Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte - Volume 107, Issue 1, 2015

Abstract Plato on eros What is love for Plato, and why, after his analysis of eros in Symposium, did Plato take up the subject again, some ten years later, in Phaedrus? This article describes a transtition in Plato’s thinking about eros. In the Symposium, eros is a desire for immortality and a creative power, and it is is elicited by a beautiful person. In the homoerotic case, the lover’s soul is pregnant, and his eros produces the Read More

Abstract 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 particu Read More

Abstract 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 fleshe Read More

Abstract 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 rela Read More

Abstract 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 kno Read More