Browsing by Subject "Love -- Philosophy"

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    Love as Recollection in Plato's Symposium
    (2010) LeFrancois, Meghan; Mulligan, Bret
    In Plato's Symposium, the interlocutors take turns giving speeches about love. The careful reader can draw several parallels between love as it is discussed throughout this dialogue and recollection as it is presented in Plato's Meno and Phaedo. According to the recollection thesis, humans have latent, innate knowledge, and throughout our lives, we recollect it, making it explicit and articulate. In the Symposium's culminating speech—that of Socrates—I argue that we learn that love is, in fact, a kind of recollection; we learn that love is the recollection of the form of beauty. In this speech, Socrates argues that love is an ascent. When we love correctly, we complete this ascent, and recollect the form of beauty. When we love incorrectly, we only ascend partially and so we partially recollect; in the process, we give birth not to knowledge, but to ideas. Socrates' speech invites us to reconsider the dialogue's other speeches. I argue that each speech not only shows parallels between love and recollection, but contributes to Socrates' argument that love is a species of recollection. The speeches of Pausanias and Eryximachus, for example, anticipate the distinction Socrates later draws between a correct and an incorrect kind of love. Alicibiades' speech—the only speech after Socrates'—reiterates, in a story, Socrates' argument for love's being a kind of recollection. I argue that this reading of the dialogue supports an interpretation of the recollection thesis according to which not only philosophers, but all humans recollect. Finally, I provide a possible reason that Socrates is the first interlocutor to explicitly mention recollection; perhaps he is the only interlocutor with something like explicit knowledge of what love is.
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    Uniting Love and Obligation: Becoming an Expert at Life
    (2012) Ellman, Isaac; Macbeth, Danielle; Allen, Benjamin W.
    This essay will aim to present a fundamentally bodily way of being in the world that unites loves and obligation. First, this essay will present the mismatch of love and obligation as an intuitive problem of everyday living. Then, philosophical writings of Nietzsche, Aristotle, and Kant will be discussed as examples of works that confront the problem of the mismatch of love and obligation. We will see that the noble way of being in the world, as discussed by Nietzsche, does not involve a mismatch, but is no longer accessible to us. Kant's reconciliation of this mismatch, in the giving up of inclination for duty, is unsatisfactory because it requires reflective mediation. Aristotle achieves a unity in his discussion of phronesis, but he is not sensitive to today's issues of multiplicity of context. In addition, Aristotle loses individualization in his uniting of love and obligation, so we ought to write a new story to achieve this unity. We will look to the expert coper in the context of a craft who both achieves a unity of love and obligation and avoid problems associated with Aristotle's philosophy. Then, we will see that by conceiving of language as craft, it will allow for the possibility of becoming an expert at language. Because language is the form of the world that shows up to us conceptual beings, achieving expertise at language will allow us to achieve expertise in everyday living, outside of the context of a craft, and unite love and obligation in our daily life. We will see that expert speech is equivalent to Buber's notion of I-You speech (as opposed to I-It speech) which involves bodily confronting another individual with one's whole being. When we speak as an I for a You, we will regain immediacy of being in the world, unite love and obligation, and become an expert at life.