Yufeng Lin

This article is about how best to understand the Murdochian idea that love is the direct apprehension of another person as a source of value outside oneself. Taking expressions of care as a case study, the article argues that the unilateral conception of loving attention that Iris Murdoch and some of her influential defenders employ cannot make sense of phenomena central to interpersonal love. According to the intersubjective alternative defended, loving attention is based in second-personal thought: thought about another subject that stands to their self-conscious thought as uses of ‘you’ stand to uses of ‘I’. Such a conception better explains why one fully counts as seeing another person, in the sense that constitutes loving attention, only if one thereby puts the beloved in a position to feel seen.

Guessing is the thesis that, roughly put, you may believe something iff it is among the most probable answers to a salient question. The thesis is motivated by observed features of felicitous belief reports when agents confront a question they aren't certain how to answer. This paper raises a novel problem for the thesis, focusing on belief reports in multi-question scenarios. I introduce and motivate a plausible inter-question principle for belief, show that Guessing is incompatible with the principle, and argue that the resulting puzzle is intractable and significant—posing a unique challenge to the thesis. Moreover, the problem generalizes to formally parallel "question-sensitive" accounts in epistemology and philosophy of language, calling for future research into their limits.

This paper explores a distinctive form of social interaction—interpersonal inquiry—in which two or more people attempt to understand one another by engaging in conversation. Like many modes of inquiry into human beings, interpersonal inquiry partly shapes its own objects. How we conduct it thus affects who we become. I present an ethical ideal of conversation to which, I argue, at least some of our interpersonal inquiry ought to aspire. I then consider how this ideal might influence philosophical conceptions of the self.