•  37
    How to Know a City: The Epistemic Value of City Tours
    Philosophy of the City Journal 1 (1): 31-41. 2023.
    When travelling to a new city, we acquire knowledge about its physical terrain, directions, historical facts and aesthetic features. Engaging in tourism practices, such as guided walking tours, provides experiences of a city that are necessarily mediated and partial. This has led scholars in tourism studies, and more recently in philosophy, to question the epistemological value of city tours, critiquingthem as passive, lacking in autonomous agency, and providing misrepresentative experiences of …Read more
  •  100
    According to the book blurb (p. iv), the themes explored in the volume include the nature of love, romanticism, and marriage; the passage and experience of time; the meaning of life; the art of conversation, the narrative self; gender; and death. All these topics are indeed touched upon to a greater or lesser extent. I find this book to be, in its essence, an investigation of love and romance. So, my main question here is: what can we learn about romantic life from this philosophical exploration…Read more
  •  387
    Three stages of love, narrative, and self-understanding
    In Alba Montes Sánchez & Alessandro Salice (eds.), Emotional Self-Knowledge, Routledge. pp. 147-167. 2023.
    The idea that love changes who we are is widely shared, and has been mostly explored from a stance in the middle stage of love (i.e., when people already love each other). But how do we get there? And what happens when love ends? In this chapter, I explore how self-understanding may be shaped in different ways at different stages of love through the notions of narrative and existential feeling. As I will argue, love gains narrative momentum at the beginning, which is maintained during the middle…Read more
  •  254
    Non-harmonious love
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 30 (3): 276-297. 2022.
    A common approach in the philosophy of love defines love as caring about one another and promoting one another's interests, aims and values. The view faces several problems and has been re-formulated to avoid them. However, here I argue that a larger re-formulation of the definition of love is needed in order to accommodate three instances of what I call 'non-harmonious' relationships. I identify three types of non-harmonious love (featuring problematic interests, opposing interests and neutral …Read more
  •  29
    Amor
    Enciclopedia Online de la Sociedad Española de Filosofía Analítica 1. 2022.
    Dado el vasto abanico de posibilidades (y teniendo en cuenta que esto es solo una muestra de la heterogeneidad del debate dentro de la filosofía analítica reciente), en esta entrada nos centraremos en un solo aspecto sobre el amor. Tradicionalmente, el amor se ha considerado un tema ético (por ejemplo, Aristóteles dedica los libros VIII y IX de Ética a Nicómaco a la amistad como ruta hacia la virtud). Desde la perspectiva de la ética, y enmarcándonos dentro del amor personal, se pueden distingui…Read more
  •  194
    Nature and the Unlovable
    Constructivist Foundations 17 (3): 208-209. 2022.
    Can our relationship with nature be loving and reciprocal? The claim is hard to sustain when nature is taken to encompass polluted and urban places. The notion of reciprocity loses its force, and the lovability of these places is put into question. Also, the demand of love may obscure the ethical demand in our relationship with nature: to be responsible in our meaning-making practices.
  •  594
    Grief, Continuing Bonds, and Unreciprocated Love
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 60 (3): 413-436. 2022.
    The widely accepted “continuing bonds” model of grief tells us that rather than bereavement necessitating the cessation of one’s relationship with the deceased, very often the relationship continues instead in an adapted form. However, this framework appears to conflict with philosophical approaches that treat reciprocity or mutuality of some form as central to loving relationships. Seemingly the dead cannot be active participants, rendering it puzzling how we should understand claims about cont…Read more
  •  131
    Emily Thomas, The Meaning of Travel (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 71 (3): 655-658. 2021.
    A philosopher's inquiry on travel may take different paths. Emily Thomas follows several in The Meaning of Travel, where she uncovers novel philosophical debates such as the ontology of maps or the ethics of ‘doom tourism’. Perhaps unexpectedly for the reader, Thomas also offers accessible and engaging discussions on—mostly Early—Modern philosophy by connecting travel-related topics to the work of some well-known authors (René Descartes and Francis Bacon), some unjustly neglected ones (Margaret …Read more
  •  601
    Falling in Love
    In Natasha McKeever, Joe Saunders & Andre Grahlé (eds.), Love: Past, Present and Future, Routledge. 2022.
    Most philosophers would agree that loving one’s romantic partner (i.e., being in love) is, in principle, a good thing. That is, romantic love can be valuable. It seems plausible that most would then think that the process leading to being in love—i.e. falling in love—can be valuable too. Surprisingly, that is not the case: among philosophers, falling in love has a bad reputation. Whereas philosophy of love has started to depart from traditional (and often unwarranted or false) tropes surrounding…Read more
  •  316
    Love by (Someone Else’s) Choice
    Philosophy and Public Issues - Filosofia E Questioni Pubbliche 10 (3): 155-189. 2020.
    Love enhancement can give us as a say on whom we love and thus ‘free’ us from our brain chemistry, which is mostly out of our control. In that way, we become more autonomous in love and in our life in general, as long as love enhancement is a free, voluntary choice. So goes the argument in favour of this addition to medical interventions of relationships. In this paper, I show that proponents of love enhancement have overlooked, or at least underestimated, the fact that love itself impacts peopl…Read more
  •  254
    Kristján Kristjánsson, Virtuous Emotions (review)
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 17 (4): 457-460. 2020.
    Honouring a career-long commitment to interdisciplinarity which has guided a prolific publication history on character, virtue, and emotion, Kristjánsson leads by example in this book. Although he is clearly a philosopher, firmly pro-Aristotelian and devotes a large proportion of the book to look at the original source, Kristjánsson is happy to question or even downright abandon Aristotelian tradition if he has to–and to push the boundaries of philosophical though…Read more
  •  693
    Lost without you: the Value of Falling out of Love
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (3-4): 1-15. 2020.
    In this paper we develop a view about the disorientation attached to the process of falling out of love and explain its prudential and moral value. We start with a brief background on theories of love and situate our argument within the views concerned with the lovers’ identities. Namely, love changes who we are. In the context of our paper, we explain this common tenet in the philosophy of love as a change in the lovers’ self-concepts through a process of mutual shaping. This, however, is poten…Read more
  •  1242
    En este capítulo, defiendo que el proceso de identificación presente en relaciones de amor romántico tiene una estructura narrativa en tres niveles: social, intersubjetivo y personal.
  •  585
    People who experience love often experience break-ups as well. However, philosophers of love have paid little attention to the phenomenon. Here, I address that gap by looking at the grieving process which follows unchosen relationship terminations. I ask which one is the loss that, if it were to be recovered, would stop grief or make it unwarranted. Is it the beloved, the reciprocation of love, the relationship, or all of it? By answering this question I not only provide with an insight on the n…Read more
  •  286
    In their strife for designing a moral system where everyone is given equal consideration, cosmopolitan theorists have merely tolerated partiality as a necessary evil (insofar it means that we give priority to our kin opposite the distant needy). As a result, the cosmopolitan ideal has long departed from our moral psychologies and our social realities. Here I put forward partial cosmopolitanism as an alternative to save that obstacle. Instead of demanding impartial universal action, it requires f…Read more