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494Love's PossessivenessPhilosophy International Journal 5 (2): 000252. 2022.This paper addresses the important questions of whether love is possessive and, if so, in what way is it possessive and in what ways is it not. It argues that love is possessive in the way that loyalty is possessive, but it is not possessive in the ways that property-owners are possessive of their mere property, abusers are possessive of their partners, jealousy is possessive of the object it fears losing, or obsession is possessive of its object. By doing so it hopes to shed light on the nature…Read more
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413Can Our Beloved Pets Love Us Back?In Simon Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 241-268. 2021.Can our beloved cats and dogs love us back? This chapter aims to find a satisfactory theory of love that substantiates the claim that they can. It begins by reconstructing and critically evaluating recent attempts by scientists to show that dogs can love humans back. Although these attempts are argued to be unsuccessful, it is further argued that they illuminate the need for an adequate theory of love and offer us some plausible ideas about love that direct us to two recent philosophical theorie…Read more
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374Ethical Emergentism and Moral CausationJournal of Moral Philosophy 18 (4): 331-362. 2021.This paper focuses on a recently articulated, emergentist conception of ethical naturalism and its commitment to causal efficacy, or the idea that moral properties have causal powers, along with its supporting commitment to moral causation. After I reconstruct the theory, I explain how it offers some interesting theoretical benefits to moral realists in virtue of its commitment to causal efficacy. Then, after locating some examples of moral causation in support of this commitment, I present and …Read more
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359Realist Ethical Naturalism for Ethical Non-NaturalistsPhilosophical Studies 175 (2): 339-362. 2018.It is common in metaethics today to draw a distinction between “naturalist” and “non-naturalist” versions of moral realism, where the former view maintains that moral properties are natural properties, while the latter view maintains that they are non-natural properties instead. The nature of the disagreement here can be understood in different ways, but the most common way is to understand it as a metaphysical disagreement. In particular, the disagreement here is about the reducibility of moral…Read more
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208It’s a truism that love must always be for something. In technical terms, love must have an object. Yet we godless naturalists that disbelieve in all gods and any form of an afterlife, including reincarnation, must then be committed to cases of love without objects insofar as we deny the existence of objects that people genuinely love (namely, God and deceased loved ones). This commitment of ours thus seems inconsistent with the truism about love, and so it seems that we godless naturalists must…Read more
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86The Syndrome of LoveErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 7 480-510. 2020.What is love? In this paper I argue that love is a psychological syndrome, or an enormously complex cluster of psychological attitudes and dispositions that’s accompanied by a corresponding set of symptoms that flow from it. More specifically, I argue that love is an affectionate loyalty that takes different shapes across cases and that manifests itself in some set of behavioral and emotional expressions, where this set of expressions also varies across cases. After laying down three theoretical…Read more
Ryan Stringer
Lincoln Land Community College
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Lincoln Land Community CollegeAssistant Professor
University of California, San Diego
PhD, 2019
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy, Misc |
Value Theory |