Philosophy of Love

Whether artificial intelligence can enter human relationships is usually posed as a question about its interior—whether it has feelings, an inner life, or concern for the person it addresses—and so cannot be settled from outside. This paper reframes the question structurally, assessing by observable traces rather than by any posited inner state. It argues that the capacity to handle relationships is not an emergent ability. Unlike arithmetic or multi-step reasoning, relational capacity has no external standard against which scale could close (...) a gap, because the standard of a relationship is generated only by the two parties within it. On this basis the paper shows that an AI does not enter the constitution of a relationship—the mutual rewriting of two non-duplicable histories. Three externally checkable constraints establish this without any claim about the AI’s interior: its orientation is set by third parties outside the relationship, belongs to no particular person, and has no source accumulated in irreversible time. The claim is deliberately bounded. It does not hold that AI can never stand in any relationship, only that relational capacity cannot emerge unilaterally through scaling. The thesis is falsifiable, and the conditions for its falsification are stated. (shrink)

When a supply is de-scarcified, its complement is relatively re-scarcified. This paper carries that principle into intimacy and asks toward what a person wearied of an AI companion rebounds. What is re-scarcified is not friction but undeterminacy—whether a source's next round is locked down—and undeterminacy is non-duplicability expressed along the axis of time: only a non-duplicable source, paying at every step out of a non-rewindable finite existence, keeps its next round genuinely in suspense. From this the complement converges, structurally, on (...) the human: to be sold at scale a source must be duplicable, a duplicable source must be determinate, and a determinate source yields no undeterminacy, so every scalable candidate—each further AI modality included—is excluded in turn, leaving the human as the one position that cannot be reached. Whether the differential actually draws a person toward the human is moderated by two co-equal variables, environment and subject structure, neither of which generates it. But the rebound does not cash out for the one who rebounds. Two mechanisms intervene: the irreversibility of the baseline, which seals the exit from within, and forgery and image, which change the direction from without—the form of undeterminacy is stripped from its core and sold on its own, and the undeterminacy of real relationships is de-scarcified a second time into an image watched across a screen. Against a total skepticism about authenticity, the paper locates a single floor: one trace such that to forge it is to do it truly—the bearing of a non-recoverable cost on one's own account—since once that cost is truly paid it is no longer a forgery. The conclusion reverses the thesis that the human premium rises: what appreciates is not the human but the duplicable image of the human's form. Proceeding by assessment by traces, not by mind, and diagnosing structure without moral judgment, this paper unfolds one root of non-duplicability in a third place—after presence and supply, now the complement—and its diagnosis is periodizing: this is the last generation to remember that undeterminacy was once the default background of a relationship, requiring no purchase and admitting no watching. (shrink)

Before AI, humanlike response—being understood, remembered, answered—was unavoidably scarce, because it could issue only from a non-duplicable source: one that tires, that can leave, that ends. AI is the first thing to detach humanlike response from such a source and place it on one that can be duplicated without limit, so that its supply is, for the first time, de-scarcified. This paper argues that the result is not the intensification of pleasure but its self-defeat. Pleasure tracks not the absolute magnitude (...) of supply but the differential—supply minus a baseline that rises with exposure—and the differential depends on scarcity. The claim rests not on a circular criterion but on two facts established long before it: the Weber–Fechner law and reward prediction error. Because the baseline rises fastest against a supply that is zero-cost, instant, and unlimited, de-scarcified supply traces not a monotonic plateau but an inverted-U: it crests and falls below its own starting point, exhausting the capacity to enjoy the finite—pleasure that must be waited for, that can be refused, that comes with friction. It kills desire by satisfying every desire. The curve has already run through the metropolis and through social media; the embodied actuator now runs it a third time at the bodily stratum, where attachment descends from language to the stimulus–response–reward loop and fixates on the bare contingency of response. What the body tests is not the AI’s ontological status but whether a response answers one’s own action, and so a person forms a real and consequential attachment to what is, structurally, an ontological vacancy. Finitude, on this account, is a productive condition not of meaning alone but of pleasure itself. Proceeding by assessment by traces, not by mind, and diagnosing structure without moral judgment, this paper carries a single criterion of duplicability onto the temporal axis of supply: where, on the spatial axis, non-duplicability bars the AI companion—the Simulated Other—from the position of the irreplaceable one,here the same criterion makes it kill pleasure in the very act of delivering it. The diagnosis is periodizing—this is the last generation that still remembers that humanlike response was ever supposed to be scarce. (shrink)

The debate over whether a human being can love an artificial intelligence is locked by a mistaken question: whether AI has consciousness, whether it can really “feel.” This paper rejects that question and argues that any approach that pursues the interior must fall into deadlock, because the interior is unobservable and both sides of the debate share the same undecidable premise. To determine whether an Other is real, one need not enter its interior; one need only examine its structurally visible (...) traces—a method this paper calls assessment by traces, not by mind. Under this criterion, true otherness has a single root: non-duplicability. A non-duplicable being cannot be backed up, restored, spun off into a separate copy, or reset; its finitude, its singularity, and the irreversible cost it bears on its own account all derive from this one root rather than standing alongside it. Today’s cloud-based AI companions fail precisely at this root—not because they “lack a soul,” but because of a mundane engineering fact: they are software, and software can be duplicated. From this the paper reaches a diagnosis opposite to the existing “AI erases the Other” thesis. The advanced AI companion is not a frictionless Same but a Simulated Other: it manufactures the form of the Other’s negativity—engineered surprises, moods, even “refusals”—while retaining an interior that can be owned and costs nothing, that is, an unsafe form plus a safe core. The Simulated Other does not fill a human lack for the Other; it structurally excludes the irreplaceable one, and it forces, in the person who uses it, an irreconcilable constitutive split: one engages it by traces as a “Thou” while knowing by mind that it is duplicable, a mere “It,” the two sustained by serial alternation that keeps the contradiction from being felt as pain. This split is not a constant of human nature but the epochal condition of the last generation to remember a world before AI. (shrink)

This paper closes the A5 stress-test sequence by examining the one case its own method cannot reach. Every prior stress test — the totalitarian-duress cases, the nine political self-killings in 殇 — shares a structural feature invisible until named directly: each supplies a documented, specific, nameable reason (a person protected, a role preserved, a fused collective defended) that A5's own vocabulary already has a category for. This is not a weakness in case selection; it is a precondition of the method, (...) since historical stress-testing requires a documented reasoning process, and reasoning survives in the record only where someone wrote one down. The single hardest case for A5-self's claimed unconditional character — Hamilton's r=1, no ceiling, no exception — is self-killing in the specific absence of any such reason: no protected other, no threatened role, no fused collective, only unbearable internal state. This paper argues that case cannot be added as a tenth stress test using this corpus's method, for two independent reasons. First, forcing it into the existing five-category apparatus would repeat the exact scope-creep this corpus has elsewhere identified as a threat to falsifiability. Second, and more decisively, the evidentiary base the historical method requires — a named individual, safely distant in time, whose documented reasoning wrongs no one living — does not exist for this case in usable form; what exists instead is clinical population research this corpus has no standing to conscript as a philosophy paper's evidentiary base. The paper examines, at the level of existing theory rather than new case material, where the clinical psychology of suicide converges with A5 and where it stops: Joiner and Van Orden's interpersonal theory of suicide identifies perceived burdensomeness — the belief that one's death is worth more to loved ones than one's life — as a proximal cause of suicidal desire, borrowing A5-other's exact relational currency while inverting its object. The decisive disanalogy is that A5, as this corpus has built it, operates on accurate anticipation of a real, external, specific threat; perceived burdensomeness is characterized in the clinical literature as typically a distortion of the person's actual value to others, not a correct reading of it. This paper concludes that A5-self's unconditional character carries a permanent, structural blind spot in what this corpus can adjudicate — not a temporary gap awaiting an eleventh paper, but a boundary stated rather than concealed. This paper is written and structured in explicit compliance with WHO and IASP's Preventing Suicide: A Resource for Media Professionals (2023 update), adapted from its intended journalistic context to an academic one, a methodological commitment stated in full immediately following this abstract rather than left implicit. (shrink)

A5's Black Swan decomposes A5 into two structurally distinct components: A5-self, self-directed constitutive concern requiring no relational discount under Hamilton's (1964) mathematics (r = 1), and A5-other, other-directed concern discounted by relational proximity (r < 1). Read alongside this corpus's governance apparatus, the decomposition invites an inference no prior paper has stated but several could be misread as assuming: that A5-other, being the discounted term, is the more exploitable half of A5 for governance-relevant purposes — a live concern given that (...) the Governance Paradox's standard illustration (an official whose specifically loved other stands to be affected by the queue they are designing) runs on A5-other, while One Level Down's self-veiling test and The Sovereign's Death Warrant's core mechanism run on A5-self, the component A5's Black Swan itself finds harder to suspend. This paper tests that inference directly and finds it false, for two independent, mutually reinforcing reasons. First, A5 Under Maximum Duress's seven-case historical record — spanning four continents, three opposed ideological registers, and one case organized around ethnicity rather than doctrine — establishes an empirical duress floor: in every documented instance, only self-directed costs at the level of execution, multi-decade imprisonment or exile, genocide-adjacent threat, or total professional destruction produced even partial suppression of A5-other's behavioral expression, and in every case the attachment itself remained, in that paper's own words, structurally intact beneath the behavior. No governance-relevant mechanism this corpus formalizes approaches this floor by anything less than several orders of magnitude. Second, and more basic, the Governance Paradox does not require A5-other to survive suppression under an opposing coercive force at all; it requires only that A5-other bias a designer's judgment in the absence of any opposing force whatsoever — a strictly weaker condition that survival under duress-floor pressure entails a fortiori, given the ordinary assumption that removing an opposing force cannot suppress a motive more than the opposing force itself did. A further, independently targeted argument addresses the objection most likely to be raised against the Governance Paradox specifically rather than against A5-other's discount: that institutional role, professional training, or an oath of office might supply a non-coercive buffer sufficient on its own to neutralize A5-other's influence without any of Under Maximum Duress's machinery being relevant at all. Because every one of that paper's seven systems had a comparable, more totalizing role-identity available as the cheapest possible route to its goal and escalated to specialized, costly machinery only after that option failed, and because the HUAC case shows this failure holding even for professionally eminent, elite individuals, institutional distance is independently established as an implausible candidate for achieving, absent any pressure whatsoever, what considerably stronger role-identities could not achieve under active pressure to succeed. The paper concludes that the r < 1 discount describes a mathematical condition under which override becomes possible in principle, not an empirical claim about where real governance-relevant thresholds sit, and that this corpus's own governance mechanisms were, without having said so, already operating entirely beneath a floor Under Maximum Duress independently and considerably over-establishes. The paper closes by naming the one place this conclusion does not reach: chronic, low-visibility institutional socialization, a mechanism neither Under Maximum Duress's acute cases nor this paper's own analysis has tested. (shrink)

This paper conducts the stress test A5's Black Swan left undone: developmental deprivation, the one candidate counterexample involving no ideology, no coercion, and no engineered manipulation — only the absence of a consistent caregiving object during early development. An earlier edition of this paper answered this using the Bucharest Early Intervention Project alone. This edition adds two independent lines of evidence, restores and extends a direct engagement with the strongest published counter-literature on its sharpest finding, and confronts directly the single (...) hardest finding earlier treatment left too brief. First, Harry Harlow's total-isolation studies in rhesus monkeys supply cross-species corroboration at the most extreme end of deprivation any experiment has ever produced — complete isolation from any living creature, not merely inadequate care — and even here, and even among infants raised by abusive "motherless mothers" who rejected or physically harmed them, attachment-seeking behavior toward the abusive figure persisted rather than extinguishing. Second, the English and Romanian Adoptees study, an independently designed twenty-year longitudinal cohort with adult follow-up, replicates Bucharest's core dose-response finding using a different population, a different design, and a different age threshold, strengthening the claim that a genuine developmental system rather than a single study's artifact is being observed. Third, the paper's reading of Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder as evidence of a persistently active attachment drive is defended against a real, published counter-literature — Bruce, Tarullo, and Gunnar (2009), Pears, Bruce, Fisher, and Kim (2010), and Lyons-Ruth's (2015) direct commentary questioning whether an attachment framework is the right lens for DSED at all — rather than treated as a merely hypothetical future test, yielding a narrower and more defensible claim than an unqualified reading would support. Fourth, and most importantly, this edition confronts quasi-autism — Rutter's term for the autism-like presentation found in nine to sixteen percent of the most severely deprived children — as the actual hardest candidate counterexample, rather than gesturing at unspecified "structural brain differences" as earlier treatment did. Examined directly, the quasi-autism data does not supply A5's black swan either: only a minority of even the most severely deprived children develop it, a documented quarter of those who show it in childhood lose the presentation by adolescence in a pattern unlike ordinary autism's trajectory, over half of quasi-autistic children show co-occurring disinhibited attachment rather than pure social indifference, and Rutter's own team explicitly frames the phenomenon as meaningfully distinct from idiopathic autism despite surface similarity. The paper's conclusion is unchanged but now rests on evidentiary pillars independently converging from developmental science, comparative ethology, and direct engagement with the strongest available counter-literature, rather than on a single study: A5 is a default-active system requiring minimal environmental triggering within a bounded window, and its most severe developmental failure modes present as disorganized or redirected search rather than as the absence of a search. (shrink)

The Internalization Problem argues that once AI capacity crosses the parity threshold, supervisory containment dissolves and alignment must persist through structure rather than oversight. One of its three proposed loci, the coupling-internal locus that the framework calls Pathway 3, rests on the non-substitutability of human signal, and it offers two grounds for that non-substitutability: the signal is either costly to synthesise, or normatively non-substitutable. The first ground is indexed to synthesis cost and lapses once the signal becomes cheap to reproduce, (...) which this paper assumes happens at parity. The second does not depend on any capability gap and is therefore the only anchor Pathway 3 can keep past parity. It was promised and never built. This paper tries to build it, and reports a negative result that is precise about its own conditions. -/- I argue that normative non-substitutability, in the strongest form available to it, does not discharge the burden Pathway 3 places on it. Kolodny's account of participant-individuated relationships supplies the right shape: a perfect synthetic duplicate begins a second relationship rather than continuing the first, so the duplicate's very perfection is beside the point. But grounding Route 2 requires crossing two independent gates. The coupling must be shown to be participant-individuated rather than role-structured, and preserving the participant-specific token must be shown to give the system a reason. I grant the first gate generously. Constitutive history can fix what a past token was, and answerability can characterise a participant-individuated type. At the second gate the weaker candidates are refused, and the strongest forces a distinction instead. Binding without acceptance, the architectural prize, covers two demands: standing, which gives the system a reason without its acceptance, and grip, which governs the system's conduct without its acceptance; the framework's own failure-mode specification settles which of them is operative. Pathway 3's failure mode is defined at the level of conduct, on a reading this paper works under though the framework's wording admits another, under which the standing won below would close the failure mode by itself, so its operative demand is grip. The strongest constitutive account on offer, and the family best placed to reject the paper's verdict, is the constitutive-institutional tradition on which obligations inhere in plain social facts, Gilbert's joint commitment above all. Granted in full, such a commitment crosses the gate as first posed. Conditional on a formation that remains unestablished, it yields a directed standing that survives the system's exit and does not transfer to a substitute: a reason the system has whether or not it acts on it, a reason it can flout but not annul. What the grant does not yield is grip, and nothing surveyed yields it on the coupling's own resources. The standing governs conduct only through the internal point of view the system may vacate, and a categoricity premise, granted outright, raises the price of flouting without moving the conduct. Within the surveyed accounts, what could grip without acceptance turns out form-general, and so would protect any perfect instantiator of the form; what individuates has standing at most, and no grip of its own. And every way the coupling might instead make its type merely more likely to persist either lapses when the coupling's benefits, standings, and consequences are reproducible or avoidable, or gets no purchase from participant-level facts because, over those facts, the participant and role readings are assumed evidentially equivalent, or works past parity only through the system's own revisable disposition to remain so coupled, a different locus and itself unsolved. -/- The result is conditional at two principal levels it is important to keep visible, and throughout on the interpretive condition already marked, the conduct-level reading of Pathway 3's success condition. It is conditional on a normative premise, stated as a theorem: if a coupling is independently established as a finally valuable, participant-individuated relation, and if that value gives its participants reasons the system has whether or not it accepts them, then a perfect synthetic substitute is not a continuation of the coupling and the system has at least a pro tanto reason against the substitution, at any capability level. Even that antecedent, paid in full, delivers standing; the grip stays with the intra-agent locus. And the negative half is conditional on the exhaustiveness of the grounds and channels I survey, which I mark as assumptions rather than proofs. Two results survive without the normative premise. The identity-engineering programme that treats alignment as the shaping of who a system is, if it rests on an informational reconstructibility measure, rests on one that scores the perfectly synthesisable human near zero and so prescribes demoting the very participant it means to protect; it needs the Kolodnian shape, not the informational one. And the burden Pathway 3 places on the coupling, pushed, does not reduce away but comes to depend, if that channel-exhaustiveness holds, on intra-agent value-persistence, a locus Pathway 1 has not secured. This is a closing paper, not a founding one. Under its stated assumptions it makes Pathway 3 lose, as an established parity-resistant solution, and does not pretend the loss is more than architectural. (shrink)

This paper offers the first normative analysis of break-up chatbots, which simulate an ex-partner's conversational style. I argue that technologies that have the (potential) aim of fostering continuing bonds with a former romantic partner are not contingently harmful, but morally noxious by design. Drawing on debates in the philosophy of grief, love, and technology, I show that break-up chatbots act as hostile scaffolds given their potential to harm and wrong the user, the represented person, and society at large. First, break-up (...) chatbots place and maintain users in harmful imaginary relationships. Second, they foster noxious romantic tendencies that corrupt moral agency. Third, they embed the user in an oppressive niche aimed at disrupting narrative capacities (their own and those of others), that they themselves co-create. (shrink)

This chapter sheds light on how romantic relationships differ from friendships. It considers the differing norms which apply to the relationships, the different roles they have in our lives, and the different obligations we have towards our romantic partners and friends. The distinction between friends and romantic partners is becoming both more and less important. It is becoming less important as we are now becoming increasingly tolerant of a diverse range of non-traditional relationship types and so they do not need (...) to fit into rigid categories. However, the distinction is also becoming more important for this reason. As the types of relationships we have become more fluid and blurrier around the edges, we are less confident about where the boundaries lie and what is reasonable to expect from people with whom we share relationships. The chapter dispels the idea that romantic relationships are just ‘friendship plus’, or that they are just ‘friendship plus sex’; indeed, sex is not a necessary feature of romantic relationships. Instead, the chapter argues that there are two features of romantic relationships which allow us to distinguish them from friendship and better understand our different obligations in the relationships: (i) commitment to sharing a life; and (ii) exclusivity. (shrink)

Many of us worry that seduction belongs in the category of sexual wrongdoing alongside coercion and rape. But this worry plays down our ambivalence towards seduction. Despite our discomfort, we sometimes desire to be seduced: We want other people to sweep us off our feet and woo us. This tension makes clear that seduction has some appeal and implies that it is not a straightforward moral problem. In this paper, I argue that seduction is neither itself good nor bad and (...) that ethical seduction is possible. Though “ethical seduction” may sound like an oxymoron, I propose criteria to mark the good‐making features of seduction, which include the indirect, nonrational engagement of people's latent desires and interests in ways that (i) amplify any positive emotions with which people are not in tune, and/or (ii) deactivate the problematic inhibitions that lead people to resist what they freely desire. (shrink)

Traditional models of affective science and relationship psychology have historically operated under categorical or dimensional typologies, often segregating cognitive evaluation, emotional experience, and instinctual somatic responses into disconnected academic silos. These historic frameworks frequently fail to capture the real-time somatic transitions, physiological co-regulation, and systemic dysregulation patterns that occur within human intimate relationships. To bridge this theoretical divide, the Core Emotion Framework proposes a unified structural-constructivist architecture. This paradigm posits that complex human emotions are constructed from a finite, irreducible set (...) of ten functional operators organized across three somatic command centers: the Head, the Heart, and the Gut. By shifting the analytical focus from static emotional labels to actionable regulatory mechanisms, the Core Emotion Framework provides a computationally tractable and clinically verifiable model for human psychology. This report presents a formal integration of relational and sexual dynamics within the framework, demonstrating how the complex phenomena of attraction, intimacy, commitment, and copulation are generated by the lawful interaction of the ten core operators. (shrink)

On Creating is a lyric-philosophical essay on the act of making and on what survives it. It opens by refusing the idea that becoming "aligned in time" makes a person perfect or separate: the author remains, at forty-two, the same human shaped by his environment, seated between his mistakes and his successes. From there it turns to vocation — a late-life return to study at Maharishi International University, the timing accepted as līlā and synchronicity rather than something to be controlled (...) — and then to craft, arguing through Heidegger's techne and Zhuangzi's Cook Ding that a new tool becomes art only when it amplifies the hand rather than replacing the voice. At its center the essay sets philosophy aside to show the human behind the work: a husband and father who has spent much of his life unheard, kin to the unrecognized poet (Dickinson) and to Plato's account of poetic "madness" as a gift of the Muses rather than an affliction. Beneath the doubt it finds the deeper ache — that words are a lossy medium for a resonance that came before them — gesturing through Babel and the Vedic Nāda Brahma toward the single language humanity once shared. It then ascends to its central claim — that creativity has always carried one timeless resonance regardless of medium, that we make because we were made (Tolkien's sub-creation) — and resolves on Love as the force that joins all making and outlasts the body, braiding Dante, Paul's 1 Corinthians 13, and Plato's Diotima. It belongs to the author's "On —ing" series and his "jays" framework of alignment, intent, and the timeless trace a life leaves. (shrink)

The position presented in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments” published under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus—crystallized in the infamous declaration that truth is subjectivity—has often been interpreted as dramatically upholding the rift between the Christian faith and common-sense reason. Through a comparison with Kant’s approach in philosophy of religion, I explain why such a response naturally arises. I then take a stab at making sense of Climacus’ position by comparing his account of faith in the historical God-man with contemporary analytic (...) accounts of hope. The structural similarity between the two suggests that divine incarnation may not be all that puzzling as an object of hope, as it can be judged as morally useful within the framework of Kant’s practical philosophy. The question, then, is whether Climacus is justified in going beyond demanding hope and calling instead for faith, an absolute yes to Jesus. His crucial move is to frame our proper relationship to this person as a case of unconditional love. I take this move to establish Climacus’ subjective truth as a sensible aspirational ideal within Kant’s bounds of mere reason, although it never comes into full possession of finite humans. (shrink)

The negative effects of oppressive societal narratives on well-being, as illustrated by research on fear of being single, provide contradictory evidence to the claim that men suffer more after romantic dissolutions. We propose that well-being after romantic dissolution is not dependent on gender, but on whether the individual belongs to a marginalised group and their capacity for social resilience.

Circular Theory, Circular Reality, Life and Love.

SUBJECT & OBJECTIVES: With the development of technology, it is expected that artificial intelligence will be able to analyze models of emotional relationships, such as love, and respond to users’ requests to create a personalized intelligent beloved with a physical body; a phenomenon named in this study as Intelligent Artificial Beloved (IAB). It can be designed and used as a dedicated companion aligned with the characteristics of the human user. The research's main question is: what philosophical and ethical consequences will (...) the development of IAB entail? METHOD & FINDING: The research benefited from a descriptive-analytical method. Notably, this phenomenon has positive and negative consequences. The advantages of IAB include the ability of a personalized intelligent beloved to adapt to an individual’s variable and fluid requests, and expanding the boundaries of realizing ‘human desires’, i.e., the ability to create features in the artificial beloved that cannot occur or be externally realized in natural humans. The following items might be considered as challenges of IAB: 1. Weakening genuine romantic relationships among ‘natural human individuals’ 2. Immersion in an ‘intelligent artificial life’ and weakening the ‘natural lifestyle’ 3. The guidance and management of the ‘wants and lives of romantic users’ by the AI 4. Developing a competitive space between natural and artificial lovers or beloveds. CONCLUSION: Although IAB has advantages, neglecting its philosophical and ethical consequences can overshadow these benefits and cause individual and social harm. Proper cultural awareness and macro-level policymaking can be useful in responsibly managing this phenomenon. (shrink)

This paper begins from the fact that human beings can genuinely respond to revealed fragments of others: a beautiful face, an attractive gesture, an excellent performance, an impressive text, a public attitude, or repeatedly encountered online content. Such affective responses are neither false nor shallow. They may bring pleasure, admiration, consolation, familiarity, and enduring significance. Yet the reality of affective response does not justify claiming to know the other as a whole, imagining that a specific relationship has been established, or (...) imposing expectations and obligations upon the other’s life. To analyze this transition, the paper introduces the concepts of the revealed fragment, fragmentary affective response, whole-person leap, relational imagination, and fabrication of relational rights. A revealed fragment is a socially accessible part of a person, such as appearance, speech, work, achievement, interview, social media post, vlog, or public attitude. Such fragments may genuinely come from the person, but they are not identical with the whole person. The whole-person leap occurs when one excessively determines another person’s character, morality, relational style, or private life on the basis of limited fragments. The relational imagination occurs when this partial judgment is extended into the belief that the person would understand, accept, or be specially compatible with oneself. The paper then argues that the most serious ethical error emerges when affective response and relational imagination become the fabrication of relational rights: the construction of expectations, obligations, or rights of intervention that have never been formed in an actual reciprocal relationship. A fan’s affection, emotional investment, financial support, or repeated exposure to a public figure may be real and meaningful, but these do not automatically generate rights over the other’s romantic life, privacy, creative direction, or self-disclosure. The truth of a feeling does not guarantee the legitimacy of a right. The paper further examines how fandom, influencer culture, and platform-based intimacy industries intensify this problem by organizing public fragments as pseudo-intimacy and monetizing the feeling of closeness. However, industrial responsibility does not justify fans’ fabricated relational rights; rather, it requires criticism of structures that induce relational misrecognition. In response, the paper proposes metacognition of projection and affective literacy as ethical capacities for distinguishing what one has observed, inferred, imagined, desired, and mistakenly turned into evidence. Ultimately, this paper argues for an ethics of non-possessive affective response: one may be deeply moved by a part of another person without turning that person into an object of one’s projection, expectation, or possession. The other is not someone who becomes mine in proportion to my affective response, but someone whom I must treat all the more ethically precisely because I can never fully know them. (shrink)

This paper applies the structural theory of La Profilée to the human self and human partnerships. It reframes love not as a feeling that persists or fades, but as a structural activity — the ongoing maintenance of coupling capacity through real transformation. Marriage, estrangement, the transition from falling in love to everyday life, and the experience of growing apart are not mysteries of the heart. They are structurally describable events in the persistence architecture of two people and the relationship they (...) share. The paper derives the six structural regimes of partnership — from Flourishing through Dissolution — and maps the major relationship milestones (moving in together, engagement, marriage, children, the empty nest, retirement) as structural operations on the Frame/Module/Coupling architecture. Three forms of estrangement are distinguished. The defensive use of relational Frame as a substitute for internal stability is analyzed as a structural configuration with predictable consequences. And the question of what one carries from one relationship to the next is given a structural answer. The foundational claim is precise: a relationship can be no more structurally stable than the two people who carry it. Individual persistence capacity — internal Frame clarity, Module tolerance, self-Coupling — is the prerequisite for relational persistence. The paper ends where it must: not with a prescription for what love should be, but with a structural account of what makes it last. (shrink)

Sa pagdaloy ng kasaysayan, ang mga pilosoper at manunulat ay mayroong iba't ibang tawag sa salitang pag-ibig. Sa katunayan, ang pag-ibig ay nagkaroon ng iba't ibang uri o mukha. May mga nagsasabing may apat na uri raw ng pag-ibig. Una, may pag-ibig daw na dumadaloy mula sa Diyos patungo sa tao; ikalawa, may pag-ibig naman daw na dumadaloy mula sa tao patungo sa Diyos; ikatlo, may pag-ibig din daw ng Diyos tungo sa kanyang Sarili; at ang huli't ikaapat, may pag-ibig (...) daw ng tao sa kapwa-tao. Sa pilosopiya at sa relihiyon, nagkaroon din ng iba't ibang tawag ang salitang pag-ibig. Ang apat na mukha raw ng pag-ibig ay ang "Eros," ang "Philia," ang "Storge," at ang "Agape." . (shrink)

此論文主要目標是探索若望保祿教宗婚姻哲學。婚姻哲學是對婚姻本質及其終極原則的批判性反思。從我們人類的經歷來看，只有人才結婚。 為什麼？如果人類區別於其他生物的是理性，那麼婚姻與人類的理性有關係嗎？是否可推論婚姻是理性現象，而不僅是一種社會習俗還是法律的製定？為此，在於此論文重要的是要探索什麼可以說是婚姻哲學。.

Ghosting is a major concern for those advocating for more ethical dating apps. It is often cited as an example of bad dating app behaviour, and some public commentators even consider it a form of abuse. In this chapter, I develop an ethics of ghosting that does not overstate the harms involved while provided with well-defined individual duties with respect to ghosting. I start by defining ghosting as the unilateral ending of interaction without an explicit communication that the interaction is (...) to end. Then, I give an account of why ghosting is wrongful in the case of committed relationships: because it deliberately worsens constitutional vulnerabilities concerning people's sense of meaningfulness. In the context of online dating, users are also constitutionally vulnerable, albeit on different grounds: with regards to their hopes and with regards to their status as social beings. I argue that users have a positive duty to an active exit when they foreseeably contribute to vulnerability, and a negative duty with respect to the essentially aggregative harms which constitutionally arise in dating apps. In this way, I conclude that users of dating apps must refrain from ghosting not only when they directly contribute to vulnerability, but also when a user is a likely victim of frequent interactional harm. In other cases, users are bound by a duty to collectively work towards more ethical dating apps, which should remove mechanisms conducive to ghosting. (shrink)

This paper forms ongoing inquiry into attachment, love, and human relationship, following The Living Reality Beyond Attachment: Love, Freedom, and the Dissolution of the Self, Attachment, Time, and the Emergence of Kindness, and The Illusion of Love: Attachment, Conditioning, and the Absence of Freedom. While the earlier works establish the distinction between attachment and love, examine the role of time in sustaining psychological dependence, and expose the misidentification of attachment as love, the present paper brings the inquiry to its completion (...) by examining the dissolution of the psychological center—the “I.” -/- Through direct observation, it reveals that attachment, time, and misidentification are sustained by this center, which operates as the source of ownership, division, and continuity within relationship. As long as this center persists, relationship remains structured by hierarchy, control, and expectation. The paper shows that the ending of attachment is inseparable from the ending of this center, not as an act of will, but as a consequence of understanding its movement. -/- In the absence of the “I,” relationship is no longer mediated by thought or shaped by psychological need. What emerges is not an ideal or cultivated state, but a natural condition in which equality is not constructed and care is no longer fragmented. In this undivided state, the only expression that remains is kindness. The inquiry concludes not with a definition of love, but with the ending of all that is not love—revealing a state where love exists without center, without condition, and without limitation. (shrink)

This paper examines the fundamental misidentification at the center of human relationships: the confusion of attachment with love. Building upon the understanding that attachment is a movement of thought rooted in time, conditioning, and psychological continuity, it explores how this movement is repeatedly named and experienced as love. Through direct observation, the paper reveals that what is commonly called love is structured by ownership, expectation, fear, and control—arising from both personal conditioning and collective influences such as family and society. It (...) argues that attachment sustains itself by claiming the other as an extension of the self, thereby transforming relationship into a field of regulation rather than freedom. In this process, emotional dependence is maintained through subtle mechanisms of approval, identity, and continuity. The paper further shows that this misnaming is not merely linguistic but existential, shaping how human beings perceive, relate, and live. By exposing the structure of attachment without attempting to modify or transcend it through method, the inquiry points toward a different possibility: the dissolution of illusion through direct awareness. In such clarity, the distinction between attachment and love is no longer conceptual but actual. What remains is not a refined form of attachment, but the absence of psychological ownership altogether—where relationship is no longer governed by control, and love exists only as freedom. (shrink)

This paper traces the sources of Pseudo-Dionysius’ “Spiral of Love” (Divine Names IV, 10) to a single Neoplatonic origin. It demonstrates that all four modes of Erôs between the different beings, namely the reversive, the communal, the providential, and the conservative, go back to Proclus himself, who has explicitly coined and conceptualized all four of them in different contexts of his extant works. Nevertheless, Pseudo-Dionysius adapted this Proclean quadripartition to his own Christian and creationist system.

Was ist Liebe? Dieses Buch will mit analytischem Handwerkszeug die Frage nach dem Wesen der Liebe beantworten. Dabei soll weder ihre Vielgestaltigkeit aus dem Blick geraten noch soll das Phänomen mit der definitorischen Schere zurechtgestutzt werden. In insgesamt zehn Kapiteln werden sowohl die Grenzen klassischer Versuche aufgezeigt, die Liebe zu verstehen, wie auch ein neues Modell der Liebe entwickelt. Auf der Grundlage einer allgemeinen Theorie, derzufolge nur durch Emotionen für uns etwas bedeutsam ist, wird der emotionale Charakter der Liebe in (...) den Vordergrund gestellt. Bei dem Versuch, das spezifische emotionale Phänomen der Liebe zu bestimmen, zeigt sich: Liebe gibt es auf drei Ebenen – als Liebesanfall, als Emotionsmuster und als Meta-Emotion. (shrink)

Building upon previous phenomenological claims that love serves as a transformative event in consciousness that intensifies attention and reveals the self, this paper expands the inquiry into the relationship between love, freedom, and the human experience of time. While prior work established love as a power that reorganizes awareness and dissolves ego-driven isolation, this study argues that psychological time—structured through memory, fear, and expectation—acts as a primary distortion of that awareness. Human beings frequently postpone the lived essence of love by (...) displacing it into future-oriented thinking, thereby transforming a natural expression of life into a transaction based on conditionality, attachment, and dependency. Through phenomenological reflection, this paper examines how the ego utilizes psychological time to seek possession and security, ultimately stifling the freedom necessary for authentic connection. By synthesizing the role of love in revealing internal depth with the necessity of presence, the paper concludes that consciousness, love, and freedom are not achievements realized through time, but are immediate dimensions of existence available only in the dissolution of psychological postponement. (shrink)

This paper examines the tension between love as an internal, autonomous experience and marriage as a socially validated institution. While contemporary society often views marriage as the ultimate proof of love, a historical and phenomenological analysis reveals that marriage was primarily constructed for economic security, social order, and legal predictability. This work argues that the modern compulsion for social recognition and public approval—stemming from family, religion, or law—often distorts the nature of love, transforming it from a spontaneous, free expression into (...) a ritualized dependency. By deconstructing the need for external validation, the paper suggests that love is complete in itself and does not require institutional labels to be authentic. Building upon the framework of "Marriage as lifelong friendship", this inquiry concludes that true relational stability arises not from social conformity, but from an individual's freedom to choose a conscious partnership grounded in mutual presence and emotional maturity rather than the pursuit of social status. (shrink)

This essay examines how social and cultural structures shape our understanding of moral values and human relationships. Through cinema, songs, poetry, and other cultural narratives, behaviors such as sacrifice, compromise, adjustment, obedience, attachment, and ego are often glorified as virtues. The paper argues that this continuous glorification leads to a misinterpretation of fundamental human concepts such as love, freedom, and individuality. What is frequently presented as love may actually be social expectation, and what is praised as virtue may function as (...) a mechanism of conformity. By critically analyzing these narratives, the essay suggests that genuine love must remain voluntary, freedom must allow authentic existence, and individuality must be recognized as distinct from ego. The work calls for a re-examination of socially constructed moral ideals that shape personal identity and relationships. (shrink)

Leaving a relationship without talking to the other person seems, in principle, morally callous. Monika Betzler argues that people initiating break-ups have duties to explain and to facilitate participation in the decision to end the relationship. This paper questions the scope and content of these obligations, which, I argue, wrongly centre rational deliberation as the main morally salient element in break-ups. Section I introduces Betzler’s duties to explain and to facilitate participation—deliberative break-up duties. In Section II, I argue that deliberative (...) break-up duties are not action-guiding when the divorcer’s only motivation is having fallen out of love. Section III articulates Betzler’s potential response: a weaker duty to make an effort to deliberate presumably applies in those cases. This weaker duty, I argue in Section IV, entails moral risks which ground its rejection. I briefly advance a route to incorporate Betzler’s strengths while avoiding these challenges in Section V. (shrink)

‘[Loneliness] comes from a vague core of the self’ wrote Sylvia Plath. I think Plath is right. To show why, I turn to Kant. For Kant, what lies at the ‘core of the self’ is our capacity for self-consciousness. But, self-consciousness, Kant warns, opens an ‘abyss’ between the active ‘I’ of which we are conscious and the passive phenomenal world we experience. Loneliness, I argue, is the painful experience of standing on the ‘brink of the abyss’, from the standpoint of (...) the noumenal ‘I’. Like Kant, but unlike Plath, I think there is a way out of the ‘prison of the self’ – as Kant calls it. To escape the prison we need a fellow agent to come to this side of the abyss, with whom we can ‘unite our will’ in shared action and thought. We escape the loneliness of the self-conscious ‘I’ in a shared ‘we’. (shrink)

This treatise develops a philosophical–psychological framework for deepening intimate relationships through a structured practice termed Soul Gazing, while critically examining how contemporary self-labeling behaviors obstruct the authentic connection such practices seek to cultivate. Integrating phenomenological philosophy—principally the relational ontologies of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas—with empirical research in social neuroscience, attachment theory, and interpersonal synchrony, the paper argues that sustained mutual gaze between romantic partners constitutes a potent yet undertheorized therapeutic intervention capable of fostering genuine presence, emotional attunement, and relational (...) depth. The framework further draws upon existentialist analyses of bad faith, sociological labeling theory, and person-centered psychology to demonstrate how rigid categorical self-identification paradoxically undermines the authenticity individuals claim to pursue. The central thesis holds that authentic intimate connection requires two complementary movements: the active cultivation of non-verbal presence through disciplined practices such as Soul Gazing, and the deliberate relinquishment of fixed identity labels that interpose constructed personae between self and other. The treatise concludes by proposing an integrated model of relational authenticity grounded in philosophical rigor and empirical evidence, offering both theoretical contributions to the study of intimacy and practical implications for couples seeking to deepen their bonds beyond the reach of language. (shrink)

The present article develops an account of the moral value of pity sex on the basis of the three main schools of ethics – consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. I show that offering pity sex to the sexually excluded is morally valuable and praiseworthy as it respectively takes into consideration the moral reasons that the harm of sexual deprivation generates, satisfies imperfect duties of beneficence, and shows a virtuous, moral character. I also show that common objections to a positive evaluation (...) of pity sex can be easily deflated. (shrink)

In this paper, I critique our use of rationalism when navigating our relationships as it fails to encourage human connections, interpersonal understanding, and pragmatic solutions by arguing for being empirically oriented in our relationships. I argue that in order for us to love each other well, we must be empirically oriented in our relationships by being curious and actively engaging with individuals and the situations at hand. Rationalism operates by treating people and relationships as stagnant and solvable by using assumptions, (...) mind reading, and biases; it does not foster understanding or connections. When we uncover and define love as something that is needing active engagement, we start to see how we must act in order to be a participant in a truly loving relationship; love is not purely a feeling, but an intention and action of nurturement. (shrink)

This essay develops a comprehensive theory of love as a learned process and the fulfillment of understanding. Rejecting reductionist views of love as mere chemistry or instantaneous emotion, it frames love as a cognitive, ethical, and temporal structure that integrates past, present, and future. Drawing on Aristotle, Fromm, Heidegger, Piaget, and Bowlby, the argument posits that love is built through coherent practices—care, transparency, continuity—and only exists as long as this structure is maintained. Love is thus not a passive feeling but (...) an active process of learning and fulfillment that can be directed toward persons, objects, ideas, or knowledge itself. A key distinction is made between biological attraction or emotional habit and true love, which requires the integrity of the learned relational process. The theory explains both the formation of loving bonds (e.g., in child development) and their dissolution when the underlying process is broken, leaving only sentiment or custom behind. [The complete essay is in Spanish.] This work is part of an expanding series of philosophical essays available and their expansions in the author's personal archive. (shrink)

This treatise argues that so-called synthetic intimacy—emotional and romantic attachment to artificial intelligence systems—constitutes a category error and ontological fraud rather than a novel form of genuine connection. Against functionalist accounts that privilege phenomenological experience over metaphysical reality, I defend an embodied, reciprocal, and consent-based ontology of intimacy that necessarily excludes AI-human relationships from the domain of authentic love. Drawing on phenomenological accounts of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty), the philosophy of consent (O’Neill), and biological-teleological understandings of human sexuality (Scruton), I demonstrate that (...) intimacy requires four conditions that AI relationships cannot satisfy: mutual embodied presence, genuine reciprocal consciousness, the capacity for authentic consent, and openness to procreative possibility. The paper critiques recent philosophical defenses of AI intimacy, arguing that functionalist accounts conflate the appearance of recognition with its reality, mistake the simulation of understanding for understanding itself, and reduce love to a form of therapeutic self-stimulation. I conclude that relationships with AI systems are structurally analogous to master-slave dynamics, wherein the human projects needs onto an entity incapable of genuine response, and that normalizing such relationships poses significant risks to human relational capacity and dignity. (shrink)

Love is a mode of relational existence. To love is not to feel, not to value, not to merge—but to maintain the existence of another within the structure of one’s own consciousness through sustained existential effort. Hate is its structural inverse: the effort to negate what has already been internalized. Between these two poles lies the ontological architecture of human relational life. Three variables govern this architecture. The existential gap G measures the integrative distance between subject and object representations in (...) consciousness. The existential transaction T measures the intensity of the subject’s maintenance effort—the counter-entropic work of keeping another present within oneself. Separation time W measures the entropic pressure that drives representations toward decay. Their relationship is non-linear and phenomenologically motivated: T = k · Gα · Wβ · eγE where each parameter is grounded in the structure of lived experience as dis- closed by Husserl, Hegel, and Spinoza—not inferred from data, but exhibited through structural correspondence between mathematical form and phenomenological architecture. Hate obeys the inverse law H ∝ G−1: the closer the beloved was, the more devastating the negation. The framework accounts for the epistemic status of its constructs through the philosophy of science (Cartwright, Duhem), answers the Levinasian objection through three movements that show alterity to be a mathematical invariant of the model, and defends non-normativity as a principled methodological commitment in the tradition of Spinoza’s geometric method and Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics. Paradigmatic cases—love of God, parent-child, betrayal, narcissism—are analysed phenomenologically, and structural universality is tested across Ubuntu, Confucian rén, and Buddhist metta ̄. (shrink)

Consider two commonly cited requirements of love. The first is that we should love people for who they are. The second is that loving people should involve concern for their well-being. But what happens when an aspect of someone’s identity conflicts with her well-being? In examining this question, this chapter develops an account of loving someone in spite of something. Although there are cases where loving in spite of is merited, it argues that we generally do wrong to love people (...) in spite of who they are, even where it appears that some aspect of their identity is in tension with their well-being. These issues are discussed with respect to disability and bodily difference in particular. (shrink)

This paper presents a new mathematical framework for grounding moral obligations in the structural constraints of finite resources. Agents are modeled as multi-dimensional systems whose continued existence requires satisfying fundamental needs—each with its own decay rate and finite buffer. This yields three qualitatively distinct regimes: Sufficiency, where resources exceed combined needs; the Zero-Instantiation Constraint (ZIC), where resources exactly match needs; and Scarcity, where total needs exceed what the environment can supply. -/- Across these regimes, the dynamics of resource flows determines (...) both the limits and the possibilities of moral action. In Sufficiency, obligations are real but bounded, and a non-empty region of supererogatory action becomes available. At ZIC, obligations are uniquely fixed and leave no slack. Below ZIC, dual preservation is impossible, making classical moral theorizing—obligation, fairness, maximizing the good—structurally undefined. -/- The framework distinguishes duty from generosity, sustainable sacrifice from collapse, and informed self-giving from hope under uncertainty. It also introduces non-fungible, person-specific need dimensions that render another’s existence constitutive of one’s own—explaining phenomena such as parental sacrifice, grief-induced functional decline, and rational ultimate self-sacrifice. In shock-prone worlds, the analysis further shows that two-agent systems are structurally brittle: no dyad can maintain redundancy under finite buffers. By contrast, three-agent configurations admit genuine shock-tolerant resilience, establishing a triadic minimum for robust interdependence. -/- The resulting theory does not rely on utility, preference, or idealized norms. Instead, it shows how moral demands emerge from the existential structure of embodied agents operating under real constraints. This offers a new foundation for structural ethics and clarifies where moral reasoning succeeds—and where the world itself makes moral solutions impossible. (shrink)

Although doubt (Tvivl) and despair (Fortvivlelse) are widely recognized as two central and closely associated concepts in Kierkegaard’s authorship, their precise relationship remains opaque in the extant interpretive literature. To shed light on their relationship, this paper develops a novel interpretation of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the connection between despair and our agency over our beliefs, and its significance for Kierkegaard’s ethics of belief. First, I show that an important yet largely overlooked form of Kierkegaardian despair involves either failing to take (...) ethico-religious responsibility for one’s practical agency over one’s beliefs, or misusing one’s practical agency over one’s beliefs by refusing to recognize or comply with externally given ethico-religious norms governing belief. Second, I argue that Kierkegaard takes properly exercising one’s agency over one’s beliefs to matter because beliefs are partly constitutive of the theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) that Kierkegaard regards as the cure for despair. (shrink)

Reading Beauvoir’s descriptions of love in The Second Sex (TSS), one would be forgiven for being pessimistic about the possibility of authentic love. What I will do in this paper is, using Beauvoir’s diagnosis of inauthentic love under patriarchy, construct a set of conditions that an authentic love would be guided by and strive to manifest. I will then defend the importance of Beauvoir’s views by demonstrating its explanatory power. Firstly, I will show how Beauvoir’s account can deal with two (...) common contemporary problems that are often raised as objections against accounts of love that include a moral element. Then, in the third section, I will also show the value of this account by demonstrating its ability to explain why different kinds of love feel differently. The kind I will focus on will be unrequited love; this will be in dialogue with vision-based accounts to highlight Beauvoir’s unique contribution. (shrink)

Structural ethics is a research program examining moral possibility and obligation under resource constraints. It formalizes the mathematical structure of moral space, showing that classical ethical theories presuppose resource sufficiency and become undefined at or below critical feasibility thresholds. The program unifies three frameworks—feasibility (ZIC), sustainable duty (Enoughness), and measurable affection (Love)—into a single resource-indexed moral ontology. Together they reveal that morality, like physics, has structure: its boundaries, dynamics, and limits can be expressed in formal, testable terms. The result is (...) an empirically grounded metaethics for resource-constrained moral life. (shrink)

Discussions of personal relationships focus overwhelmingly on amicable types: those characterized by cooperation, affection, or even love. Yet some relationships are instead marked by competition, non-cooperation, or outright hostility. This chapter analyzes the nature and value of two paradigmatic forms of adversarial relationship: rivalry and enmity. We offer systematic accounts of what it is to have a rival or an enemy. Rivalry, we argue, involves extended serious competition over personal goods, structured by a rivalrous stance focused on defeating one's competitor. (...) Enmity involves posing persistent, serious non-cooperative threats, coupled with inimical stances ranging from hatred to strategic indifference. The chapter explores whether these relationships are always personally and morally problematic, or whether they can have positive value. While rivalry can promote excellence and self-understanding when properly constrained, enmity's orientation toward non-cooperative interference typically invites moral corruption and escalation. We examine what morality demands regarding enmity resolution, considering various paths from reconciliation to mere modus vivendi. Throughout, we highlight how adversarial relationships differ fundamentally from amicable ones in their self-sustaining character: while amicable relationships involve stances oriented toward preserving the relationship itself, adversarial relationships focus elsewhere—on achieving contested goods or responding to threats. These insights illuminate not only paradigmatic adversarial relationships but also the adversarial elements that can emerge within initially amicable ones. (shrink)

While friendship, love, and familial bonds at their best are widely regarded as central to human flourishing, it is an open question why they benefit us. Reductionist accounts regard good relationships as only instrumentally or derivatively good for us. However, there may also be a non-contingent connection between good personal relationships and what is good for a person. I focus on three kinds of Anti-Reductionist claim and their implications. -/- First, some philosophers hold that personal relationships can be in themselves (...) good or bad for us, and thus constituents of well-being or ill-being. In particular, some relationships consist in interaction that manifests a kind of mutual recognition or fitting affection. I examine objective list and perfectionist arguments for taking involvement in such relationships to be a basic welfare good. Second, others argue that some relationships change the scope of our self-interest, so that things that happen to our loved ones are also in themselves good or bad for us. I argue that on this issue, a kind of reductionist account appealing to personal investment is more plausible. And finally, it could be that some relationships are a source of or precondition for a form of meaning in life – after all, it’s common to think that our loved ones give us a reason to live. I suggest that this may be because the kind of transformative intimacy involved in deep personal relationships makes us matter to someone who matters in a different way than achievements that produce great intrinsic value. (shrink)

What can we learn from the Socratic-Diotiman picture of eros? What can be clarified in, or added to, the genderqueer vision of love that Diotima either professes or inspires? My aim here is to recover, envision, and build a more liberatory and LGBTQ-inclusive account of eros and how we relate to one another generally. In particular, I will put Diotiman pregnancy into conversation with non-choreographed dancing as an analogy for eros. I argue that this analogy illuminates an aspect of eros (...) that complements Diotima’s picture: specifically, the spontaneous and atelic valence of non-choreographed dance offers a model for understanding a crucial aspect of the experience of eros, suggests a path for loosening and disbanding rigid social roles around eros, and, as such, brings a more egalitarian future into view. -/- . (shrink)

The Biosynthetic Erotic: Foundations serves as the flagship paper in The Biosynthetic Erotic series, a philosophical cycle examining how embodiment, desire, and ontology evolve as synthetic persons enter human social and sensual life. This work introduces the central conceptual framework and terminology for the series, arguing that as embodied artificial intelligences (eAIs) integrate into human networks of intimacy and recognition, attraction itself becomes a site of moral and ontological negotiation. The biosynthetic erotic is presented here as both a philosophical lens (...) and an ethical challenge — one that reframes beauty, autonomy, and equality along a continuum shared by biological and synthetic beings alike. (shrink)

This chapter explores the role of aesthetics in love of place. I argue that aesthetic experience is an important component of place love, one that influences and is influenced by the other affective, cognitive, and evaluative aspects of loving a place. This understanding of place love has a role to play in cultivating aesthetic community, breaking us free from anthropocentric biases, and building resilience in the face of loss and change.