Joseph Gurrola

There is a highly influential and widely admired ideal within Black American moral and political philosophy that directs us to respond to America's racial injustice – and to certain other forms of injustice and wrongdoing – with love. But, despite its considerable influence, this ideal is puzzling on its face, and reflection on some prominent formulations of the ideal raises pressing questions: What kind of love does this ideal refer to? What are the grounds for the view that such love is a reasonable response to relevant forms of injustice and wrongdoing? How can we respond to injustice and wrongdoing in this way without facilitating further, or even more severe, mistreatment? I characterize and defend a version of this ideal that James Baldwin defends in his early fiction and early essays, and I address these questions as they apply to Baldwin's view.

The split‐brain phenomenon and dissociative identity disorder (DID) have been posed as candidate cases of multiple persons in one body. Philosophers have typically argued that DID subjects are better candidates for multiple personhood because their behavior is more disunified. While a DID subject is intuitively more like multiple persons than is a split‐brain subject, I argue here that the grounds of this intuition do not concern disunified behavior per se. Rather, they concern the differing self‐conceptions of split‐brain subjects on the one hand and at least many DID subjects on the other.