•  4
    What Is Changing and What Has Already Changed: Parenthood and Certainty in Moral Discourse
    In Salla Aldrin Salskov, Ondrej Beran & Nora Hämäläinen (eds.), Ethical Inquiries After Wittgenstein, Springer. 2022.
    Among the beliefs Wittgenstein holds that cannot be taken to be true or false, but rather appear to him as certain, are "all human beings have parents" (On Certainty §240): "I believe that I have forebears and that every human being has them" (OC §240) and "I have a father and a mother" (OC §282). I ask what moral questions are entailed in thinking of the changes that our current Western conceptual landscape has undergone in relation to parenthood and family life in the light of the growing righ…Read more
  •  138
    One of the standard examples in contemporary moral psychology originates in the works of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He treats people's responses to the story of Julie and Mark, two siblings who decide to have casual, consensual, protected sex, as facts of human morality, providing evidence for his social intuitionist approach to moral judgements. We argue that Haidt's description of the facts of the story and the reactions of the respondents as ‘morally dumbfounded’ presupposes a view a…Read more
  •  2
    I argue that a careful consideration of the internal relation between the expression of an emotion, ‘I am angry’, and the description of the object of that emotion, ‘That was wrong’, illuminates the sense in which emotions are intentional, and perhaps also rational, as brought out in cognitive accounts of emotion. It also throws light on the moral and interpersonal aspects of our emotional life, which I instantiate through a discussion of the different perspectives on what has happened between t…Read more
  •  2
    Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.
  •  3
    Hur för man samtal?
    with Birgit Schaffar and Marina Lundkvist
    Studier i Pædagogisk Filosofi 9 (1). 2020.
    Interactions and conversations with children, caretakers and other pedagogues take central stage in early childhood education. In this article, we investigate how future teachers in early childhood education reflect on dialogues and their own participation in practical conversation training from Philosophy for Children. We discuss these in the light of the triad address-responsiveness-responsibility, which has been considered central to genuine dialogues in dialogical ethics. In our study, the s…Read more
  •  296
    The social intuitionist approach to moral judgments advanced by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt presupposes that it is possible to provide an explanation of the human moral sense without normative implications. By contrast, Iris Murdoch’s philosophical work on moral psychology suggests that every description of morality necessarily involves evaluative features that reveal the thinker’s own moral attitudes and implicit philosophical pictures. In the light of this, we contend that Haidt’s treat…Read more
  •  233
    Engaging with the philosophical writings of Iris Murdoch, we submit that there are difficulties associated with providing a good description of morality that are intimately connected with difficulties in understanding other human beings. We suggest three senses in which moral philosophical reflection needs to account for our understanding of others: (1) the failure to understand someone is not merely an intellectual failure, but also engages us morally; (2) the moral question of understanding is…Read more
  •  6
    Wittgenstein suggested that considering the context in which a word or sentence is used may help show the limitations of some ways of setting up a philosophical problem. In this article, I explore the role this suggestion may have in moral (philosophical) reflection, through a consideration of a literary example taken from Jeanette Winterson’s novel, Written on the Body (2001). Using the example to elucidate ways of speaking in love that seem to embody an important truth and ways of acting and t…Read more
  •  7
    ‘Speak to us of love’: Some Difficulties in the Philosophical and Scientific Study of Love
    In Joel Backström, Hannes Nykänen, Niklas Toivakainen & Thomas Wallgren (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, Springer Verlag. pp. 203-227. 2019.
    How may science, philosophy and poetry aid us in our search for an understanding of the concept of love? By drawing on different attempts to articulate Wittgenstein’s notion that philosophizing about a concept is a matter of bringing it back to its natural home, the lives we live in language, this chapter presses what this may mean when the language we want to find the home for is the language of love. Is it a pre-requisite of such an investigation that it also speaks to us of love? What other e…Read more
  •  9
    The difficulty of thinking Listening to the voices of students in early childhood education
    with Birgit Schaffar and Marina Lundkvist
    Journal of Philosophy in Schools 7 (1): 68. 2020.
    This paper addresses the question of how to conceptualise the kind of difficulties students in early childhood education encountered in articulating their thoughts and in listening to others in the initial stages of a CoI. With examples from their course diaries, we illustrate what sense it makes to consider the thinking the CoI promotes as centrally embodied, extended, embedded and enacted. We consider their difficulties, not as external obstacles to expressing their thought, but as difficultie…Read more
  •  17
    New Critical Thinking: What Wittgenstein Offered, by Sean Wilson
    Nordic Wittgenstein Review 8 (1-2): 248-252. 2019.
  •  8195
    Are there reasons for loving? How can I promise to love someone? Is there such a thing as unconditional love? Am I responsible for loving or for failing to love someone? Can there be love without idealization? This work sets out to show that many of the questions we raise when philosophizing about love are expressive of confusions about what we talk about when we talk about love. Addressing questions pertaining to philosophical discussions about emotions, personal identity and the meaning of lan…Read more
  •  80
    The Promise That Love Will Last
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 54 (6). 2011.
    Abstract What sense are we to make of the promise of love against the contingency of human life? I discuss two replies to this question: (1) the suggestion that marriage, based on the probable success of this kind of relationship, is a more or less worthwhile endeavour (cf. Moller and Landau), and (2) Martha Nussbaum's Aristotelian proposal that we only live life fully if we embrace aspects of life, such as loving relationships, that are vulnerable to fortune. I show that both responses, in diff…Read more
  •  17
    A Personal Love of the Good
    Philosophia 47 (4): 977-994. 2019.
    In order to articulate an account of erotic love that does not attempt to transcend its personal features, Robert Solomon and Martha Nussbaum lean on the speeches by Aristophanes and Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium. This leads them to downplay the sense in which love is not only for another person, but also for the good. Drawing on a distinction between relative and absolute senses of speaking about the good, I mediate between two features of love that at first may seem irreconcilable. The first…Read more
  •  34
    A Passion for Life: Love and Meaning
    Nordic Wittgenstein Review 6 (1): 31-51. 2017.
    Does one’s love for a particular person, when it is pure, also constitute a love of life? The significance of speaking about leading a passionate life, I submit, is found in the spontaneous, embodied character of opening up to and finding meaning in one’s life rather than in heightened fleeting feelings or experiences of meaning that help one forget life’s meaninglessness. I contrast this view with Simone Weil’s suspicion that our passionate attachment to another person is an obstacle to attendi…Read more
  •  46
    The most beautiful girl in the world
    Think 3 (9): 33-38. 2005.
    What does a lover mean when he says, ‘You're the most beautiful girl in the world’?
  •  19
    Emotions and understanding: Wittgensteinian perspectives (edited book)
    with Ylva Gustafsson and Michael McEachrane
    Palgrave-Macmillan. 2009.
    This unique collection of articles on emotion by Wittgensteinian philosophers provides a fresh perspective on the questions framing the current philosophical and scientific debates about emotions and offers significant insights into the role of emotions for understanding interpersonal relations and the relation between emotion and ethics
  • Our struggles with reality
    In Ylva Gustafsson, Camilla Kronqvist & Michael McEachrane (eds.), Emotions and Understanding: Wittgensteinian Perspectives, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
  •  5
    How Ordinary Is the Language of Love?
    In Annalisa Coliva, Volker Munz & Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (eds.), Mind, Language and Action: Proceedings of the 36th International Wittgenstein Symposium, De Gruyter. pp. 255-270. 2015.
  •  54
    Lost and Found: Selfhood and Subjectivity in Love
    Philosophical Investigations 35 (3-4): 205-223. 2012.
    Sartre's conception of bad faith suggests that every desire to be someone in love is self-deceptive in the attempt to define my factual being. Departing from İlham Dilman's discussion of personal identity, I argue that this view on selfhood is inattentive to the kind of personal and moral reflection inherent in asking who I am. There is a temptation in love to deceive myself and you by renouncing responsibility. Yet the concept also embodies demands that allow me to continuously shape myself int…Read more