenian practices, and propose that Plato borrowed Eleusinian language because it criticized conventional notions of the divine, thereby allowing him to reimagine the possibilities for the philosophical process among humans.     

Insidious syncretism in the political philosophy of Huai‐nan‐tzu 1

This is a study of the ninth chapter of the Huai‐nan‐tzu, a Chinese philosophical text compiled in the mid‐second century BC. The chapter (entitled Chu‐shu [The techniques of the ruler]) has been consistently interpreted as a proposal for a benign government that is rooted in the syncretic Taoist principles of the Huai‐nan‐tzu and is designed to serve the best interests of the people. I argue, on the contrary, that the text makes skilful (and deliberately deceptive) use of vocabulary from the major philosophical traditions of the day, in an attempt to subdue all philosophical sectarianism and wrench various antecedent philosophical ideas into the justification of a supreme political state. The best interests of the people are understood as nothing more than their material needs, since the text also denies that the ruler's subjects are possessed of ‘minds’ in any philosophical sense. It is this process of systematically undermining other philosophical traditions that I call ‘insidious syncretism. ‘     

Love from Afar: Distance,Intimacy and the Theology of Love

Proceeding from Jean‐Luc Marion's The Erotic Phenomenon, this article discusses how the Christian concept of love can manifest intimacy. While most theological concepts of love spell out the requirement of distance, they do not pay sufficient attention to the intimate variants of love. The article argues that a full‐fledged theological account should make room for love's different economic and donative variants, as well as for love's advance from ‘distance’ to ‘visibility’ and, finally, ‘intimacy’. Concrete examples of intimate love include mystical union, transforming hospitality, fidelity and love that is as strong as death.     

AQUINAS'S ARGUMENT AGAINST SELF-HATRED

Aquinas's argument against the possibility of genuine self‐hatred runs counter to modern intuitions about self‐hatred as an explanatorily central notion in psychology, and as an effect of alienation. Aquinas's argument does not deny that persons experience hatred for themselves. It can be read either as the claim that the self‐hater mistakes what she feels toward herself as hatred, or that, though she hates what she believes is her “self,” she actually hates only traits of herself. I argue that the argument fails on both readings. The first reading entails that all passions are really self‐love, and so is incompatible with Aquinas's own “cognitivist” view of what it is that distinguishes specific passions in experience. The second reading entails that persons have no phenomenal access to “self,” rendering self‐reference—how it is that the self can be an intentional object of conscious mental states—a mystery. Augustine's claim, which Aquinas accepts on authority, that all sin originates in inordinate self‐love seems to entail the impossibility of genuine self‐hatred because both thinkers fail to distinguish between two distinct forms of self‐love: amor concupiscentiae and amor benevolentiae.     

From One Testament to the Other

Translation of Paul Ricoeur, “D'un testament à l'autre” Translator's Preface: This essay, part of the section “Essais d'herméneutique biblique” in Ricoeur's Lectures 3: aux frontières de la philosophie, is one example of the later Ricoeur's increasing willingness to let theology and philosophy speak to each other. I would like to draw readers’ attention to two moves made here by Ricoeur: (1) the way in which his philosophical hermeneutics opens the way for a biblical ontology rooted in Exodus 3:14, and (2) the way his theory of metaphor reveals the same implied ontology behind 1 John 4:8.     

‘The Extremely Difficult Realization That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real’: Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency

Abstract: In the last few years, there has been a revival of interest in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Despite this revival, however, certain aspects of Murdoch's views remain poorly understood, including her account of a concept that she famously described as ‘central’ to moral philosophy—i.e., love. In this paper, I argue that the concept of love is essential to any adequate understanding of Murdoch's work but that recent attempts by Kieran Setiya and David Velleman to assimilate Murdoch's account of love to neo‐Aristotelian or neo‐Kantian theories of moral agency are misconceived. We will not understand what Murdoch is trying to do unless we understand her position as a radical alternative to such theories. Here, I present a reading of Murdoch's account of love as a form of Platonic eros directed toward two objects: the Good and the particular individual. It is in navigating the tension between these two objects that we find ourselves facing what Murdoch famously described as ‘the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real’. When properly understood, Murdoch's account of love opens up conceptual space for an alternative approach to some of the central questions in contemporary moral theory.     

Luther on Unio Cum Christo

Although often neglected, Luther's concept of unio cum Christo in justification is a fruitful model for integrating faith and ethics. According to this model, the Christian is justified in union with Christ who is present in faith. Since Christ is the incarnation of God's self‐giving love, the Christian united with Christ will in turn love her neighbor. This model of integration reveals an intrinsic connection between faith and ethics. Justification concerns not only the dyad of self and God, but also the self's relations with other persons. For Luther, loving the neighbor completes justification. Nonetheless, in both Luther's writings and for the purposes of constructive ethics, unio cum Christo is best understood not as an exhaustive account of integration, but as a helpful model for illuminating certain theological commitments, especially the importance of neighbor love to the God‐relation.     

Why ‘Swampman’ Would Not Even Get as Far as Thinking it Was Davidson: On the Spatio‐temporal Basis of Davidson's Conjuring Trick

In this article, we analyse one of the most famous recent thought‐experiments in philosophy, namely Donald Davidson's Swampman. Engaging recent commentators on Davidson's Swampman as well as analysing the spatio‐temporal conditions of the thought‐experiment, we will show how the ‘experiment’ inevitably fails. For it doesn't take seriously some of its own defining characteristics: crucially, Swampman's creation of a sudden in a place distinct from Davidson's. Instead of denigrating philosophical thought‐experiments per se, our analysis points towards considering thought‐experiments in a different sense: imaginary scenarios helpfully self‐deconstructing rather than constituting substantive philosophical resources.     

Amor Fati as Practice: How to Love Fate

On the basis of an interpretation of key passages in The Gay Science, this paper examines Nietzsche's idea of amor fati—love of fate. Nietzsche's idea of amor fati involves the wish to be able to learn how to see things as beautiful. This gives the impression that amor, love, is supposed to play some role in the beautification of fate. But Nietzsche also explains amor fati in relation to his desire to be a devoted “Yes‐sayer.” This pulls the interpretation of amor in a different direction; for now it seems as if the love Nietzsche wants to cultivate is supposed to be expressed in a positive, affirmative attitude toward one's fate. How to think this duality under the single idea of amor fati? I develop a novel reading of amor fati as a form of practice, as something that we can do, and explain in its light how the two moments of love are to be brought together. The relation of amor fati to the “Eternal Recurrence of the Same” is also addressed: mastering the practice of amor fati can enable one to pass successfully the test of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same.     

Foucault,Velázquez and the place of sacramentality

In Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, the protagonist Bess McNeill is often viewed as a Christ-figure, in particular, as an image of Christ's love. In this essay, I address the feminist critique that taking Bess in this way represents a serious distortion of Christ's love, arguing that Bess need not be seen as endorsing a self-destructive and victimizing form of love that feminist critics rightly reject. Instead, I suggest that we can view her love as an indictment of the institutions structuring its expression. Finally, I argue that Bess’ love for Jan combines aspects of love that have typically been segregated into eros and agape in a way that enriches our understanding of agape and prompts us in turn to re-evaluate our understanding of Christ's love and death.     

From the Same Spirit: Receiving the Theological Gifts of Transgender Christians

Transgender Christians bear four transformative gifts to the body of Christ. They celebrate that humans are God's created co‐creators, and that God creates with and through them. Second, gender non‐conforming Christians have learned to steadfastly love (hesed) themselves as they love God and the world. Next, transgender Christians witness that humans are a coherent unity of body‐mind, not a mind in a body. Finally, transgender followers of Jesus welcome the Holy Spirit's gifts of plurality, newness, unity, and freedom.