Table of contents for Issue 35 - March/May 2022 in New Philosopher

“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.”Susan Sontag Love is all around: we love our partners, our family, our pets, our possessions, ourselves; we love food, music, games, activities, knowledge, beauty. We even love love itself. But for such an omnipresent feeling, if that’s indeed what it is, it is awfully difficult to pin down. This hasn’t stopped us trying, or perhaps it is one of the reasons why we do: 70 per cent of all songs recorded since the 1960s have been about love (followed closely by “and/or sex”, which has jumped from 18 to 40 per cent since the ‘60s) and last year 50 million romance novels were sold in the US alone, making up almost 20 per cent of all book sales. This is hardly a…

DBC Pierre DBC Pierre won the Booker Prize for his debut novel Vernon God Little, which was also awarded the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003 – the first time the two awards had been granted to the same book. Pierre is also the author of Ludmilla’s Broken English, Lights out in Wonderland, a book of short stories, and a novella, Breakfast with the Borgias. He was awarded the James Joyce Award from the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin. Susan Wolf Susan Wolf is the Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work ranges widely over topics in moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and…

Here’s a fun little thought-experiment, derived from the work of Ernest Gellner. Try jotting down a list of all the things you love about your partner, if you have one. (If you don’t, try to picture your perfect beloved. If you’re just not into romantic love at all, sit back and enjoy what we’re about to do to the concept.) Don’t panic if you find making this list harder than you think it should be. How do you sum up somebody you love in just a few adjectives? It almost feels like a sort of betrayal to even try, treating someone as if they could be reduced to a laundry-list of lovable qualities. Faced with the task, some people will fall back on cliché or generic praise (“He’s so kind…

Polygyny, when a man has more than one wife at the same time, is permissable legally and culturally in some countries around the world. Polyandry, the practice of a woman having more than one husband at the one time, is now illegal in virtually every country in the world. According to a study conducted in the UK by researchers at Swansea, Bristol, and Nottingham universities, both men and women identified ‘three’ as the ideal number of prior sexual dalliances by a prospective partner. On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling that granted same-sex couples a constitutional right to marry. About six-in-ten Americans (61%) support same-sex marriage. The estimated prevalence of Narcissism Personality Disorder (NPD) is around 1%, although some studies say up to 6%. The…

The idea of love is, of course, deeply precious to us – it’s the name we give to our most emotionally invested, generous, tender, complex and (at times) most bruising relationships with other people. Our love for a partner, for our child or for a parent is (with all the attendant drama of longing, fear, and loss) central to our identity. But there has always been an impulse to enlarge the realm of love outwards from this intimate circle. A curious feature of early Christianity for instance, in the eyes of pagan observers, was the notion that one might love a god – not simply worship them as a power. The single thinker who, perhaps, was most focused on love was the Islamic scholar Abu Ali ibn Sīna, known to…

Zan Boag: I read in the preface to the paperback edition of your book The Narcissism Epidemic that you had written the book before Twitter had got going. It’s quite easy to have a look at the current environment and talk about narcissism online, but you were writing about it before social media had really started to take hold. In referring to it as an epidemic, a word that’s top of mind at the moment, you made a comparison to obesity and to disease in general. Why did you see it, and do you continue to see it, like a ‘disease’? W. Keith Campbell: When comparing narcissism to obesity, we were just trying to look at comparative social phenomena in terms of effect size. And that’s where obesity came from.…

It’s old news that compulsory monogamy is the mating system of the capitalist patriarchy. Friedrich Engels and Bertrand Russell both made the case for this connection between economics and the way we arrange our intimate relationships. So have many others, myself included. Under patriarchy, the inheritance of private property demands that men be sure of paternity. This in turn means that women’s sexuality – and correspondingly their care, love, and attention – must be tightly monitored and controlled. It’s unsurprising that women themselves eventually became private property within this worldview, as much as gold, food, or land. Later socio-political movements rejected the idea that women could be literally owned, and eventually monogamous control began to be exercised more symmetrically, with men also – at least in principle – being expected…

On July 21, 1913, Franz Kafka took to his diary to list the pros and cons of getting married. He was hopelessly in love with Felice Bauer at the time and suffering the throes of an existential agony over his future. Kafka would eventually pen some 500 love letters to Bauer, extending beyond the five-year period during which the couple were twice engaged, but never married. In his diary he listed seven “arguments” that tugged him one way then the other, the first being his “inability to endure life alone”. With more self-knowledge than was perhaps evident in his love letters, he confessed: “I am incapable, alone, of bearing the assault of my own life, the demands of my own person, the attacks of time and old age…” And yet…

newphilosopher.com is an online portal for exploring philosophical ideas on ways to live a more fulfilling life. Read the articles, join in discussions, watch free online documentaries and plan your trip to the next festival near you. Deepfakes: Truth in trouble Deepfake technology is already sufficiently advanced to produce a video that would stand up to at least a day or two’s scrutiny. Nothing but the truth For Kant, any lie would be an instance of treating someone else as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. New Philosopher online store Visit the online store for previous issues of New Philosopher magazine, subscriptions as well as gift ideas. How are you smart? I introduce the concept of an‚ individual-centred school‚ that takes this multifaceted view…

Same-sex marriage is legally performed and recognised in thirty-one countries: ARGENTINA, AUSTRALIA, AUSTRIA, BELGIUM, BRAZIL, CANADA, CHILE, COLOMBIA, COSTA RICA, DENMARK, ECUADOR, FINLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, ICELAND, IRELAND, LUXEMBOURG, MALTA, MEXICO, THE NETHERLANDS, NEW ZEALAND, NORWAY, PORTUGAL, SOUTH AFRICA, SPAIN, SWEDEN, SWITZERLAND, TAIWAN, THE UNITED KINGDOM, THE UNITED STATES, AND URUGUAY. Thirty-three countries prohibit same-sex marriage on a national level: ARMENIA, BELARUS, BOLIVIA, BULGARIA, BURKINA FASO, BURUNDI, CAMBODIA, THE CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC, CROATIA, THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, GEORGIA, HONDURAS, HUNGARY, JAMAICA, KENYA, KYRGYZSTAN, LATVIA, LITHUANIA, MOLDOVA, MONTENEGRO, PALAU, PARAGUAY, POLAND, RUSSIA, RWANDA, SERBIA, SLOVAKIA, SOUTH SUDAN, UGANDA, UKRAINE, VENEZUELA, AND ZIMBABWE.…

Love! Applicable to deities, people, life, sports, and pizza. Featuring a range of vibrant states, including: attraction, affection, infatuation, passion, divinity, attachment, bliss, contentment, compulsion, companionship, heartache, torment, hysteria, madness, and murder. So what are we really talking about? It’s as if we’ve named every creature after a horse, but have lost sight of the actual horse. If there even is an actual horse. Granted, we simply mean to say that love drives all those states, but we never identify that driver. Many states we attribute to love are extreme crossovers from other species of condition. Take for example Carl Tanzler von Cosel, the Dresden-born radiographer who was said to have experienced visions as a child. Among them was one of a dark-haired woman who he knew was destined to…

As I type these words, my son and daughter are aged eight and six years old respectively.They’re running around the garden, screaming and laughing and pretending to be various animals – a cat, a dog, a dragon – while I try to focus on the crawl of type across my screen. In what ways are, and aren’t, they like the first of our ancient ancestors to tread this ground? The clothes my children are wearing; the (relative) cleanness of their skins; the language they’re speaking: all of these things are specific to the present. Yet, if I had somehow been handed two newborn late-Palaeolithic babies to adopt, they would happily have mastered everything my children have done. They too would be modern humans – because modernity is a description not…

Honoré De Balzac to Madame Hanska June 1835 MY BELOVED ANGEL, I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them. I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me. As for my heart, there you will always be – very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason? This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me. I rise up every moment say…

noun: 1. An intense feeling of deep affection; 2. A feeling of deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone; 3. Affectionate greetings conveyed to someone on one’s behalf; 4. A formula for ending an affectionate letter; 5. A personified figure of love, often represented as Cupid; 6. A great interest and pleasure in something; 7. A person or thing that one loves; 8. (British informal) A friendly form of address; 9. (in tennis, squash, and some other sports) a score of zero, nil. [verb] 1. Feel deep affection for (someone); 2. Feel a deep romantic or sexual attachment to (someone); 3. Like or enjoy very much. Origin: Old English lufu, of Germanic origin; from an Indo-European root shared by Sanskritlubhyati‘desires’, Latinlibet‘it is pleasing’,libido‘desire’, also byleaveandlief. Source: Oxford English Dictionary…

The Logician Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 Pure benevolence Love is a word which covers a variety of feelings; I have used it purposely, as I wish to include them all. Love as an emotion – which is what I am speaking about, for love ‘on principle’ does not seem to me genuine – moves between two poles: on one side, pure delight in contemplation; on the other, pure benevolence. Where inanimate objects are concerned, delight alone enters in; we cannot feel benevolence towards a landscape or a sonata. This type of enjoyment is presumably the source of art. It is stronger, as a rule, in very young children than in adults, who are apt to view objects in a utilitarian spirit. It plays a large part in our…

The fountains mingle with the river And the rivers with the ocean, The winds of heaven mix for ever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single; All things by a law divine In one spirit meet and mingle. Why not I with thine?— See the mountains kiss high heaven And the waves clasp one another; No sister-flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth And the moonbeams kiss the sea: What is all this sweet work worth If thou kiss not me?…

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When I spotted my husband, he was talking to a pre-schooler. My first thought was that we’d have to abort our little game: pretending I don’t know the man I live with is one thing; doing it in front of an audience is ludicrous. I resented him for making the game harder, but I was also proud of him. After all, it was I who had suggested we play strangers for the weekend in a foreign city while his parents watched our kids back home. It was well within his rights – not to mention perfectly in keeping with his personality – to chat to a father-daughter team at a café. He was putting me to the test, but maybe I’d surprise myself. Ostensibly, my husband and I had gotten…

I recently attended a wedding where the groom told a story of his and his new wife’s lives over almost a decade. The times when they almost met, but didn’t. The time when he – an Australian – was performing in a London pub with his future wife in the audience.They wouldn’t meet for years. A sequence of near-misses,almost and what-ifs culminated in a wonderfully romantic speech on their wedding day. But none of it would have been, were it not for a dating app. Fate had tried to bring them together to no avail. It took an algorithm, carefully curating their prospective partners, in combination with their shared attraction in each other’s pictures and 25-word biographies, to turn a set of near-misses into a genuine romance. A lot of…

Famous throughout all the Aonian cities, Tiresias gave faultless answers to people who consulted him. Dusky Liriope, the Naiad, was the first to test the truth and the accuracy of his words, whom once the river-god Cephisus clasped in his winding streams, and took by force under the waves. This loveliest of nymphs gave birth at full term to a child whom, even then, one could fall in love with, called Narcissus. Being consulted as to whether the child would live a long life, to a ripe old age, the seer with prophetic vision replied, “If he does not discover himself.” For a long time the augur’s pronouncement appeared empty words. But in the end it proved true: the outcome, and the cause of his death, and the strangeness of…

Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish philosopher known for his cryptic pronouncements on art and history – “where we see the appearance of a chain of events, [the Angel of History] sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet”did not live a settled life. From the age of 13, when he was sent to boarding school in the countryside, Benjamin was on the move. Whether it was to continue his studies, look for work, or escape from Nazi persecution, Benjamin never spent long in one place. Despite this itinerancy, and despite being a leading Marxist intellectual, Benjamin did not travel lightly. On the contrary, Benjamin’s Marxism did not preclude him from being attached to (certain) commodities: most notably, a painting by…

Susan Wolf is the Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work ranges widely over topics in moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind. Before moving to Chapel Hill, Wolf taught at Harvard University, the University of Maryland, and the Johns Hopkins University. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and was President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association for 2010–11. Her works include the articles “Moral Saints and “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility”, and books including Freedom Within Reason, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, The Variety of Values, and Understanding Love. Zan Boag: You’ve been investigating ‘love’ for quite some time. What does love…

What Love Is Carrie Jenkins Romantic love In my time and place, the social role of romantic love – a composite image that emerges from the overlaying of all our cultural representations, norms, and narratives – builds in some features that are causing harm and need to change. I’ve reviewed just a few in this chapter: the normative assumption that love should lead to marriage and biological reproduction; the norm of romantic monogamy; amatonormativity; and, permeating all of these while also contributing further harms of their own, the stereotypical gender roles for romantic love. These social norms work together to make romantic love a powerful force for the creation of “traditional” nuclear family units, causing tangible damage to anyone caught in the crosshairs. The New Science of Narcissism W. Keith…

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