Hichem Naar

The Rationality of Love addresses the question whether love belongs, paradoxically enough, to the realm of reason, whether love belongs to the class of responses, such as belief and action, that admit of norms of justification and rationality. Are there normative reasons to love someone? Can love be an appropriate or fitting response to an individual? Or is love, like perceptual experiences, sensations, and urges, the sort of thing we just have and for which we cannot be normatively criticizable? Ordinary thinking about love seems to pull us in different directions. On the one hand, love—involving as it does lots of non-rational elements—seems to be a good example of a response we shouldn’t assess in terms of rationality. On the other hand, we find it appropriate or fitting to love certain things and not others, and we are not reluctant to ask ourselves why we love certain people. This book defends the view that love is subject to normative standards by carefully assessing the various answers to the normative question about love and by providing its own solution. An extensive critical discussion of the so-called ‘no-reasons’ view of love is given, which helps uncover important issues to be tackled by any advocate of the rationality of love. In addition, the discussion is informed by the philosophy of normativity, an area often neglected in the debate. All in all, this book provides a systematic and up-to-date discussion of a central issue in the philosophy of love.

Dans cet essai, je me concentre sur le débat entre nativistes et empiristes au sujet des origines de la morale : la morale serait-elle innée, là depuis la naissance, ou serait-elle un produit de la culture, acquise par le biais d’un conditionnement social ? Nous verrons que cette question soulève d’importants problèmes conceptuels, notamment celui de savoir ce que l’on entend ici par ‘morale’. Des considérations méthodologiques seront également soulevées : quels types de données peuvent montrer que le nativisme (ou empirisme) moral est vrai ? Quelle forme une théorie nativiste doit-elle prendre afin de rendre compte de la complexité du phénomène moral ? En conclusion, je suggère qu’étant donné le caractère double de la morale (à la fois produit de l’évolution et de la culture), il serait peut-être envisageable de laisser tomber la bonne vielle dichotomie entre inné et acquis.

What is an emotion? No one will seriously doubt that it is a psychological entity of some sort. Rich and lively philosophical debates have failed to generate any stable picture regarding the nature of emotions that extends much beyond this platitude, however. At most, a bare majority of philosophers would agree that emotions exemplify the following features. First, emotions are characterized by a certain phenomenology: they are felt. Second, they are intentional phenomena and, as such, are in one way or another directed to various sorts of entities in the world (one is amused by the joke, sad at the death of a dear friend or proud that one is a self-made man). Third, they are closely connected with evaluations of these entities Ð amusement connects with a positive evaluation of the joke, sadness with a negative evaluation of the death. Fourth, emotions are relatively short-lived: unlike other phenomena that are closely related to them, such as character traits and sentiments that may endure for substantial stretches of one's life, emotions endure at most for some hours. Beyond that, disagreement reigns and the debates, which have become increasingly important in the past two decades or so, have almost exclusively revolved around the identification of the necessary and sufficient conditions of the emotions.