Is it Better to Love Better Things?

It seems better to love virtue than vice, pleasure than pain, good than evil. Perhaps it's also better to love virtuous people than vicious people. But at the same time, it's repugnant to suggest that a mother should love her smarter, more athletic, better looking son than his dim, clumsy, ordinary brother. My task is to help sort out the conflicting intuitions about what we should love. In particular, I want to address a problem for the no-reasons view, the theory that love cannot be rationally justified. Since it seems better to love good people rather than evil villains, it appears that there are indeed reasons for (or, at least, against) love. Is it coherent to talk this way and deny that love can be justified? I think so and will explain how

Early Relationships, Pathologies of Attachment, and the Capacity to Love

Psychologists often characterize the infant’s attachment to her primary caregiver as love. Philosophical accounts of love, however, tend to speak against this possibility. Love is typically thought to require sophisticated cognitive capacities that infants do not possess. Nevertheless, there are important similarities between the infant-primary caregiver bond and mature love, and the former is commonly thought to play an important role in one’s capacity for the latter. In this work, I examine the relationship between the infant-primary caregiver bond and love. I argue that while these very early attachments do not represent genuine love, a fuller understanding of them can inform extant philosophical views of love

(The Varieties of) Love in Contemporary Anglophone Philosophy

This chapter assesses theories of the nature of personal love in Anglophone philosophy from the last two decades, sketching a case for pluralism. After rejecting arationalist views as failing to accommodate cases in which love is irrational, and contemporary quality views as giving love the wrong kind of reason, it argues that other theories only account for different subsets of what a complete theory of love should explain. It therefore concludes that while love always consists in valuing someone as a particular individual, there are multiple ways of doing this, corresponding to multiple kinds of love

"Mama, Do You Love Me?": A Defense of Unloving Parents

In this chapter I critique the contemporary Western ideal of unconditional maternal love. In the first section, I draw some preliminary distinctions and clarify the scope and limitations of my inquiry. In the second section, I argue that unloving mothers exist, and are not psychologically abnormal. In the third section, I go further and suggest that lack of maternal love can be fitting and even morally permissible. In the fourth section, I sketch some implications that lack of maternal love and unrequited filial love have for the debate on reasons for love. I conclude with avenues for future research

Love is in the Airwaves: Contesting Mass Incarceration with Prisoners\u27 Radio

Building on bell hooks’ conceptualization of love as a mode of political resistance, this article explores how prisoners’ radio employs love to combat injustice. Through an examination of two prisoners’ radio projects—The Prison Show in Texas and Restorative Radio in Kentucky—I argue that incarcerated people and their loved ones appropriate the radio to perform public and revolutionary acts of love, countering the oppressive forces of mass incarceration in the United States. By unapologetically positioning their love for prisoners front and center, ordinary Americans subvert systems of oppression which mark incarcerated folks as incapable and unworthy of love. Love is an intrinsic marker of humanity, so prisoners’ radio allows the incarcerated and their advocates on the outside to actively challenge the dehumanization that people face behind bars

Brotherly Love in Twelfth Night

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night draws an intriguing contrast between brotherly love and romantic love. Through the relationships of Sebastian-Antonio and Viola-Orsino, the playwright illustrates these two types of love in the lives these characters, showing that the two distinct types of love may conflict or harmonize, depending on the situation. An analysis of these two relationships provides insight into the tension between the two types of love in the play. The comparison of the motives, characteristics, expectations, and transience of the four characters’ amicable relationships illustrates the benefits and shortcomings of amity

Materiality and surface of the digital print

This paper discusses how the materiality and surface of the digital printmaking process may be seen as visually evidenced in the resulting printed imag