People who experience love often experience break-ups as well. However, philosophers of love have paid little attention to the phenomenon. Here, I address that gap by looking at the grieving process which follows unchosen relationship terminations. I ask which one is the loss that, if it were to be recovered, would stop grief or make it unwarranted. Is it the beloved, the reciprocation of love, the relationship, or all of it? By answering this question I not only provide with (...) an insight on the nature of break-ups, but also make a specific claim about the nature of love. I argue that the object that is universally lost in all break-ups is a person with certain intrinsic qualities, who is in a relationship characterised by certain shared activities and recognized as romantic. That means that, at least in romantic terminations, the beloved and the relationship are not independent objects of grief. So, plausibly, they may not independent objects of value in love. Hence, those who state otherwise should face up to this objection coming from the study of break-ups. (shrink)

This paper defends resilience in bereavement by way of responding to two prominent objections in the contemporary philosophical literature. Resilience in bereavement pertains to the ability to return to one’s functional and emotional baselines in a comparatively short period after the death of a loved one. Contrary to what Moller thinks, resilience is compatible with having a deep appreciation for the deceased loved one. Appealing to the example of Zhuangzi’s grieving of his wife, I argue that the agony of grief (...) is assuaged as one comes to terms with one’s loss through a realization of the universality and inevitability of death. This can be so even as one continues to appreciate the significance of what one has lost. Also, contrary to Smuts’ view, resilience does not indicate a failure to care. Although the resilient is free from prolonged and intense grief, she could continue to care for the deceased by constructing a new relationship with her and contributing to this relationship in ways that are appropriate to it. This view is further corroborated by empirical bereavement research. According to the continuing bonds theory, healthy grief is resolved by establishing changed ties with the deceased rather than detaching ourselves from them. (shrink)

While love and personal relationships are the subjects of rich and sophisticated literatures, philosophical writing about the end of special relationships is much harder to come by. However, the end of special relationships is a significant part of our lives and gives rise to a number of philosophical questions. In this article, I explore the normative significance of the end of special relationships, with a particular focus on the case of breaking up in the context of committed romantic relationships. Specifically, (...) I address three questions. First, what does A do when A breaks up with B? Second, what normative effect will A’s breaking up with B have on the relationship-based duties, reasons, and permissions that are partly constitutive of A and B’s relationship? Third, how is the ability to break up consistent with the commitment that many longer-term romantic relationships involve? In response to the first and second questions, I argue that breaking up is a neglected example of a normative power and develop a tripartite account of the normative effects of exercising this power. In response to the third question, I develop an account of the nature and value of commitment within romantic relationships and show how the power to exit a relationship by breaking up is consistent with this form of commitment. (shrink)

Grief is a complex emotional experience or process, which is typically felt in response to the death of a loved one, most typically a family member, child, or partner. Yet the way in which grief manifests is much more complex than this. The things we grieve over are multiple and diverse. We may grieve for a former partner after the breakup of a relationship; parents sometimes report experiencing grief when their grown-up children leave the family home. We can also experience (...) grief for people we have never met. Indeed, it is not just persons that we may grieve for. People report feeling grief over the death of their pets, or about the destruction the natural environment. In all these cases one factor that seems to stand out is loss. Despite being about very different things, these various forms of grief all involve a loss of some sort. Yet there is a further aspect of grief, which, on the face of it, does not quite follow this pattern. Grief can also be experienced before a loss has occurred. Grief can be experienced while the person that one is grieving for is still living and before one has (fully) suffered the loss. This phenomenon is known as anticipatory grief. The experience of anticipatory grief is a complex phenomenon, which resists easy classification. Nonetheless, we suggest that mental time travel, our ability to mentally project ourselves into the personal past (episodic memory) and personal future (episodic prospection), is a key mechanism that underpins experiences of anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief can still be understood in terms of loss, but it is a loss that is brought to mind through memory and imagination. (shrink)

Downton Abbey is, at its most basic, a story driven by intimate, romantic relationships: Mary and Matthew, Bates and Anna, Sybil and Branson, Lord and Lady Grantham, and many others. As viewers, we root for (or against) these characters as they fall in love, quarrel, break up, reconcile, have children, and deal with separation and death. But what do we get out of this? Is it merely an emotional “rush,” or is it something more meaningful? In this essay, I’ll (...) attempt to answer this question by examining how the relationships portrayed in Downton Abbey might look to the characters of Plato’s Symposium, one of the first (and most famous) philosophical treatments of love. The residents of Downtown Abbey provide ideal models for exploring and critiquing the various “theories of love” offered by the Symposium’s characters. Thomas’s defense of James, for example, provides a great illustration of Phaedrus’s claim about the relationship between love and courage, while Mary’s early struggles illuminate Pausanias’s suggestion that “pure” love can be achieved only by following (well-designed) social rules. By contrast, Bates and Anna help give content to Aristophanes’ s idea that love involves finding your “missing half,” while Carson’s and Mrs. Hughes’ relationship exemplify the sort of “order” celebrated by Eryximachus. Edith, for her part, seems to have fallen for Agathon’s sophistical claim that romantic love can only truly be experienced by the young and beautiful. Finally, Socrates’s famous account of the “ladder of love” can be seen most vividly in the transformative relationship of Sybil and Bronson. Along the way, we’ll consider what is really meant by “Platonic love,” and consider what the characters of Downton Abbey can teach about this invaluable philosophical concept. (shrink)

Using a subliminal priming lexical decision task, the present research investigated whether individuals who show negative implicit evaluations of an ex-partner immediately after a break-up show superior post-break-up emotional adjustment. As expected, individuals whose reaction times indicated negative implicit evaluations of their ex-partner showed reduced depressive affect immediately after the break-up. Individuals who did not initiate their break-up demonstrated less negative implicit evaluations of their ex-partners as well as more depressive affect. Finally, increased negative implicit evaluations (...) of ex-partners over a one-month period were associated with corresponding improvements in adjustment. The findings demonstrate a critical role for implicit evaluations in post-break-up adjustment. (shrink)

This paper begins by distinguishing between two levels at which ethics has been applied in the past half century. Typically, ethics gets applied at the level of public debate and policy. Much less often, applied ethics centers on the personal level. As a literature search reveals, this is true of recent philosophic discussions of divorce. This paper seeks to begin an alternative philosophic discussion of divorce and separation by considering it at a personal level. I begin this discussion by analyzing (...) two different conceptions of love-eros and agape-and suggest a synthesis of the two. The conception of love that I endorse suggests that the value of the parties in a loving relationship is constructed within the relationship itself. It is this feature of love that helps to explain why so many feel sueh a sense of worthlessness when experiencing a divorce or separation. Namely, that much of the positive value they had within their relationship has little or no value outside the context of that relationship. (shrink)

This paper begins by distinguishing between two levels at which ethics has been applied in the past half century. Typically, ethics gets applied at the level of public debate and policy. Much less often, applied ethics centers on the personal level. As a literature search reveals, this is true of recent philosophic discussions of divorce. This paper seeks to begin an alternative philosophic discussion of divorce and separation by considering it at a personal level. I begin this discussion by analyzing (...) two different conceptions of love-eros and agape-and suggest a synthesis of the two. The conception of love that I endorse suggests that the value of the parties in a loving relationship is constructed within the relationship itself. It is this feature of love that helps to explain why so many feel sueh a sense of worthlessness when experiencing a divorce or separation. Namely, that much of the positive value they had within their relationship has little or no value outside the context of that relationship. (shrink)

Berislav Marušić’s On the Temporality of Emotions is a lovely book. Marušić confronts a puzzle about grief and anger that many will find familiar from their own.

When, in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York more than two decades ago, the late Queen Elizabeth II expressed her sentiments with the words: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love’, she was making a reference to British psychiatrist Dr Colin Murray Parkes's book Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life. In the book, Dr Parkes states an obvious, albeit often ignored, fact that the pain of grief is just (...) as much part of life as the joy of love. Following the death of the Queen in September 2022, Joe Biden, the current president of the US, used the same quote as an opportunity to express his own personal sadness about her passing. It was also an opportunity to participate in public grief about the loss of a popular leader, and of innocent lives. It is not uncommon for leaders, religious ones including, to speak of love, especially during such poignant moments. But it is somewhat less common for public figures to bring to our attention the close connection between grief and love. Even when they do, grief is commonly seen in a negative light. Philosophers provide another example of what is, I shall argue, a mischaracterization of grief. (shrink)

"No topic has inspired more discussion--or more confusion--than love. Beginning with Plato, who first removed love from the realm of ordinary emotions, love has been praised as the key to being human and being happy, alternatively dismissed as an illusion or conspiracy. In this brilliant and provocative book, Robert Solon breaks through the myths and metaphors of love to discover the emotion itself. Love, Solomon argues, is neither primitive nor 'natural,' but rather learned and purposeful behavior. And like all emotions, (...) it is very much the product of a particular society. Love is at once an entertaining history of love in Western civilization, a bold philosophical reconstruction of our conception of love, and an enthusiastic description of the experience and place of love in our lives." --. (shrink)

Music education is a social act oriented around interactions between people in public spaces. These spaces provide opportunities for what Hannah Arendt calls natality, which we interpret as new and unexpected actions that arise in a shared space. Drawing from a range of ideas and experiences of Arendt, bell hooks, Joan Baez, Martha Nussbaum, and music education philosophers and practitioners, we argue that it is important for music educators to make room for this space by becoming more critically aware of (...) their emotions. Opening up to the unexpected in human interactions can at times be difficult and elicit fear. It also calls for a civic love. Cultivating this kind of love includes recognizing that our emotions and matters of the heart are instruments of power that can support or hinder others from becoming actors in their own right. As agents within music education, we can strive to realize this by developing a critical pedagogic consciousness and reflecting on the unexpected and emotional spaces of interaction. (shrink)

Model organisms are central to contemporary biology and studies of embryogenesis in particular. Biologists utilize only a small number of species to experimentally elucidate the phenomena and mechanisms of development. Critics have questioned whether these experimental models are good representatives of their targets because of the inherent biases involved in their selection (e.g., rapid development and short generation time). A standard response is that the manipulative molecular techniques available for experimental analysis mitigate, if not counterbalance, this concern. But the most (...) powerful investigative techniques and molecular methods are applicable to single-celled organisms (‘microbes’). Why not use unicellular rather than multicellular model organisms, which are the standard for developmental biology? To claim that microbes are not good representatives takes us back to the original criticism leveled against model organisms. Using empirical case studies of microbes modeling ontogeny, we break out of this circle of reasoning by showing: (a) that the criterion of representation is more complex than earlier discussions have emphasized; and, (b) that different aspects of manipulability are comparable in importance to representation when deciding if a model organism is a good model. These aspects of manipulability harbor the prospect of enhancing representation. The result is a better understanding of how developmental biologists conceptualize research using experimental models and suggestions for underappreciated avenues of inquiry using microbes. More generally, it demonstrates how the practical aspects of experimental biology must be scrutinized in order to understand the associated scientific reasoning. (shrink)

The ubiquity of top-down causal explanations within and across the sciences is prima facie evidence for the existence of top-down causation. Much debate has been focused on whether top-down causation is coherent or in conflict with reductionism. Less attention has been given to the question of whether these representations of hierarchical relations pick out a single, common hierarchy. A negative answer to this question undermines a commonplace view that the world is divided into stratified ‘levels’ of organization and suggests that (...) attributions of causal responsibility in different hierarchical representations may not have a meaningful basis for comparison. Representations used in top-down and bottom-up explanations are primarily ‘local’ and tied to distinct domains of science, illustrated here by protein structure and folding. This locality suggests that no single metaphysical account of hierarchy for causal relations to obtain within emerges from the epistemology of scientific explanation. Instead, a pluralist perspective is recommended—many different kinds of top-down causation (explanation) can exist alongside many different kinds of bottom-up causation (explanation). Pluralism makes plausible why different senses of top-down causation can be coherent and not in conflict with reductionism, thereby illustrating a productive interface between philosophical analysis and scientific inquiry. (shrink)

This chapter describes the theoretical implications of Extended Synthesis and addresses the methodological options available for determining aspects of theoretical structure. It uses a “bottom-up” approach focused on evolutionary theory in particular, as opposed to a “top-down” strategy that attempts to characterize the structure of all scientific theories. The chapter shows that there are multiple stable components contained within a broad representation of evolutionary theory. It suggests that the philosophical analysis offered in the chapter regarding the structure of evolutionary theory (...) assists attempts to recover coherence through the vehicle of an Extended Synthesis. (shrink)

Grief research in philosophy agrees that one who grieves grieves over the irreversible loss of someone whom the griever loved deeply, and that someone thus factored centrally into the griever’s sense of purpose and meaning in the world. The analytic literature in general tends to focus its treatments on the paradigm case of grief as the death of a loved one. I want to restrict my account to the paradigm case because the paradigm case most persuades the mind that grief (...) is a past-directed emotion. The phenomenological move I propose will enable us to (1) respect the paradigm case of grief and a broader but still legitimate set of grief-generating states of affairs, (2) liberate grief from the view that grief is past directed or about the past, and thus (3) account for grief in a way that separates it from its closest emotion-neighbor, sorrow, without having to rely on the affective quality of those two emotions.If the passing of the beloved causes the grief but is not what the grief is about, then we can get at the nature of grief by saying its temporal orientation is in the past (the event of the passing), but its temporal meaning is the present and future—the new significance of a world with the pervasive absence that is the world without the beloved. The no-longer of grief is a no-longer oriented by a past (that which is no longer) that is referred a present and future (that which is a no-longer understood as not now as it once was). Looking at the griever’s relation to time can tell us much about the pain and the object of grief, then. As the griever puts the past before himself with a certainty about this world “henceforth,” a look at the griever’s lived sense of the fi nality of the irreversibly lost (1) liberates grief from the tendency in the literature to be reduced to a past-directed emotion, (2) accounts for grief ’s intensity, its affective force or poignancy, and thus (3) enables us to separate grief from sorrow according to its intentionalobject in light of the temporal meaning of these emotions. (shrink)

An engaging and illuminating exploration of grief—and why, despite its intense pain, it can also help us grow Experiencing grief at the death of a person we love or who matters to us—as universal as it is painful—is central to the human condition. Surprisingly, however, philosophers have rarely examined grief in any depth. In Grief, Michael Cholbi presents a groundbreaking philosophical exploration of this complex emotional event, offering valuable new insights about what grief is, whom we grieve, and how grief (...) can ultimately lead us to a richer self-understanding and a fuller realization of our humanity. Drawing on psychology, social science, and literature as well as philosophy, Cholbi explains that we grieve for the loss of those in whom our identities are invested, including people we don't know personally but cherish anyway, such as public figures. Their deaths not only deprive us of worthwhile experiences; they also disrupt our commitments and values. Yet grief is something we should embrace rather than avoid, an important part of a good and meaningful life. The key to understanding this paradox, Cholbi says, is that grief offers us a unique and powerful opportunity to grow in self-knowledge by fashioning a new identity. Although grief can be tumultuous and disorienting, it also reflects our distinctly human capacity to rationally adapt as the relationships we depend on evolve. An original account of how grieving works and why it is so important, Grief shows how the pain of this experience gives us a chance to deepen our relationships with others and ourselves. (shrink)

With the publication of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become impossible to avoid Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. There has been the expected controversy with Heideggerians on the defensive and the philosopher’s detractors condemning his work outright. But there has been little serious exploration of the matter aside from several recent works. This article builds on this literature on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and concludes that an anti-Semitic narrative lies at the heart of Heidegger’s history of the oblivion of Being as nihilism. Moreover, Heidegger (...) adopts the narrative framework set up by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality. In the end, we assert that Heidegger advocates a kind of war against Judaism that seeks to eradicate the Jewish influence in the western tradition. Heidegger’s ‘metaphysical’ anti-Semitism aims to overcome the nihilism of the ‘Jewish Christian’ revenge [Rache] against death, a nihilism that has evolved into the technological effort to make everything secure. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Grief is often thought of as an emotional response to the death of someone we love. However, the term “grief” is also used when referring to losses of various other kinds, as with grief over illness, injury, unemployment, diminished abilities, relationship breakups, or loss of significant personal possessions. Complementing such uses, we propose that grief over a bereavement and other experiences of loss share a common phenomenological structure: one experiences the loss of certain possibilities that were integral to—and perhaps central (...) to—the unfolding structure of one’s life. Grief can thus be conceived of in a broad but still univocal way. To develop this position, we focus on the example of grief over involuntary childlessness, where lack of a concrete, historical object of emotion serves to make explicit the way in which grief concerns future possibilities. We go on to suggest that the phenomenological complexity, diversity, and prevalence of grief are obscured when approached via an abstract, simplified conception of bereavement. -/- . (shrink)

This book brings together a group of Judith Butler's philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up with (...) becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power. Butler shows in different philosophical contexts how the self that seeks to make itself finds itself already affected and formed against its will by social and discursive powers. And yet, agency and action are not necessarily nullified by this primary impingement. Primary sense impressions register this dual situation of being acted on and acting, countering the idea that acting requires one to overcome the situation of being affected by others and the linguistic and social world. This dual structure of sense sheds light on the desire to live, the practice and peril of grieving, embodied resistance, love, and modes of enthrallment and dispossession. Working with theories of embodiment, desire, and relationality in conversation with philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Fanon, Butler reanimates and revises her basic propositions concerning the constitution and deconstitution of the subject within fields of power, taking up key issues of gender, sexuality, and race in several analyses. Taken together, these essays track the development of Butler's embodied account of ethical relations. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss and characterize transcendental and salvational aspects of two naturalistic philosophical projects, those of Robert Corrington, a contemporary American Naturalist and George Santayana, the first identifiable American Naturalist. I am considering here soteriological pathways available for transformation or transfiguration of the self toward a state of spiritual optimization in an imminent natural cosmos where all but limited gains seem to be out of human hands. The individual, imbedded in Nature, is caught up in an unteleological (...) stream of Nature's own formation. In my consideration of this subject in relation to Robert Corrington's work, I have found a helpful and insightful .. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNegative affective biases are thought to be a key symptom driving and upholding many psychiatric disorders. When presented with ambiguous information, anxious individuals, for example, tend...

Seventeen transgressive behaviors were studied in the context of six personality variables using survey methods. The personality variables were impulsivity, sensation seeking, empathetic perspective taking, guilt, and shame, with social desirability used as a control. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated a five-factor model as having the best fit. Those five factors are competitive cheating, self-cheating, school cheating, relationship cheating, and breaking a social contract. A structural equation model indicated that only impulsivity, sensation seeking, and empathetic perspective taking were related to frequency (...) of transgressive behaviors, thus supporting the hypothesis that moral decision making has a critical automatic component. (shrink)

The authors of Habits of the Heart believe that American individualism ?may have grown cancerous?that it may be destroying those social integuments that Tocqueville saw as moderating its more destructive potentialities.? However, because they come to their research with an anti?individualistic bias in place, the authors fail to acknowledge the role of either recent historical events or influences other than individualistic ideas in shaping American culture. An alternative explanation for the emergence of the isolated self and the incoherence of moral (...) discourse in American life is presented. Both of these phenomena are viewed as temporary responses to a shift in American character. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a surge in philosophical work on the rationality of grief. Much of this research is premised on the idea that people tend to grieve much less than would be appropriate or, as it is often called, fitting. My goal in this paper is diagnostic, that is, to articulate two never properly distinguished, and indeed often conflated, arguments in favour of the purported discrepancy between experienced and fitting grief: a metaphysical and a psychological argument. According to the (...) former, grief is rationalized entirely by facts about the past. And because the past is unchangeable, grief can be said to remain forever fitting. According to the latter argument, humans’ emotional resilience causes grief to diminish at a faster rate than would be fitting. Which of these problems we end up facing depends on relatively subtle variations in the characterization of the losses that render grief appropriate. (shrink)

Independent on Sunday October 2nd One of the country's lead­ing philosophical counsellers, and chairman of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP), Tim LeBon, said it typically took around six 50 ­minute sessions for a client to move from confusion to resolution. Mr LeBon, who has 'published a book on the subject, Wise Therapy, said philoso­phy was perfectly suited to this type of therapy, dealing as it does with timeless human issues such as love, purpose, happiness and emo­tional challenges. `Wise (...) Therapy, is part of a series aimed at promoting an integrative attitude as its ethos. Among all the many perspectives of psychotherapists and counselors, philosophy needs to take its place and needs to find its voice. Tim LeBon has provided an effective means by which counselors can bring philosophy into their work with clients' - APPA journal `Tim Le Bon's Wise Therapy is a comprehensible and well argued book dealing with the practical therapeutic applications of philosophical research that may well be of interest to philosophers but -- as the author himself intends -- will be of most obvious benefit to therapists and counselors, both by informing their dialogue with clients in new ways and by helping them become more informed about ways to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising within the context of their own work' - Metapsychology `A fascinating workshop for therapists and clients, backed up a thorough degree if philosophical acuity' - Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis `I strongly recommend the book for philosophers as well as practitioners, teachers, students and supervisors in counselling and psychotherapy' - Self and Society `Provides some additional and valuable arrows for the therapist's quiver' - Irvin Yalom, author of Love's Executioner `Like Aristotle, Tim LeBon examines what is said and extracts what is best from it…. There are many fascinating exercises designed to bring out and enlighten the client's values, conception of the good life, well-being, happiness, pleasure, and the proper place of reason in life…. Wise Therapy is well written and engaging. The case histories are illuminating examples of therapeutic techniques at work, the thought experiments are well designed, and the philosophical position adapted from the internal debates of the philosophers is level headed…. I recommend it highly to philosophers with an interest in counselling, and psychological counsellors with an interest in philosophy' - Jeff Mason, The Philosophers' Magazine `Tim LeBon has… authored a text which should become a staple on the philosophical counsellor's bookshelf…. Wise Therapy is a concise, well-written book…. His ability to relate philosophical concepts to counselling concerns is admirable and attests to the skill and knowledge he possesses as a working counsellor. But, by far the most important part of Tim LeBon's book to PC is the last chapter, "The Counsellor's Philosophical Toolbox"' - Craig Munns in The Examined Life ` Tim LeBon has done a good job of offering practical approaches to some of the most important and vexing issues that arise in counselling…. Tim LeBon's book contains helpful suggestions, practical information, and useful examples, and would make a good addition to the library of any counsellors willing to allow philosophy to turn mere client sessions into wise therapy' - Peter Raabe, Practical Philosophy Wise Therapy is an original and practical guide to how philosophy can benefit counselling and psychotherapy. Tim LeBon argues that therapy, informed by philosophy, can help clients make better decision and achieve emotional wisdom. He uses philosophical approaches to explore issues of right and wrong, the emotions and reasons, well-being and the meaning of life, and develops a 'counsellor's toolbox' of techniques that can help practitioners apply the wisdom of philosophy to good therapeutic practice. For counsellors who may find philosophical approaches to therapy useful, this work addresses key philosophical topics - the emotions, free will, the meaning of life and ethics. It is jargon-free where possible and assumes no previous philosophical training. From The Independent, 16th November 2004 Plato is my agony aunt It was the end of a love affair that broke her heart. Could the wisdom of the great philosophers show her how to be happy again? Claire Smith tries a novel form of therapy "The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates said. Nor is the life you're left with after your boyfriend has left you for another woman - at least, that's how it felt in October last year when mine broke rank and went off with an art student from Cleveland, Ohio. We were over there for the opening of his new art exhibition. He'd flown over four days before me and had met her at a party. Supposedly, they "connected". The five months that followed were a roller-coaster of confusion, vitriol and despair. I knew there'd been problems in our relationship. We saw the world very differently; he delighted in the charm of the ordinary, I wanted maximum divinity. He walked; I galloped. He drank tea; I loathed the stuff. But, along the banks of the Thames, we'd made a promise to always stick together. Our love was something unique: "transcendental", I called it. And besides, we recycled. Surely a commitment to save the world would save our relationship? Alas, no. So there I was, a woman scorned. Hell truly hath no greater fury. And what made it worse was that I still believed in our transcendental love. If I wanted to change the way I was feeling, I needed to alter the way I was thinking. But how? A few bottles of wine and a sharp blow to the head might have done the trick. Fortunately, there's an older, more trusted way of turning your head on its head that counsellors are starting to use: philosophy. The idea of employing Plato as an agony aunt was begun in 1981 by the German philosopher Gerd Achenbach. Although philosophy spends a lot of its time asking real-life questions that affect real-life people - What is happiness? And is it always wrong to lie? - most of the debate goes on in ivory towers. What Achenbach and subsequent philosophers including Tim LeBon, the chairman of the UK's Society for Philosophy in Practice, wanted to do was "give practical application" to this gigantic library of great thoughts. So how does it work? Like most types of therapy, you sign up for a set of sessions. "Two would give you a new perspective on one issue; six would help you to make a major life-decision, like a career change; with 12 you can start to rethink your entire life philosophy," explains LeBon. Each session lasts 50 minutes and costs £50 - and, no, you don't have to have any previous knowledge of philosophy. "If you think of Friends, it would suit Ross and Chandler more than Joey," LeBon says. "It's for anyone who wants to make their emotions more intelligent. Or for those who have tried other kinds of therapy, and want something more cerebral." The first session begins with the patient venting off about whatever's troubling them. The rant over, the counsellor then picks out some key concepts that are crucial to the problem - in the case of heartbreak, it is love and happiness that come hurtling to the fore - and then gets the patient to define what they mean. So, what is love? What is happiness? To kick-start the patient's thinking, LeBon describes what a great philosopher had to say about it. In my case, he tells me what Plato wrote about love in his Symposium: that to stop man fighting the gods, Zeus decided to cut each human in two, so they would lose their strength. "This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other," Plato said. "Each of us is a 'matching half' of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him." This method of probing what we might think are "obvious" ideas, such as love and happiness, was devised by Socrates in the squares of Athens. "The only I thing I know is that I know nothing at all," he boasted. What Socrates showed was that although many of the thinkers of his time thought they knew what justice, happiness and goodness meant, their understanding was tied in to their personal agenda and world view, and, what's more, when pushed, their ideas often contradicted themselves. A bit like me on love. Whereas part of my understanding of love was something that gave life meaning, made it worth living and bound us together, I also believed that true love was "transcendental": that it was out of this world, and it didn't matter if the two people who loved each other couldn't get along in the day-to-day. Love was bigger than the mundane. But when it came to the next stage of the therapy, critical thinking - "to check out whether your assumptions stand up to examination" - I walked head first into a contradiction. If I think love's purpose is to make life worth living, but then say it's irrelevant to daily life, surely my two ideas of love are not compatible? As the cogs in my brain start to creak into motion, I feel myself taking a step back from my predicament: thinking about how I've been thinking. This idea I had of transcendental love might have started off as a romantic dream. But when the relationship stopped working, and I found myself feeling trapped and frustrated, I used it to justify the mechanics of a relationship that just didn't work in the daily grind. I used it to lie to myself. In the final stage, LeBon gets me to start thinking about how to go forward. "You can't change what has happened," he says. "You can't change that he's left you, or how you behaved in the relationship. So, as the Stoics did, let's work on controlling the controllables: the things that you can change." To work out what can be changed, he gets me to try out a thought experiment, a method often used in philosophy to imagine other worlds where people can have different codes of behaviour. Thought experiments shatter your preconceived ideas of how the world should be and let your imagination run wild to how the world could be. "I find Viktor Frankl very useful here, the Austrian psychiatrist and concentration-camp survivor who actually believed that everything in life happens for a purpose," LeBon says. "Suppose this break-up did happen for a reason that will work to your benefit," he suggests. "What might that be? The answer might be that you can now focus on something important that was denied in the relationship. Or - the Hollywood version - so you'll meet someone who is really right for you." Temporarily freed of any sense of responsibility for the relationship that was, and its sorry demise, the list came fast. I could now travel more; he didn't like me travelling on my own, but too often he didn't want to go anywhere, preferring to stay in his studio and make art. I'd love to meet someone with a similar sense of adventure to mine. For the first time in two years, I was being honest with myself about what I really wanted - listening to those voices that we all have inside our heads, and too often try to muzzle. So did philosophy save me? Well, I'm now dating a travel writer I have to run to keep up with. I still haven't got over the fact that my replacement came from Cleveland, Ohio. But I guess I never will. Tim LeBon can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] A FEW WORDS FROM THE WISE Compiled by Ed Caesar · "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet" - Plato · "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness" - Friedrich Nietzsche · "That man shall live as his own master and in happiness who can say each day 'I have lived'" - Horace · "The good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue... Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy" - Aristotle · "There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than friendship" - Thomas Aquinas · "Whatever you do... love those who love you" - Voltaire · "Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination" - Immanuel Kant · "Happiness is a state of which you are unconscious. The moment you are aware that you are happy, you cease to be happy" - Jiddu Krishnamurti · "Love is an ideal thing. Marriage is a real thing" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I shrink, therefore I am Therapy has many answers, but some questions require the help of a philosopher, says Clint Witchalls Sunday November 21, 2004 The Observer Danny had worked in the City of London for 10 years. As a research analyst, stockbroker and fund manager, he'd made a lot of valuable contacts, earnt a lot of cash, and learnt some important business skills. However, as he approached his mid-thirties, he no longer felt good about himself or what he did for a living, and he found his colleagues cold and unfriendly. A chronic illness made him realise his mortality, and he began to reassess his priorities. Danny had been struggling with his career conundrum for nearly five years when he met David Arnaud, a philosophical counsellor. After a few soul-searching sessions, Danny arrived at a decision. Today, he teaches economics to sixth-formers, and he loves it. 'It's a much better lifestyle,' he says. Many people are turning to philosophical counsellors to get answers to questions such as: 'How do I make sense of myself?' 'What is important to me?' 'Where am I going?' These are perhaps not the sort of questions that require psychiatric intervention, but Arnaud, who recently completed the first empirical study of philosophical counselling in the UK, has found that within just five sessions the majority of clients, with important decisions to make, tend to move from a state of concern and confusion to a resolution. Modern philosophical counselling can be traced back to 1981, when the philosopher Gerd Achenbach opened the first practice near Cologne. Achenbach referred to the new discipline as 'therapy for the sane.' Today, there are hundreds of philosophical counsellors around the world, with the movement particularly strong in the US, Britain and the Netherlands. 'The dilemmas people face aren't always primarily psychological,' says Alex Howard, a philosophical counsellor from Newcastle. 'If people face problems that are social or economic, it doesn't make sense to define their problems in purely psychological terms.' Tim LeBon, a founder member of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP) and author of Wise Therapy, adds: 'We are faced with far more life choices than our grandparents, yet have far fewer resources to deal with them. Our grandparents may have gone to a priest or to other family members for advice; most people don't trust these solutions any more and so want to make their own well-informed, well thought-out choices. Philosophical counselling can help these people - people in mid-life crises who are wondering how to make the most of the rest of their life. People who want to take stock of their values.' Where stressed executives might once have been prescribed a course of tranquillisers or antidepressants, they can now get a dose of Bertrand Russell instead: 'Success is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.' While some philosophical counsellors do recommend books for their clients to read, most sessions are about helping the client identify faulty thoughts. For example, a briefing in Aristotelian logic might show a client why their beliefs are erroneous. The person might infer that they're a screw-up because they've screwed up. The counsellor could point out that they're making an error called 'fallacy of composition' - that is, what's true of the part isn't necessarily true of the whole. In philosophical counselling, problems aren't pathologised as they are by the psychiatric profession, and the dialogue between client and counsellor is more like a meeting of equals, compared to many therapies where the client is treated like a patient and seen as someone who is, in some way, inadequate. 'Anybody can benefit from philosophical counselling,' says Howard. 'But it does require someone who is willing to take stock.' Lou Marinoff, author of international bestseller Plato Not Prozac! has done much to promote philosophical counselling. 'Some people who have stabilised their neurochemistry and validated their emotions now wish to examine or re-examine the criteria of their beliefs, the principles of their conduct, or the meaning of their lives,' he says. 'With whom shall they do this? Psychologists and psychiatrists can shed light on such issues - as can rabbis, priests, imams and gurus. Philosophers are now rejoining the ranks of helpers.' LeBon believes certain therapies (such as cognitive behavioural therapy) don't go far enough in helping their clients. 'For instance, if you are anxious about your relationship, a cognitive therapist would try to dispute your catastrophising and jump to conclusions to make you feel less anxious,' says LeBon. 'A philosophical counsellor would do this, but would also look for existential meaning in your anxiety - perhaps you really don't want to be in the relationship and that is what your anxiety is telling you.' LeBon also gives short shrift to psychoanalysts. 'There's very little evidence for the Freudian unconscious, and it's time to move on to more intellectually satisfying and helpful therapies,' he says. However, Alain de Botton, the man who popularised philosophy as self-help, isn't ready to bury psychologists and their ilk just yet. 'The truth is that psychoanalysis grew out of philosophy - it's not some completely new idea, and in fact, done properly, psychoanalysis is philosophical anyway. It may even be dangerous to the mental health of some people to suggest a philosopher rather than a properly trained analyst. The knowledge of analysts when it comes to many emotional problems is now much greater than that of most philosophers.' Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004. (shrink)

Close-up insights on how experts in the field are re-interpreting ethical principles to create workable policies for today and tomorrow, from the creators of ...

Because an increasing number of patients have medical conditions that render them incompetent at making their own medical choices, more and more medical choices are now made by surrogates, often patient family members. However, many studies indicate that surrogates often do not discharge their responsibilities adequately, and in particular, do not choose in accordance with what those patients would have chosen for themselves, especially when it comes to end-of-life medical choices. This chapter argues that a significant part of the explanation (...) of such surrogate failure is that family surrogates are likely to undergo anticipatory grief when making end-of-life decisions. After clarifying both the emotional structure and object of grief, I propose that the pending death of a loved one induces an emotional conflict in surrogates between the care demanded by their responsibility as surrogates and the attachment surrogates feel toward their dying loved one, an attachment surrogates "resolve" in the direction of attachment rather than care. This hypothesis helps to explain both surrogates' general inability to exercise "substituted judgment" on behalf of their loved ones and a wide swath of the particular data regarding this inability (e.g., that surrogates more often err by choosing overtreatment). I conclude by considering possible clinical and philosophical responses to this hypothesis. (shrink)

In Grief: A Philosophical Guide, Michael Cholbi presents a compelling account of the nature of grief. To further illustrate how fruitful the philosophical study of grief, and Cholbi’s account of it is, I present three sets of comments. The first regards the extent to which Cholbi’s account of grief also provides an account of vicarious grief. The second concerns the paradox of grief and the good of grief, and suggests one reason we may recommend grief is that grieving is healthy. (...) The final set of comments pertains to the duty to grieve, and whether this duty may extend to other emotionally rich activities, such as falling in love. (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

The number of family members caring and caregiving for a loved one undergoing physical and mental changes continues to increase dramatically. For many, this ongoing experience not only involves the “burden of caregiving” but also the “burden of grief” as their loved-one’s newfound medical condition can result in the loss of the person they previously knew. Dramatic cognitive, behavioral, and personality changes, often leave caregivers bereft of the significant relationship they shared with the affected person prior to the illness or (...) injury. This results in what we term conditions of acquired “non-death interpersonal loss”. Current approaches to these losses use an amalgam of models drawn from both death and non-death loss. Despite their utility, these frameworks have not adequately addressed the unique processes occurring in the interpersonal sphere where the grieving caregiver needs to reach some modus vivendi regarding the triad of “who the person was,” “who they are now,” and “who they will yet become.” In this paper we propose a process-based model which addresses cognitive-emotional-behavioral challenges caregivers meet in the face of their new reality. These require a revision of the interpersonal schemas and the relationships that takes into account the ongoing interactions with the affected family member. The model and its utility to identify adaptive and maladaptive responses to NoDIL is elaborated upon with clinical material obtained from caregivers of people diagnosed with major neuro-cognitive disorder and pediatric traumatic brain injury. The article concludes with implications for theory, research and clinical intervention. (shrink)

The first sexual encounter between Dominique Francon and Howard Roark in The Fountainhead is known as the “rape scene.” From the time of the novel's publication, some readers have found a contradiction between Rand's views on freedom and the violence within the novel. The ambiguity arises from the way in which the scenes leading up to the event are constructed, the sadomasochistic context of the novel, and Rand's views of gender and romantic relationships. Although Rand repeatedly denied that any rape (...) occurred, this article concludes that a rape did occur and that Rand fully intended it to be so. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Grief, and the Imagination in Early Modern EnglandStephen PenderIn 1633, the Northampton physician James Hart warned that excessive grief "will to some procure irrecoverable Consumptions," dry the brain and bone marrow, hinder digestion, interrupt rest, and "by consequent prove a cause of many dangerous diseases." The risk was grave: "Galen himself maketh answer that one may dye of these passions, and to this doe all Physicians assent; and (...) experience maketh it so appeare" (1633, 393–95).1 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, physicians routinely treated grief and its effects, since it was commonly held that the passions were realized in matter.2 They applied an ensemble of remedies—bleeding, emetics, laxatives—predicated on sympathetic connection between bodies and souls, for disturbance "in the emotional climate of the body alters its inner temperature and causes in turn dangerous mutations in the balance and composition of the humours" (MacDonald 1981, 182).3 The spirits, too, were enlisted: for "the spirit being either withdrawne from the outwarde parts by vehement passio[n] of griefe," the "outward partes not only faile in their sense and motion, but even nourishment & growth thereby are hindered" (Bright 1586, 60; see also 47, 51–52). But grief also "besieged" the mind, weakened reason, hampered discourse, and impugned the will (Reynolds 1640, 229–30). By affecting mental faculties, passions subvented affliction, and thus physicians offered various prophylactics against fulminant emotion in the sick, most [End Page 54] of which focused on the imagination as potentially harmful faculty that prolonged or intensified suffering. A sufferer, Hart writes, "by reason of his sicknesse, hath sorrow enough, especially, if the party be of a feeble, fearfull and pusillanimous spirit, the phansie still framing unto it selfe new fears of some bad and sinistrous event." As wards against excessive passion, Hart recommends vigilance and circumspection, accommodation and distraction. First, physicians must guard against visitors who "prove the causes of infinite evills to the sicke" by occasioning overweening feeling. Drawing on Paul's distinction between worldly and "godly" sorrow in his second letter to the Corinthians, Hart recognizes that sufferers have just cause for fear, and physicians should not interrupt or retard "true sorrow for sinne," which offers comfort to a "drouping and sorrowfull soule." But the effects of any lenitive passion are endangered by "indiscreetly" compounding fear and grief "at an unseasonable time" (1633, 400). To avoid odium, a counselor's efforts must conform to "time, place, and person" (Wilson 1994, 120). Second, a physician should "accommodate himselfe to the severall dispositions of his patients, and to many particular circumstances concerning them," adjusting therapies and practices to individual sufferers. Finally, if not too fragile, the sick should be distracted with mirth (1633, 400).Those expressing "true sorrow for sinne" should read. Hart recommends one of the "many volumes written by our learned Divines, concerning this subject," Robert Bolton's 1631 Instructions for a Right Comforting Afflicted Consciences with Speciall Antidotes Against Some Grievous Temptations. Bolton, who was rector of Broughton, Northamptonshire, and a popular conformist preacher, insists that divines sometimes held even "godly sorrow" unseasonable, "when it unfitteth the body or minde to good duties" (1641, 587). Excessive grief is particularly foul: of "all other passions of the Soule," he writes, "sadnesse, and grief grates most upon the vitall spirits; dries up soonest the freshest marrow in the bones; and most sensibly suckes out the purest, and refinedst bloud in the heart" (1641, 21). Bolton's remedies are to avoid idleness and solitude, for both render the soul susceptible to disquiet (1641, 582), and to read: the sorrowful and the melancholy find succor in scripture. Although both forms of suffering may be treated medically, one remedy for an afflicted conscience is "Gods blessed Booke" (1641, 211–15). One early seventeenth-century Sussex physician turned to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) for assistance.4Like most physicians in the period, both Hart and Bolton differentiate grief occasioned by humoral imbalance from sorrow born of a repentant conscience, and both confirm that the "phantasie" is central to physical and [End Page 55] moral therapy.5 For Bolton, grief, melancholy, and "terror of conscience" dwell chiefly in the imagination (1641, 212... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Grief, and the Imagination in Early Modern EnglandStephen PenderIn 1633, the Northampton physician James Hart warned that excessive grief "will to some procure irrecoverable Consumptions," dry the brain and bone marrow, hinder digestion, interrupt rest, and "by consequent prove a cause of many dangerous diseases." The risk was grave: "Galen himself maketh answer that one may dye of these passions, and to this doe all Physicians assent; and (...) experience maketh it so appeare" (1633, 393–95).1 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, physicians routinely treated grief and its effects, since it was commonly held that the passions were realized in matter.2 They applied an ensemble of remedies—bleeding, emetics, laxatives—predicated on sympathetic connection between bodies and souls, for disturbance "in the emotional climate of the body alters its inner temperature and causes in turn dangerous mutations in the balance and composition of the humours" (MacDonald 1981, 182).3 The spirits, too, were enlisted: for "the spirit being either withdrawne from the outwarde parts by vehement passio[n] of griefe," the "outward partes not only faile in their sense and motion, but even nourishment & growth thereby are hindered" (Bright 1586, 60; see also 47, 51–52). But grief also "besieged" the mind, weakened reason, hampered discourse, and impugned the will (Reynolds 1640, 229–30). By affecting mental faculties, passions subvented affliction, and thus physicians offered various prophylactics against fulminant emotion in the sick, most [End Page 54] of which focused on the imagination as potentially harmful faculty that prolonged or intensified suffering. A sufferer, Hart writes, "by reason of his sicknesse, hath sorrow enough, especially, if the party be of a feeble, fearfull and pusillanimous spirit, the phansie still framing unto it selfe new fears of some bad and sinistrous event." As wards against excessive passion, Hart recommends vigilance and circumspection, accommodation and distraction. First, physicians must guard against visitors who "prove the causes of infinite evills to the sicke" by occasioning overweening feeling. Drawing on Paul's distinction between worldly and "godly" sorrow in his second letter to the Corinthians, Hart recognizes that sufferers have just cause for fear, and physicians should not interrupt or retard "true sorrow for sinne," which offers comfort to a "drouping and sorrowfull soule." But the effects of any lenitive passion are endangered by "indiscreetly" compounding fear and grief "at an unseasonable time" (1633, 400). To avoid odium, a counselor's efforts must conform to "time, place, and person" (Wilson 1994, 120). Second, a physician should "accommodate himselfe to the severall dispositions of his patients, and to many particular circumstances concerning them," adjusting therapies and practices to individual sufferers. Finally, if not too fragile, the sick should be distracted with mirth (1633, 400).Those expressing "true sorrow for sinne" should read. Hart recommends one of the "many volumes written by our learned Divines, concerning this subject," Robert Bolton's 1631 Instructions for a Right Comforting Afflicted Consciences with Speciall Antidotes Against Some Grievous Temptations. Bolton, who was rector of Broughton, Northamptonshire, and a popular conformist preacher, insists that divines sometimes held even "godly sorrow" unseasonable, "when it unfitteth the body or minde to good duties" (1641, 587). Excessive grief is particularly foul: of "all other passions of the Soule," he writes, "sadnesse, and grief grates most upon the vitall spirits; dries up soonest the freshest marrow in the bones; and most sensibly suckes out the purest, and refinedst bloud in the heart" (1641, 21). Bolton's remedies are to avoid idleness and solitude, for both render the soul susceptible to disquiet (1641, 582), and to read: the sorrowful and the melancholy find succor in scripture. Although both forms of suffering may be treated medically, one remedy for an afflicted conscience is "Gods blessed Booke" (1641, 211–15). One early seventeenth-century Sussex physician turned to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) for assistance.4Like most physicians in the period, both Hart and Bolton differentiate grief occasioned by humoral imbalance from sorrow born of a repentant conscience, and both confirm that the "phantasie" is central to physical and [End Page 55] moral therapy.5 For Bolton, grief, melancholy, and "terror of conscience" dwell chiefly in the imagination (1641, 212... (shrink)

Love, Friendship, and the Self presents a reexamination of our common understanding of ourselves as persons in light of the phenomena of love and friendship. It argues that the individualism that is implicit in that understanding cannot be sustained if we are to understand the kind of distinctively personal intimacy that love and friendship essentially involve. For love is a matter of identifying with someone: sharing for his sake the concerns and values that make up his identity as the person (...) he is. Moreover, in friendship the friends share not only a concern for each other but also their activity, their lives, and even potentially their selves. By providing a detailed analysis of these notions, Bennett Helm argues for an understanding of persons as essentially social. (shrink)

Against the common understanding that the Ethics promotes a "radical anti-emotion program," I claim that Spinoza describes an immanent transformation of love from a form of madness to an expression of wisdom. Love as madness produces the affects that another tradition unites in the seven deadly sins, such as lust, gluttony, envy, greed, and pride. Spinoza, however, never condemns these affects as such. Within each affect one can find its "correct use" (E5p10schol), which enables us to love and to live (...) otherwise. As we come to understand our beloveds as determinate expressions both of nature's power and of our own ability to persevere in being, we find conditions for our liberation within these most burdensome of passions. More specifically, as we diminish our tendency to imagine what we love in terms of its finitude and susceptibility to loss, we are determined to love and to know both others and ourselves by the joyful passions. Ultimately, Spinoza's portrait of love suggests ways of life that generate the satisfaction of our possessive desire with the collective and inclusive love of, certainly, the eternal and immutable thing, but also the eternal and immutable in things, in each other, and above all, in ourselves. In other words, Spinoza's economics of love and possession point up the desire to appropriate our own power in and of community, and in of nature. (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)

Should we regret the fact that we are often more emotionally resilient in response to the deaths of our loved ones than we might expect -- that the suffering associated with grief often dissipates more quickly and more fully than we anticipate? Dan Moller ("Love and Death") argues that we should, because this resilience epistemically severs us from our loved ones and thereby "deprives us of insight into our own condition." I argue that Moller's conclusion is correct despite resting on (...) a mistaken picture of the nature and significance of grief. Unlike Moller, I contend that grief is a composite emotional process, rather than a single mental state; that grief is a species of emotional attention rather than perception; and that grief is a form of activity directed at placing our relationships with the deceased on new terms. It is precisely because grief has these three features that it facilitates the scrutiny of our practical identities and thus fosters self-knowledge and self-understanding. (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.

On its surface, the movie her depicts a classical romance: boy meets girl, both fall in love, the relationship evolves, until they finally and sadly break up. What makes this conventional plot special and worthwhile of being used in philosophical investigation is the fact that the girl in this case is an artificial intelligence —Samantha is an operating system owned by Theodore. But is reciprocal, romantic love between a human and an AI even possible, and, if so, might there (...) be aspects of such a loving relationship that warrant ethical criticism? Assuming, for the sake of argument, a positive answer to the first question, this chapter focuses on the latter. In addressing the ethical implications of such a loving relationship, we highlight the likelihood of its sexist and misogynistic traits. Current depictions of AI lovers—just like Samantha—usually fulfill the female stereotype of being warm, caring, and always up to satisfying the user’s needs. This is due to a fundamental asymmetry which is constitutive for relationships between humans and AIs—after all, the latter are programmed and bought for the very reason to satisfy the buyer’s needs. We argue that romantic love between a human and an AI, therefore, warrants substantial ethical criticism, as it falls short of important ethical aspects of a romantic love worthwhile pursuing. (shrink)

Have you lost a loved one? The loss can be inestimable, the grief excruciating. What helped you? Did someone say something comforting? Did someone offer a consolation, which you resented? Have you ever tried to comfort someone with a terminal illness or one who has lost a loved one? Knowing how to help or what to say that is not trite, insincere, or superficial can be difficult. The point of view of a grieving person is quite different from that of (...) those who wish to offer comfort. In a multicultural society such as ours, anticipating the beliefs of the grieving person can be even more difficult. This book explores the perspective of a grieving person. It considers the merits and potential harm of alternative comfort strategies. As a philosophical analysis of grief, it emphasizes an understanding of the beliefs that underlie grief and the usefulness or dangers of emotions. Because grief is so complex and sensitive, a narrow approach runs the risk of alienating the grieving person. The ideas in this book are expressed in a dialogue among three characters. Their discussion is broad and fundamental. Starting from the familiar consolation, “She’s no longer suffering” and the grieving person’s resentment toward the expression, the three friends articulate the value of life and the evils of death. Their discussion enriches their understanding of grief. Many consolations offered to mourners are poor arguments. Even the better ones do their work best in the context of a greater understanding of grief. (shrink)

Alan C. LoveDarwinian calisthenicsAn athlete engages in calisthenics as part of basic training and as a preliminary to more advanced or intense activity. Whether it is stretching, lunges, crunches, or push-ups, routine calisthenics provide a baseline of strength and flexibility that prevent a variety of injuries that might otherwise be incurred. Peter Bowler has spent 40 years doing Darwinian calisthenics, researching and writing on the development of evolutionary ideas with special attention to Darwin and subsequent filiations among scientists exploring evolution (...) . Therefore, we would expect that when Bowler engages in a counterfactual history—imagining a world without Darwin—he is able to avoid historical injury and generate novel insights. My assessment is that the results are mixed. Before we can see why, it is necessary to walk briskly through the main contours of his argument.Bowler begins with an apologia for a counterfactual appr .. (shrink)

The word "truth" retains, in common use, traces of origins that link it to trust, truth, and truce, connoting ideas of fidelity, loyalty, and authenticity. The word has become, in contemporary philosophy, encased in a web of technicalities, but we know that a true image is a faithful portrait; a true friend a loyal one. In a novel or a poem, too, we have a feel for what is emotionally true, though we are not concerned with the actuality of events (...) and characters depicted. To have emotions is to care about certain things: we can wonder whether those things are really worth caring about. We can wonder whether our passions reflect who we are, and whether they constitute fitting responses to the vicissitudes of life. So there are two aspects to emotional truth: how well an emotion reflects the threats and promises of the world, and how well it reflects our own individual nature. That is the starting point of this book, which looks first at the analogies and disanalogies between strict propositional truth and a looser, "generic" sense of truth. As applied to emotions, generic truth is closer to those original meanings: as in a portrait's fidelity or friend's loyalty. Taken in this sense, the notion of emotional truth opens up large vistas on areas of life essential to our existence as social beings, and to our concerns with beauty, morality, love, death, sex, knowledge, desire, coherence, and happiness. Each of those topics illustrates some facet of the dominant theme of the book: the crucial but often ambivalent role of our emotions in grounding and yet also sometimes undermining our values. Emotions act, in holistic perspective, as ultimate arbiters of values where different and independently justified standards of value compete. (shrink)

In aesthetics there is a long tradition according to which beauty is the object of love. One construal of this suggests a sentimentalist theory of beauty: beauty just is the object of an emotion aptly described as love. The first step toward such a view would be to discern whether we can make sense of at least some kind of aesthetic affect as at least some kind of love. I suggest that we can by taking up a thought from Frank (...) Sibley, according to whom aesthetic properties reflect non-aesthetic values that “go deep into human life and interests” or that “mean much to us” given the kinds of lives we live. I show how we might think that a variety of aesthetic affect represents its object as embodying life-affirming value and as such we can see a variety of aesthetic affect as a kind of love of life. It remains to be seen whether this can be leveraged into a theory of beauty narrowly construed. (shrink)

Heterogeneity within MDD has hampered identification of biological markers (e.g., intermediate phenotypes, IPs) that might increase risk for the disorder or reflect closer links to the genes underlying the disease process. The newer characterizations of dimensions of MDD within Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) domains may align well with the goal of defining IPs. We compare a sample of 25 individuals with MDD compared to 29 age and education matched controls in multimodal assessment. The multimodal RDoC assessment included the primary IP (...) biomarker, positron emission tomography (PET) with a selective radiotracer for 5-HT1A ([11C]WAY-100635), as well as event-related functional MRI with a Go/No-go task targeting the Cognitive Control network, neuropsychological assessment of affective perception, negative memory bias and Cognitive Control domains. There was also an exploratory genetic analysis with the serotonin transporter (5-HTTLPR) and monamine oxidase A (MAO-A) genes. In regression analyses, lower 5-HT1A binding potential (BP) in the MDD group was related to diminished engagement of the Cognitive Control network, slowed resolution of interfering cognitive stimuli, one element of Cognitive Control. In contrast, higher/normative levels of 5-HT1A BP in MDD (only) was related to a substantial memory bias toward negative information, but intact resolution of interfering cognitive stimuli and greater engagement of Cognitive Control circuitry. The serotonin transporter risk allele was associated with lower 1a BP and the corresponding imaging and cognitive IPs in MDD. Lowered 5HT 1a BP was present in half of the MDD group relative to the control group. Lowered 5HT 1a BP may represent a subtype including decreased engagement of Cognitive Control network and impaired resolution of interfering cognitive stimuli. Future investigations might link lowered 1a BP to neurobiological pathways and markers, as well as probing subtype-specific treatment targets. (shrink)