True Love Without Uniqueness: Good Reasons for Romantic Love Love involves emotions, and emotions are things that happen to us. So how can love be true? Love can be true only if people can have reasons for loving someone. I explore the tension between these two thoughts and propose a way of resolving it. I argue that reasons for romantic love are not limited to the other person’s properties, not even when relational properties such as a common sense of humour (...) are included. A full-blown romantic relation provides relation-dependent reasons that derive from the values that are realized within the relationship. These include trust, vulnerability and intimacy. True love is justified in part by such relation-dependent reasons. How this is consistent with the emotional dimension of love becomes clear once it is appreciated that people can have reasons for the emotions they experience. As this is not always recognized, the mystery of love is sometimes overrated. I end by discussing whether true love must be unique in the sense of being limited to one particular person. I argue that true love need not be combined with the norms of monogamy, but is consistent with those of polyamory. (shrink)

Overzicht van de gewijzigde visie in de 20e-eeuwse filosofie op emoties.

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Wat gebeurt er allemaal in relaties? We raken gefrustreerd wanneer een vriend niet terugbelt. We missen een geliefde die ver weg is. We komen elkaar tegen op straat. We vrijen. We voelen ons eenzaam. Soms terwijl we vrijen. We voelen ons diep met iemand verbonden. We verwachten veel. We doen ons best om niet te veel te verwachten. Soms lukt dat, en dan kunnen we elkaar echt ontmoeten. Dit boek gaat over de spanningen die in elke relatie aanwezig zijn. In (...) romantische relaties, maar ook in andere. Je verhoudt je tot de anderen en tot jezelf. Maar je verhoudt je ook tot de verhouding zelf. Dat is een nieuw idee in de cognitiewetenschappen. Daar gaat het veel vaker over kennen, dan over liefhebben. Maar wat als kennen en liefhebben eigenlijk heel dicht bij elkaar zouden liggen? In dit boek breekt cognitiefilosoof Hanne De Jaegher een lans om kennen en liefhebben samen te bestuderen. Want allebei zijn het geëngageerde relaties vol spanningen. Zo schrijft de auteur een wonderlijk nieuw hoofdstuk in de filosofie van de liefde. (shrink)

In this paper the author argues that love de re — love for a particular person — is an emotion that is singular in that the beloved person is an external constituent of that emotion. After comparing love de re with other de re attitudes, and distinguishing it from love de dicto, he rejects reductions of love de re to love de dicto. It will be demonstrated the lover must have a dynamic conception of the person he loves which is (...) derived from historical connections with him or her. A merely causal link is not enough. The way the beloved person appears to the lover cannot be reduced to an antecedently available picture or assembly of properties the lover appreciates, as cognitivists tend to claim. The theoretical background of the paper draws on insights of G. Evans and J. McDowell. (shrink)

Saner onderzoekt de mythe van Orfeus. Hij beschrijft de oudere 'Ishtar mythe', waarin de macht van muziek reeds aan bod komt, en wijst op de relatie tussen deze mythe en de Orfeusmythe. Het essay handelt over de onmacht van Orfeus.

De invloed van het denken van Paul Moyaert is zeer groot. Daarom wil 'Orde scheppen' hulde brengen aan deze filosoof en zijn intellectuele bezetenheid. De thematische diversiteit van het boek weerspiegelt de biodiversiteit van Moyaerts eigen werk, die met enig geweld tot drie grote thema's of domeinen kan worden herleid: wijsgerige antropologie, psychopathologie en religie. Onderwerpen zijn: het symbolische, de liefde, uchronie, de echtheid van beelden, en poëzie; de afstemming bij jongvolwassenen met een meervoudige handicap, homoseksualiteit bij vrouwelijke adolescenten, (...) en Kant en Foucault; en ten slotte de hardnekkigheid van religie, christelijke ascese, de vele gezichten van Kierkegaard, Franciscus van Assisi, en de oorlogsdagboeken van Hans Keilson. (shrink)

Filosofisch getinte zoektocht naar de eigenschappen van het begrip liefde en van de act van liefhebben, met nadruk op liefde in het joodse denken en dat van Kierkegaard.

Inleiding tot het gedachtegoed van de Amerikaanse filosoof.

Love and personal identity. Everyday loves, ambiguous selves What we love matters for who we are. The idea may be self-evident, but how should it be understood exactly? One way is to conceptualize the formative influence of love on our identities in terms of ‘identification’: loving shapes who we are as we (volitionally) identify with the interests of the beloved and accept them as our own. Harry Frankfurt has fleshed out an influential identification-view along these lines. However, the identification-account is (...) insufficiently able to accommodate the ambiguous nature of everyday loving and the way in which these ambiguities affect our identity. A second way in which the formative influence of love on our identity can be conceptualized is as ‘relation’: we are indeed shaped by what we love but the (affective-volitional) character of the relation in which we stand to our loved ones determines our identity. The latter view is capable to account for ambiguous loves and corresponding ambiguities in the self. Also, it gives prominence to the practical problem of loving, that is, to the question of how to relate to the people we love. It offers a more realistic perspective on that problem, as it takes the enduring differences between us and our beloveds into account, as well as the intersubjective character of loving. In sum: how we love what we love shapes who we are. (shrink)

The concept of "the mediate" — a central notion in the philosophy of Aristotle and Hegel — is the starting point in this article on touching. It reveals that touching is less immediate than our philosophical tradition seems to admit. That is at least the position Derrida defends in a recent book in which he focusses on the priority of touching . Together with the study of the paradox that Derrida discovers in Husserl's text on the hierarchy of the senses, (...) it is Derrida's underlining of the priority of touching itself that is here being questioned. One wonders if the notion haptophilia, instead of haptocentrism, would not have been more accurate. Moreover, if Derrida's argument in general sensitizes for the less immediate aspects of the philosophical text and context, it is the more mediate dimension of touching that is actually being stressed. And since mediate aspects can never be addressed directly and explicitly, the critique of haptocentrism appears to be a matter of drawing attention to the mediate in an indirect way. In other words, the love for the mediate is itself expressed in an indirect and mediate way. (shrink)

I argue that courtly love can throw a new light upon two major problems in Freud's theory of sublimation. For Freud sublimation is the procès in which the sexual aim of the drives is diverted towards a non-sexual aim that is still related with the original one. The first problem regards the relation between the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quern. Freud describes this relation with different terms. The notion of ‘desexualisation’ represents precisely what he has in mind. (...) This term propounds that Freud understands sublimation as a one-sided movement that consists in leaving behind the original sexual aim. Courtly love proves that desexualisation as Freud understands it, is not a necessary condition for sublimation. A weakening of Freud's strong claim concerning desexualisation implies however that the distinction between sublimation and perversion is not always clear-cut. The second problem appertains to the processes that bring about the transformation of the sexual aim. Courtly love infers that idealisation of the love-object can play an important role in bringing about sublimation. The kind of sublimation that corresponds to courtly love is what has been called in German Idealism ‘Verführung’ (rapture). Psychoanalytic theory is not willing to conceive idealisation in this sense. According to the classical psychoanalytic theory, idealisation produces repression of sexual drives. I argue that this idea is counter-intuitive and that Freud's understanding of idealisation is more subtle. I give a short overview of Freud's approach of idealisation and I denote some elements in his approach that help us to describe the direct link between idealisation and sublimation. Idealisation of the beloved can go together with an inhibition of sexual drives. But it is wrong to identify aim-inhibition with repression. I suggest to characterize the interaction between idealisation and sublimation as an exaltation of drives. (shrink)

Het thema van de verlossing en het onverbrekelijke verband tussen verlossing, liefde en dood loopt als een rode draad door Wagners late opera's. Scruton onderzoekt hoe dit thema vorm krijgt in de christelijke traditie, de Griekse tragedies en in de opera's van Wagner en dan met name in Tristan en Isolde. Hij analyseert nauwkeurig de verschillende 'settings' waarin verlossing gedaante krijgt. Zo beschouwt hij verschillende offerrituelen, de rol van de jacht daarbij, de gemeenschap tegenover het individu, de rol van (...) geweld. Ook gaat hij in op hoe de slachtoffers zelf tegen hun opoffering aankijken. Alleen zo valt te begrijpen hoe zij verlossing kunnen vinden. En dat de liefde deze verlossing biedt. (shrink)

Nussbaum vertelt in een persoonlijk essay over haar bekering tot de joodse traditie en haar omgang met deze traditie. Ze schetst een beeld van het type jodendom dat haar inspireert aan de hand van begrippen als feminisme en kosmopolitisme.

Blindness in therapy? Love? Or science? In this paper we dispute what seems an obvious truism these days: that increasing the influence of scientific research on psychotherapy is a good thing. We begin with an exploration of two distinct capacities that contribute in significant ways to human flourishing: knowledge and love. We then argue that modern society rather onesidedly capitalizes on the growth of scientific knowledge. This has an important drawback because the dominant model of growth presupposed in scientific research (...) is built on the idea of reducing the potentially disturbing influence of the subjective engagement of the scientist with the object of knowledge. This is ordinarily quite a fruitful idea that has, however, paradoxically bad effects in evidence-based therapy. This is the case, we argue, because in a scientifically informed therapy the therapist should, in some sense, try to be blind to the effects of his expertise on his clients’ expectations of his expertise. A scientific, disengaged perspective therefore frustrates the therapist’s need to invest in the formation of a charitable relationship with his clients. Next we argue that the popular prejudice against love – that it is blind – is not as plausible as it is considered to be. To be sure, love invites cognition to accept a subservient role, but, we argue, this has some advantages too. It encourages the lover to discern particularly positive and promising features of the object of his love, and this, we argue, is crucial to a successful therapy in two ways. On the one hand, the therapist needs to engage with these positive and promising features to succeed in building the needed charitable relationship with his clients. And on the other hand clients often go into therapy because they lack access to their own positive and promising features and are therefore unable to entertain a charitable relationship with themselves. We conclude that with respect to psychotherapy there might be good reason for contemporary society to capitalize on the growth of love, rather than the growth of knowledge. (shrink)

Reasons for love: why we can’t do otherwise than love what is lovable Harry Frankfurt famously argues that loving someone is not done for reasons. While focusing on the (plausible) claims that parents need no reasons for loving their children and that it is absurd to ascribe a duty (or reason) to love X to someone who does not happen to love X, he overlooks an aspect of love that does connect it to reasons in a particular way: in daily (...) conversation human beings spend enormous amounts of time and reflection to explaining and trying to understand love. I interpret the omnipresence of ‘love-talk’ as an indication of the nature of love in human beings: we love someone or something for reasons. Drawing on insights from the guise of the good-debate on the nature of desire, I argue that regardless of the infinite variety of things and persons that can be loved, the objects are all loved under the same form: the form of being lovable. The notion of a ‘lovability characterization’ entails a notion of ‘reasons’ that does not require reasons to be universalisable and that allows the loving-for-reasons view to avoid the fungibility-objection. In reply to the objection that the loving-for-reasons view makes love overly rationalistic, I point out that reason should not be understood as an external authority that commands us to do certain things, but as an internal power, integral to who we are, that shapes our conscious life, our mental attitudes and their objects. (shrink)

Wijsgerig-antropologische beschouwing, mede geïnspireerd door de hedendaagse Franse filosofie en de psychoanalyse, over de liefde als grond en bestemming van mens en wereld.

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