research

What does it take for a desire to be intelligible? This paper proposes an answer to this question. I argue, first, that we should reject the dominant approach in the literature, according to which the intelligibility of desire consists in the object of the desire possessing some desirable quality; and the job of an account of the intelligibility of desire is to identify what such quality is. I show that two accounts representative of this approach are unsatisfactory, because they struggle to explain cases in which personal idiosyncrasies play a role in determining what is or is not intelligible to someone. The reason for this, I argue, is that the dominant approach neglects the interpersonality that is intrinsic to the intelligibility of desire. Alternatively, I propose that the intelligibility of desire consists in the desire being shared by the desirer to whom the intelligibility is in question.

How do we explain actions out of love for one’s deceased beloved? Contemporary theories of love that adopt the approach of identifying the practical reason love gives us have a difficult time offering a satisfactory explanation. According to the benevolence theorist, love essentially consists in the lover caring for the well-being or happiness of the beloved for their own sake. Yet, they have a hard time establishing that the deceased beloved has any well-being or one that can be promoted or harmed. According to the ends-sharing theorist, love consists in sharing in the beloved’s pursuit of ends or projects that are significant. But they fail to account for cases where we defy the beloved’s death wish out of love.

In this paper, I argue that acting out of love for one’s dead beloved or more generally, love in the absence of the other, motivate an account of love which looks beyond the popular approach. More specifically, I propose that loving someone consists in sharing a practical stance with them, where this means that the lover experiences what happens to the beloved as what happens to themselves in a particular way.

It is a common thought that people have social needs. But the nature of such needs has not received much attention in recent philosophical literature. This paper aims to shed light on the nature of one such need—the need for interpersonal love. More specifically, this paper has two goals. The first is to offer an argument against the view according to which the need for love is contingent on some condition(s) of the individual person; call this the contingentist view. The second is to offer a proposal for what I call the constitutivist view, according to which the need for love is constitutive of the concept of a person.

My argument against the contingentist view appeals to the impossibility of a good solitary life. I argue that it is constitutive of the concept of a person that a good life is a possibility. This possibility is not the kind of possibility associated with particular individuals but the theoretical kind. On this basis, if the contingentist is correct, then it must be possible that a genuinely solitary person can lead a good life. This is because if they cannot, then love would be what’s missing in their life that makes it good, hence the need for love becomes a constitutive need. However, I argue that a good and genuinely solitary life is not possible. As some have argued, our conception of solitude suggests an interpersonal structure of which love is its full-blooded manifestation. Based on this, I argue that the kind of solitude that lacks this interpersonal structure—the genuine solitude—inevitably slips into either loneliness or solipsism, either of which vetoes a good life. My proposal is that the need for love is at least partially a need for self-knowledge, because the relationship with the beloved grants them a status such that their knowledge of the lover, together with the interpersonal attitudes that come with the knowledge and from the relationship, constitutes an irreplaceable source of self-knowledge for the lover. Since self-knowledge is constitutive of a person, my proposal is a constitutivist proposal.

What can our reactions be to someone who is completely unintelligible to us? According to some accounts of intelligibility, someone who is completely unintelligible to us is someone with whom we share nothing—no shared desires, feelings, experiences, etc. According to the standard view, represented by Anscombe, the sort of reactions we would have towards a completely unintelligible person can be no other than treating them as a “babbling loon.”

My claim is that reactive attitudes other than the ones dehumanizing the other is possible, and one such attitude is acknowledgement. Drawing on and developing further the works of Stanley Cavell, I argue that acknowledging the unintelligible person consists in acknowledging the legitimacy of their desires, feelings, and experiences, and one basis for such acknowledgement is love.

Recent accounts have characterized the experience of loneliness as, for example, an emotional response to the thought that desired social needs cannot be met, or a receptive experience that represents the lack of certain relational goods as bad. These accounts typically take the experience of loneliness to accurately represent what the lonely person desires or values. I want to put some pressure on this approach. Drawing on the works of Hannah Arendt, I develop an account of loneliness that centers on the intelligibility of the experience of the lonely person. Moreover, I argue that the experience of the lonely person is unintelligible to themselves because crucial requirements of intelligibility, such as recognition from others, are not met.