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Love: self-propagation, self-preservation, or ekstasis?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jennifer Whiting
Jennifer Whiting*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto
*
*Email: jen.whiting@utoronto.ca
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Abstract

My title refers to three accounts of interpersonal love: the rationalist (and ultimately rational egoist) account that Terence Irwin ascribes to Plato; the anti-rationalist but strikingly similar account that Harry Frankfurt endorses in his own voice; and the ‘ekstatic’ account that I – following the lead of Martha Nussbaum – find in Plato's Phaedrus. My claim is that the ekstatic account points to important features of interpersonal love to which the other accounts fail to do justice, especially reciprocity and a regulative ideal of equality.

Keywords

LovePlatoPhaedrusreciprocityequality

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Type
Articles
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Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , August 2013 , pp. 403 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2013

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Footnotes

1.

I dedicate this essay to the memory of two friends with whom I often discussed these issues: Rogers Albritton, who died during the year I was drafting this for an APA Symposium, and Paul Hoffman, at whose memorial conference I later presented a revised version. (Paul was himself a student and friend of Rogers and presented a paper at the memorial conference for Rogers.) Though we often disagreed about these issues, I like to think that each would see something of their own spirit living on in this paper. Each was a model of ‘ekstatic’ conversation, always engaging on equal and reciprocal terms with their interlocutors and willing to follow their interlocutors on the interlocutor's own terms. Paul once told me he thought he learned more from thinking about what his students were trying to say in their papers than from any other activity. He, like Rogers, had a talent for taking others seriously.

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