Philip Strammer

This book reimagines the foundations of moral philosophy by centering on the ethical significance of second-personal experience—our direct, lived responsiveness to others. Philip Strammer challenges the dominance of both naturalist and transcendental traditions, arguing that neither adequately accounts for the moral depth of the I–You relation. Drawing on Martin Buber’s dialogical philosophy and enriched by post-Wittgensteinian moral thought, the book explores conscience, remorse, and saintliness as second-personal phenomena. At its heart is the concept of lovingness—a wholehearted, unmediated openness to otherness—as the key to understanding moral meaning and the manifestation of goodness. Through rigorous philosophical analysis and vivid phenomenological examples, Strammer offers a compelling alternative to moral theories moving within the subject-object dichotomy. This work will appeal to scholars and advanced students in ethics, phenomenology, moral psychology, and religious thought, offering a fresh and challenging perspective on what it means to live a morally responsive life with and among others.

The article examines the relation between love and moral understanding in the context of post-Wittgensteinian ethics via two examples, the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan and Raimond Gaita’s autobiographical account of an encounter with a loving nun. The article suggests that the examples are best understood as teachings about love as expressive of moral understanding and speak of love thus understood in terms of a wholehearted responsiveness to others – as wholeheartedness. While both examples teach a similar lesson, they emphasise different aspects: whereas the discussion of the Biblical parable focuses on the moral understanding involved in being loving towards another, Gaita’s anecdote foregrounds the question of what it is like to witness and understand such love. Our discussion shows that philosophy often overlooks the moral significance of love by rationalising morality. Whereas rational conceptions of morality overemphasise its practical and socio-cultural dimensions, the moral understanding that finds expression in love illustrates the radically personal nature of moral concerns. Thus, it is suggested that love is not merely an aspect of morality but lies at its very heart.

The article examines the relation between love and moral understanding in the context of post-Wittgensteinian ethics via two examples, the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan and Raimond Gaita’s autobiographical account of an encounter with a loving nun. The article suggests that the examples are best understood as teachings about love as expressive of moral understanding and speak of love thus understood in terms of a wholehearted responsiveness to others – as wholeheartedness. While both examples teach a similar lesson, they emphasise different aspects: whereas the discussion of the Biblical parable focuses on the moral understanding involved in being loving towards another, Gaita’s anecdote foregrounds the question of what it is like to witness and understand such love. Our discussion shows that philosophy often overlooks the moral significance of love by rationalising morality. Whereas rational conceptions of morality overemphasise its practical and socio-cultural dimensions, the moral understanding that finds expression in love illustrates the radically personal nature of moral concerns. Thus, it is suggested that love is not merely an aspect of morality but lies at its very heart.

Much of interest could and has been said about the psychology of suicidal love; in this paper, however, I will reflect on the philosophical – indeed, the ethical – question of whether there can be suicide out of love at all, that is, whether it makes sense to say that love can be the reason for someone to take her own life or whether speaking in such a way may not involve a confusion. I shall explore this question and possible answers using Franz Kafka’s short story The Judgment and Judith Butler’s reading of it. In the first section, I discuss Butler’s understanding of the final confession of love of Georg Bendemann, the story’s protagonist, for his parents. In section two, I then proceed to problematize the implications of this reading and the notion of love underlying it. Section three concludes the paper by offering an alternative reading of Georg’s last words, serving as the starting point for a different understanding of love that avoids the problems arising from Butler’s reading.

This paper examines how we are to understand the goodness of neighbourly love, using the example of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Engaging with the philosophical discussion concerning the parable's moral significance that ensued in the wake of Peter Winch's 1987 paper ‘Who is my Neighbour?’, the paper argues that framing the goodness of the Samaritan in terms of a perceived necessity—as Winch and others do—runs the risk of simplifying and thus distorting it. The proposed alternative claims that goodness is better understood when framed in terms of what Kierkegaard describes as purity of heart. Developing this claim, it is shown that while the one who is pure of heart does good deeds without perceiving them as necessary, the notion of necessity may nonetheless be of moral significance for the one who witnesses such purity.

In this essay, I propose a phenomenological alternative to the established candidates of what grounds moral status, namely the experience of being claimed in immediate response to an Other. Drawing from late-Wittgensteinian moral philosophy, I develop this alternative in critical juxtaposition to theories that aim to derive moral status from values grounded in independently accountable empirical properties. Against such theories, I expound how meaningful talk of moral status must instead be understood to be rooted in the individuals’ morally charged immediate responsiveness to Others, a responsiveness that preconditions the very possibility of separating value and fact. If my analysis is sound, then the empirical property or set of properties that is commonly taken to qualify as a candidate for a ground of moral status in fact presupposes a phenomenological dimension of ‘ethical encounter’. The recognition of this deeper phenomenological level would, while not disposing with the notion of moral status, transform its meaning and, thus, how much of the philosophical debate on moral status is conducted.