Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: A maid sat captive in a stone tower.She loved a lord.Why? Ask the wind and the stars, ask the God of Life; for none other knows these things.And the lord was her friend and her lover; but time passed and one fine day he saw another, and his feelings changed.-Knut Hamsun, Pan T he romanticism of my title is a family of views about love's relationship to reasons.What unites these views is the idea that love is immunised from assessments of reasonableness and appropriateness.As we'll see, philosophers express romantic ideologies in a variety of non-identical formulations, and routinely slide between normative and descriptive claims.But the characteristic romantic thought is a normative one: love is an outlier in moral psychology in virtue of its relationship to justification.Love's insulation from reasons, it is said, accounts for much of its puzzling nature, and appreciating this is the source of important insights about the human condition.1 Like many philosophers, I find romantic views implausible.Nonetheless, understanding what motivates romanticism is important, in part because of its connections to widespread patterns of thinking, behaviour, and social practice.This essay engages in an extended reconstruction and critique of possible motivations for romantic ideas.Besides giving this interesting family of views its due, my critique sheds light on various sources of confusion in our thinking about
Author: Sam Shpall
Institution: The University of Sydney
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4245836109