It is widely believed that a person's traits can function as reasons for loving her. 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. (shrink)

My theme in this essay is the relation of misfortune – and other occasions for regret – to the affirmation of life. R. Jay Wallace believes there is an antagonistic relation that produces a schism between our affirmative attitudes and our reasons and considered judgments. On his view, our attachments to the persons and projects that give meaning to our lives lead us to affirm states of affairs it would be more appropriate to regret. I argue that the attitude of (...) affirmation can acknowledge and do justice to reasons for regret. Wallace fails to appreciate the implications of the Nietzschean positions he cites as precedents; he assumes the past has a meaning that is fixed and insulated from the future. Drawing on Nietzsche, I argue that the affirmation of life is a coherent project of bestowing meaning on a historical sequence going forward into the future. (shrink)

A substantial body of recent philosophy envisages a close, congenial relationship between blame and morality. It has been posited, assumed or argued, for instance, that blame is responsive to moral...

"I imagine the two friends crossing the deserted streets of Paris at night and talking—about what? They speak of philosophy, intellectual matters."David M. Robinson's article "In the Golden Hour of Friendship": Transcendentalism and Utopian Desire locates a reversal in Emerson's essay "Friendship." Emerson, according to this reading, propounds and then rejects philosophy as a foundation of friendship; "Emerson enacts in this essay a quite extraordinary repudiation of his own philosophy. He first describes the desire of one individual for another as (...) an unchosen or fated condition, the initial promise of which is by nature impossible to fulfill… But Emerson then simply dismisses this iron law of existence as a... (shrink)

This article challenges the widespread assumption that forgiveness transpires under voluntary control. I explain that that assumption underlies the lively debate of the question of whether forgiveness is or ought to be free or conditional. I then critically examine two accounts of forgiveness, those of Avishai Margalit and Pamela Hieronymi, to which the assumption of control is pivotal, and argue that they are compromised by that assumption. The premise that forgiveness is voluntary leads Margalit to incorrectly dissociate it from forgetting, (...) and Hieronymi to grant judgment a role it can't reliably fulfill on its own. Drawing on works of theory and literature, I suggest that elements outside our control, such as time, other persons, identification and circumstances can play significant parts in bringing forgiveness about. I thus try to pave the way for a more complete view of forgiveness. (shrink)

The present essay looks to add to the body of literature that seeks to clarify the nature of vengeance and evaluate it morally. However, unlike previous philosophical investigations of vengeance, my essay examines it not from the standpoint of impersonal justice but from the perspective of the one who seeks it, to determine whether it is good for the would-be avenger. The values I measure it by are fulfillment and self-knowledge. The paper has two major parts. In the first, I (...) argue that vengefulness is motivated by two ends: allaying a sense of vulnerability and preserving a positive self-conception. The emotional benefits of a vengeful disposition, I claim, come at the expense of self-knowledge. They are therefore unstable and prone to give way when vengefulness is translated into action. In the second part, I try to substantiate this claim by examining two criticisms of vengeance: that its pursuit can diminish the avenger by consuming him and that it is self-defeating. Framing vengefulness within broader psychoanalytic accounts of the repetition compulsion and projection, I endorse versions of both criticisms that tie vengeance’s failure to provide fulfillment to some of the ways in which it occludes self-knowledge. (shrink)

The scholarly attention lavished on William James’ case study in the “Sick Soul” lecture in The Varieties of Religious Experience of a man disturbed by the vision of an epileptic patient has generally not approached this case as a religious experience. To deepen our understanding of religious experience, I show that this case study can be understood as religious using elements of the theory of religion expounded throughout James’ text. I argue that it can be understood as a stage in (...) the process of conversion James lays out. The omission of a subsequent stage highlights James’ reasons for rejecting healthy-mindedness as a philosophically adequate perspective and illustrates his claim that the strivings of the conscious mind can stunt the conversion process. Drawing on other philosophical, psychological, and literary texts, I argue that the content of the vision James describes points to solitude as a source of religious disquiet. (shrink)

This article turns to Jack London’s and Albert Camus’ novels about contagion to try to tease out some of the moral meanings of the pandemic we are currently living through. In many ways, these works are prescient, and can thus serve as commentary on the situation we find ourselves in. In others, their narratives differ from each other and from our experience; the differences signal what is at stake in some of our circumstances. Camus’ ideal of solidarity focuses my discussion. (...) I show how certain conditions associated with an outbreak provide occasions for solidarity, but also examine several obstacles to it. Many of those obstacles, I contend, have to do with the limitations on what we can know – about ourselves, one another, and the world. In the end, I argue that complete solidarity may require us to reconceive our relationship to our communal past and the natural world. (shrink)