Camilla Kronqvist

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 language and morality, the author shows how these confusions can be dissolved by carefully attending to our different conversations about love. Her investigations show that many of the challenges we face when reflecting on love do not have the kind of scientific or strictly philosophical character that would allow us to settle them once and for all. They are moral in character and gain their significance from the questions they raise about the place love has in our own lives. The kind of reflection on the meaning of love suggested in this work does not depend on any new discoveries about the phenomena of love. It is available to anyone who is prepared to reflect on our ways of speaking and to question our preconceptions of love and of philosophy. Through such reflection our understanding of love may continually deepen.

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 treatment of the story about Julie and Mark, two siblings who decide to have casual, protected, and in his view harmless sex, provides a too simplistic picture of what is involved in understanding human morality. Despite his aim to explain the roots of moral judgments, he fails to provide a deeper understanding of morality in two different respects. First, he does so by suggesting that his story contains all the relevant information needed to take a moral stand on it, and by rejecting as irrelevant the wider human context in which questions about sexual and family relations arise. Second, he simplifies the responses of the people who are subject to his experiment by disregarding their various reasons for disapproving and by equating understanding human morality with explaining an impersonal psychological process.

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 not limited to the extent to which we understand a particular person, but also presents itself in how we picture difficulties in understanding people; and (3) “philosophical pictures of morality” fundamentally shape the conceptual framework we use to investigate morality, as well as the analysis of morality we find illuminative and satisfactory. Exploring the implications of these claims, we ask what it means to think of others as the same, or as different, from ourselves. We then consider the ethical significance of finding, or not finding, our feet in our encounters with others, dwelling on how the metaphor of movement reveals one way in which we are never at peace in the exploration of morality.

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 about moral reasoning that is more substantial than he acknowledges. Drawing on the philosophical work by Iris Murdoch and Cora Diamond, we explore how different descriptions of human morality, sexuality, and family relations engage us in evaluations about distinctive features of human life and language that go deeper than Haidt envisages. Thus, we show the need to attend to the concepts used to describe the facts of human moral psychology and the pictures of morality these concepts reveal about the researcher's own understanding of moral experience. This points to the particular responsibility any researcher into human moral psychology has for ensuring that the descriptions they offer are attuned to the complexities of the lives of those they form theories about and that these do not appear conceptually confounding.

Teachers in vocational education face two problems. (1) Learning involves the ability to transcend and modify learned knowledge to new circumstances. How should vocational education prepare students for future, unknown tasks? (2) Students should strive to produce work of good quality. How does vocational education help them develop their faculty of judgment to differentiate between better and worse quality? These two ques- tions are tightly interwoven. The paper compares the didactics of philosophy and sloyd. Both developed independently, but their solutions to how one advances the capacity for reflective judgment are similar. Central to this capacity is not merely devising efficient means to work towards pre-existing aims, but to reflect in practice on what one’s aim are and should be. This implies reflection on what future problems, as well as solutions to them, demand of us cognitively, socially and morally.

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 attending to him or her from the distance proper to love and friendship. From that perspective it appears as if the meaning with which personal love endows life is mostly illusory, including the loss of meaning characteristic of grief. I question whether Weil’s view should be seen as an unconditional, though for most unattainable, ideal of love, or if it is rather expressive of a rejection of one of the central features of love: the vulnerability that ensues from the recognition that when we love there are times where we stand in need of the other’s love to be able to embrace life as meaningful.

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 is the sense in which love is deeply personal in character. The second is the sense in which we in love come to articulate ethical demands. With the help of the Diotimian ascent of love that Socrates presents in his speech, I submit that these two can come together in the realization that our personally conditioned responses in love are transformed to accommodate demands that carry an unconditional meaning.

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 different ways, depend on the presupposition that the sense of our promises to love is dependent on our ability to make predictions. The philosophers I discuss assume an epistemological standpoint from which we may attempt to judge whether it is in our general interest to love. I argue that embracing such a perspective by itself leads our attention away from the kind of personal and moral engagement in other people of which our promises to love are expressive. From the perspective of love, the attempt to calculate the risks and gains of loving itself appears as a moral failure to be present to the reality of other people

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 into a loving subject by scrutinising my responses and by asking whether they are expressive of love or not

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 difficulties that are internal to thinking itself, in the sense that thinking implicates the skillful participation in a shared practice that involves us as embodied human beings, enculturated in a context that carries much of the meaning of our situation, engaged in activities that are centrally social, and dependent on interaction with others, who on a fundamental level shape what it is possible for us to think.

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 students´ express discomfort at the need to discuss matters in a manner that is new to them, but also think that this form of conversation helps them to listen more actively to others. This insight about the difficulty of listening, and the possibility of developing into better listeners, is of significance in the formation of their professional identity and practice.

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 existential dimensions and moral difficulties are there to be seen in the significance that different people are prepared to assign to different uses of ‘love’?

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 rights and recognition of sexual and gendered minorities. What is changing when we start to think of sentences such as "Everyone has a father and a mother" as not expressing an indubitable truth, a fundamental fact of our existence, but as constituting an oppressive social norm? What has already changed in our ways of conceiving of ourselves when we stop regarding such ways of expressing ourselves as a necessary aspect of our natural history but start thinking of them as one possibility among others in finding good and meaningful forms of life? What aspects remain unquestionable in Wittgenstein's beliefs throughout these changes, and what aspects of our family ties would we do best not to let slide?

Danièle Moyal-Sharrock and Constantine Sandis have suggested that our sense of being ‘women’ (and ‘men’) can be elucidated by thinking of it as an animal certainty. The suggestion is helpful in resisting the notion that ‘being woman’ can be modelled either on the idea of indubitable first-person knowledge of one’s inner self or of a third person’s unquestionable knowledge of one’s body. One’s being woman is manifested in one’s ways of acting and reacting; it constitutes a mode of being, which cannot be given further justification. Nevertheless, I argue that the emphasis on certainty may render the possible doubts an individual may entertain about being a woman at different stages and in different contexts of their life opaque. It may also obscure the philosophical analysis of what thinking of certainty with Wittgenstein may offer to the understanding of ‘woman’, since for him the exploration of meaningful and impossible forms of doubt always ran parallel to his thinking on certainty. Considering everyday examples of certainty and doubts in being a woman, I therefore discuss the dialectic between certainty and doubt in the constitution of being ‘a woman’, giving special attention to the significance of second person assertions and comments for the first person’s experience of being or not being a woman or not being ‘woman enough’.

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 thinking that appear to be a denial of that truth, I discuss and attempt to show how different ways of attending to context may reveal the moral dimensions of this language use. I also consider one point at which attention to context seems to come to a halt and when acknowledging what is ethically significant seems to demand something different from us.

This book highlights the recent re-emergence of Edward Westermarck's work in modern approaches to morality and altruism, examining his importance as one of the founding fathers of anthropology and as a moral relativist, who identified our moral feelings with biologically-evolved retributive emotions. Questioning the extent to which current debates on the relationship between biology and morality are similar to those in which Westermarck himself was involved, the authors ask what can be learnt from his arguments and from the criticism that he encountered. Drawing on Westermarck's manuscripts and papers as well as his published work, the authors show the importance of situating debates, whether modern or classical, in their correct methodological and philosophical context. This volume is a rigorous assessment of the ways in which morality is connected with human biological nature. It plays close attention to the development of debates in this field and will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology and philosophy.

The notion of Bildung has been a catalyst for educational theories about the human relation to the material and social world. Place, both as a concrete spatial location and as metaphorical spatialization have been central to the understanding of Bildung. Nevertheless, the tradition of Bildung has treated the material world mainly as a restricting and adversarial space for human becoming. By asking why the role of belonging to a concrete place is absent from several contemporary debates on Bildung, we discuss themes in Hegel’s and Humboldt’s conceptions of human formation, and argue that the preoccupation with different ideas of becoming human, through moving beyond material restrictions, centres on a notion of Bildung as a movement in time, a temporal dialectic. In contrast to conceptualizations of the world as binding and restricting, we then ask what place there is for ‘place’ in a theory of Bildung, and argue that the relation between the subject and the world can be perceived as a much more supportive dialogical relationship than these discussions suggest. With reference to insights from Rudolf Laban’s and Irmgard Bartenieff’s Movement Studies (LBMS), we illustrate an alternative perspective on the role of the material world in human physical, social, and cognitive development. These dimensions of development suggest that becoming and belonging in the world necessarily involve a simultaneously functional and expressive element, where the subject’s expressive movement of freedom and intention is balanced by their trustful resting in a concrete place.

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 the parties in a quarrel and the kinds of failures of understanding that may take place in such cases.

Questions of ethics and the study of culture are tightly interwoven. Are we to see ethics as one thread in the fabric created by human culture or does ethics rather transcend culture? The discussions in this volume take place within this spectrum. Eleven Wittgenstein scholars explore how ethics is embedded in everyday activities and speech. The topics dealt with range from the ways we speak about human practices and nature, religious belief, gender, and moral understanding to questions about Wittgensteinâ (TM)s views on ethics and what it means to understand and attend to a particular individual. Central points of departure are, firstly, that ethics cannot be reduced to any specific cultural form and, secondly, that how we conceive of language is crucially connected with how we perceive the relation between culture and ethics. The points of view put forth frequently pose radical questions to the mainstream of philosophy. The different uses to which Wittgensteinâ (TM)s thought is put also raise important questions about how one should understand the role of language, ethics and culture in his philosophy.

We relate recent accounts of Wittgenstein-inspired deep disagreement to polarised understandings of sex and gender, considering their strengths and limitations in clarifying clashes that may sometimes appear in our most intimate sexual relationships. Our starting point is a heated and deeply disruptive argument between a man and a woman in a heterosexual relationship, presented in the lyrics and music video for Kendrick Lamar and Taylour Paige’s song ‘We Cry Together’. We use this example to bring out some of the fixed assumptions about the nature of deep disagreements, seen in Robert J. Fogelin’s account of forms of life, David M. Godden and William H. Brenner’s account of concept determination, Duncan Pritchard’s account of hinge commitments, and Victoria Lavorerio’s account of pictures. Though we find much of the discussion present in these accounts promising, we argue that none are able to grasp the messy, unpredictable, and constantly shifting nature of the (quite ordinary) disagreement in our example. This offers support to scholars who caution against making a priori claims about which topics (e.g. abortion) necessarily evoke deep disagreements, and suggests that we resist attempts to establish, a priori, what deep disagreements _must_ look like, and how they _must_ be resolved. This enables us to bring out the ways in which pig-headedness and self-righteousness, in our example, do not provide reasons to reject this particular disagreement as “genuinely” deep, but provide a picture of an emotional dynamic on which the depth of this particular deep moral disagreement seems to hinge.