Troy Jollimore | California State University, Chico (original) (raw)
Papers by Troy Jollimore
Philosophies
People often say that romantic love should be unconditional, and they often want romantic love to... more People often say that romantic love should be unconditional, and they often want romantic love to last forever. These claims and desires are presumably linked: part of the reason it would be good for love to be unconditional is that it is assumed that such love, being detached from changing conditions, would last forever. This article argues that there are, indeed, kinds of unconditional and permanent love that are worth wanting, but also kinds that are not, and attempts to clarify just what it is that is valuable about these kinds of romantic love.
Philosophy of Love in the Past, Present, and Future, 2021
The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy, 2019
Essays in Philosophy, 2012
The Philosophers' Magazine, 2017
Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 2015
A great deal of the discussion pertaining to artificial intelligence, or AI, has focused on two q... more A great deal of the discussion pertaining to artificial intelligence, or AI, has focused on two questions: Can computers be built that convincingly mimic patterns of human behavior, and if so, how can they be built? This leaves aside a host of other questions that are not only interesting but important. Many of these are straightforwardly ethical, or at least have an ethical element. Should we try to build computers that mimic human behavior? Are there particular human behaviors that we should not try to simulate? Would a simulation of a certain pattern of human behavior—romantic love, for instance—be as good as the real thing, and if not, what would it be missing? Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her portrays a romantic relationship between a human being, Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) and a piece of bs_bs_banner MIDWEST STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY
Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 2009
... that understand metaphor and other figurative language as fundamentally cognitive in nature c... more ... that understand metaphor and other figurative language as fundamentally cognitive in nature centers on Donald Davidson's article, What ... It is thus very odd that Davidson should attempt to emphasize the lack of content and arationality of a ... Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk. ...
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love, 2017
Many philosophical accounts of love hold that love is a thoroughly arational phenomenon, that it ... more Many philosophical accounts of love hold that love is a thoroughly arational phenomenon, that it is not a response to value, or that we do not love for reasons. This chapter argues these accounts are mistaken: when we love we are typically responding to positive qualities of the beloved, and in rendering our love appropriate and intelligible these qualities provide reasons for love. However, the role of reasons in love is highly complex. This is, in part, because love’s reasons are nondeontic: love is never rationally required, no matter how many positive qualities a person may possess or how positive they may be. Although we love for reasons, there is a sense in which when we love we go beyond our reasons. Love is neither thoroughly arational nor pervasively rational; it is “something in between.”
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2005
It is relatively common for philosophers to doubt whether we have any reason to act as morality r... more It is relatively common for philosophers to doubt whether we have any reason to act as morality requires. But it is very difficult to find philosophers who are willing to doubt, in a similar way, the idea that we have reason to act as instrumental rationality requires; reason, that is, to take effective steps toward attaining the ends we have accepted as our own. The inference from the fact that a certain action is an effective means of satisfying an agent's ends to the conclusion that that agent has reason to perform that action is held by almost everyone to be, as it is sometimes said, automatic:once it is determined that the action in question bears the specified relation to one's goals, nothing more needs to be shown. But fewer philosophers are willing to grant that morality possesses this sort of automatic reason-giving force. Rather, it is quite commonly held that some additional consideration needs to be cited in order to show that an agent has reason to act as she is...
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion
Journal of Applied Philosophy
Midwest Studies In Philosophy
Les ateliers de l'éthique
Friendship and romantic love are, by their very nature, exclusive relationships. This paper sugge... more Friendship and romantic love are, by their very nature, exclusive relationships. This paper suggests that we can better understand the nature of the exclusivity in question by understanding what is wrong with the view of practical reasoning I call the Comprehensive Surveyor View. The CSV claims that practical reasoning, in order to be rational, must be a process of choosing the best available alternative from a perspective that is as detached and objective as possible. But this view, while it means to be neutral between various value-bearers, in fact incorporates a bias against those value-bearers that can only be appreciated from a perspective that is not detached—that can only be appreciated, for instance, by agents who bear long-term commitments to the values in question. In the realm of personal relationships, such commitments tend to give rise to the sort of exclusivity that characterizes friendship and romantic love; they prevent the agent from being impartial between her belo...
Love's Vision
Love often seems uncontrollable and irrational, but we just as frequently appear to have reasons ... more Love often seems uncontrollable and irrational, but we just as frequently appear to have reasons for loving the people we do. This book offers a new way of understanding love that accommodates both of these facts, arguing that love is guided by reason even as it resists and sometimes eludes rationality. At the same time, the book reconsiders love's moral status, acknowledging its moral dangers while arguing that it is, at heart, a moral phenomenon—an emotion that demands empathy and calls us away from excessive self-concern. Love is revealed as neither wholly moral nor deeply immoral, neither purely rational nor profoundly irrational. Rather, as Diotima says in Plato's Symposium, love is “something in between.” The book makes its case by proposing a “vision” view of love, according to which loving is a way of seeing that involves bestowing charitable attention on a loved one. This view recognizes the truth in the cliché “love is blind,” but holds that love's blindness do...
Nordisk poesi
Ved tiden for første verdenskrig var litteraturkritikken og litteraturhistorien som disiplin i en... more Ved tiden for første verdenskrig var litteraturkritikken og litteraturhistorien som disiplin i en situasjon hvor valget stod mellom å avvise moderne litteratur som kunst og verdig emne for vitenskap, eller også å revidere de nedarvede vurderingskriteriene. Som bekjent valgte visse formalister det siste. Med tilsetning av fenomenologi og strukturalisme ble det litteraturvitenskapen. Bortsett fra naerlesning som en pedagogisk light-versjon av de kontinentale strømningene har den engelskspråklige verden og dens nordiske satellitter holdt seg med analytisk filosofi. Her er målet tankemessig klarhet, midlene begrepsanalyse og presis argumentasjon. Retningen kom til som en språkorientert reaksjon på den britiske idealismen, som videreføres i drømmen om et entydig og kontekstfritt logisk-matematisk symbolspråk. Et slikt prosjekt forutsetter utvilsomt en egen meningssfaere separat fra så vel den konkrete verden som de naturlige språk med deres logiske inkonsekvenser og tegnbundne materialitet. Som ledd i sitt arbeid med å kartlegge verden og etter hvert også kunstartene filosofisk, er Oxford University Press kommet til poesien: The Philosophy of Poetry, en antologi redigert av John Gibson. Ikke overraskende valgte de logiske formalistene forskjellig fra de russiske litteraere formalistene og avstod fra modernistisk litteratur. I de sjeldne tilfeller hvor fiksjonslitteratur har vaert på banen, har det (ifølge Gibson) vaert med et eksempel fra en Sherlock Holmes-fortelling. Analytisk filosofi og språkkunst står steilt mot hverandre, så fjernt det er mulig å komme. Når Ronald de Sousa og Peter Lamarque (hver for seg) og Jesse Prinz og Eric Mandelbaum (sammen) innledningsvis bestemmer poesien, er det med termer som «Opacity», «Dense» og «Semantic Finegrainedness». Idealet er gjennomsiktighet, men disse filosofene tar høyde for at visse saksforhold kaller på semantisk subtilitet og tetthet som legitimerer slakkere krav til klarhet. Fra litteraturvitenskapelige hold virker til
Cogent Arts & Humanities
Is it possible to do philosophy by writing lyric poems-or reading them? How can a poem be genuine... more Is it possible to do philosophy by writing lyric poems-or reading them? How can a poem be genuinely philosophical, and can a philosophical poem do something that straightforward philosophical writing cannot do? Some have suggested that poems and philosophical writings have different aims and are subject to different and conflicting demands, which would render it difficult if not impossible to write a successful philosophical poem. I suggest that while this is true with respect to the aims of the standard academic philosophical journal essay, there is a different way of doing philosophical work-one that pays close attention to actual thought processes and that dramatizes the interplay of ideas-that lyric poetry is quite well suited to take on. Such work may be significant not only in helping us better understand human consciousness, but in letting us grasp insights and aspects of our experience of the world which the philosophical demand for simple, unified theories might otherwise tempt us to minimize or ignore altogether.
Philosophies
People often say that romantic love should be unconditional, and they often want romantic love to... more People often say that romantic love should be unconditional, and they often want romantic love to last forever. These claims and desires are presumably linked: part of the reason it would be good for love to be unconditional is that it is assumed that such love, being detached from changing conditions, would last forever. This article argues that there are, indeed, kinds of unconditional and permanent love that are worth wanting, but also kinds that are not, and attempts to clarify just what it is that is valuable about these kinds of romantic love.
Philosophy of Love in the Past, Present, and Future, 2021
The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy, 2019
Essays in Philosophy, 2012
The Philosophers' Magazine, 2017
Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 2015
A great deal of the discussion pertaining to artificial intelligence, or AI, has focused on two q... more A great deal of the discussion pertaining to artificial intelligence, or AI, has focused on two questions: Can computers be built that convincingly mimic patterns of human behavior, and if so, how can they be built? This leaves aside a host of other questions that are not only interesting but important. Many of these are straightforwardly ethical, or at least have an ethical element. Should we try to build computers that mimic human behavior? Are there particular human behaviors that we should not try to simulate? Would a simulation of a certain pattern of human behavior—romantic love, for instance—be as good as the real thing, and if not, what would it be missing? Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her portrays a romantic relationship between a human being, Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) and a piece of bs_bs_banner MIDWEST STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY
Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 2009
... that understand metaphor and other figurative language as fundamentally cognitive in nature c... more ... that understand metaphor and other figurative language as fundamentally cognitive in nature centers on Donald Davidson's article, What ... It is thus very odd that Davidson should attempt to emphasize the lack of content and arationality of a ... Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk. ...
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love, 2017
Many philosophical accounts of love hold that love is a thoroughly arational phenomenon, that it ... more Many philosophical accounts of love hold that love is a thoroughly arational phenomenon, that it is not a response to value, or that we do not love for reasons. This chapter argues these accounts are mistaken: when we love we are typically responding to positive qualities of the beloved, and in rendering our love appropriate and intelligible these qualities provide reasons for love. However, the role of reasons in love is highly complex. This is, in part, because love’s reasons are nondeontic: love is never rationally required, no matter how many positive qualities a person may possess or how positive they may be. Although we love for reasons, there is a sense in which when we love we go beyond our reasons. Love is neither thoroughly arational nor pervasively rational; it is “something in between.”
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2005
It is relatively common for philosophers to doubt whether we have any reason to act as morality r... more It is relatively common for philosophers to doubt whether we have any reason to act as morality requires. But it is very difficult to find philosophers who are willing to doubt, in a similar way, the idea that we have reason to act as instrumental rationality requires; reason, that is, to take effective steps toward attaining the ends we have accepted as our own. The inference from the fact that a certain action is an effective means of satisfying an agent's ends to the conclusion that that agent has reason to perform that action is held by almost everyone to be, as it is sometimes said, automatic:once it is determined that the action in question bears the specified relation to one's goals, nothing more needs to be shown. But fewer philosophers are willing to grant that morality possesses this sort of automatic reason-giving force. Rather, it is quite commonly held that some additional consideration needs to be cited in order to show that an agent has reason to act as she is...
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion
Journal of Applied Philosophy
Midwest Studies In Philosophy
Les ateliers de l'éthique
Friendship and romantic love are, by their very nature, exclusive relationships. This paper sugge... more Friendship and romantic love are, by their very nature, exclusive relationships. This paper suggests that we can better understand the nature of the exclusivity in question by understanding what is wrong with the view of practical reasoning I call the Comprehensive Surveyor View. The CSV claims that practical reasoning, in order to be rational, must be a process of choosing the best available alternative from a perspective that is as detached and objective as possible. But this view, while it means to be neutral between various value-bearers, in fact incorporates a bias against those value-bearers that can only be appreciated from a perspective that is not detached—that can only be appreciated, for instance, by agents who bear long-term commitments to the values in question. In the realm of personal relationships, such commitments tend to give rise to the sort of exclusivity that characterizes friendship and romantic love; they prevent the agent from being impartial between her belo...
Love's Vision
Love often seems uncontrollable and irrational, but we just as frequently appear to have reasons ... more Love often seems uncontrollable and irrational, but we just as frequently appear to have reasons for loving the people we do. This book offers a new way of understanding love that accommodates both of these facts, arguing that love is guided by reason even as it resists and sometimes eludes rationality. At the same time, the book reconsiders love's moral status, acknowledging its moral dangers while arguing that it is, at heart, a moral phenomenon—an emotion that demands empathy and calls us away from excessive self-concern. Love is revealed as neither wholly moral nor deeply immoral, neither purely rational nor profoundly irrational. Rather, as Diotima says in Plato's Symposium, love is “something in between.” The book makes its case by proposing a “vision” view of love, according to which loving is a way of seeing that involves bestowing charitable attention on a loved one. This view recognizes the truth in the cliché “love is blind,” but holds that love's blindness do...
Nordisk poesi
Ved tiden for første verdenskrig var litteraturkritikken og litteraturhistorien som disiplin i en... more Ved tiden for første verdenskrig var litteraturkritikken og litteraturhistorien som disiplin i en situasjon hvor valget stod mellom å avvise moderne litteratur som kunst og verdig emne for vitenskap, eller også å revidere de nedarvede vurderingskriteriene. Som bekjent valgte visse formalister det siste. Med tilsetning av fenomenologi og strukturalisme ble det litteraturvitenskapen. Bortsett fra naerlesning som en pedagogisk light-versjon av de kontinentale strømningene har den engelskspråklige verden og dens nordiske satellitter holdt seg med analytisk filosofi. Her er målet tankemessig klarhet, midlene begrepsanalyse og presis argumentasjon. Retningen kom til som en språkorientert reaksjon på den britiske idealismen, som videreføres i drømmen om et entydig og kontekstfritt logisk-matematisk symbolspråk. Et slikt prosjekt forutsetter utvilsomt en egen meningssfaere separat fra så vel den konkrete verden som de naturlige språk med deres logiske inkonsekvenser og tegnbundne materialitet. Som ledd i sitt arbeid med å kartlegge verden og etter hvert også kunstartene filosofisk, er Oxford University Press kommet til poesien: The Philosophy of Poetry, en antologi redigert av John Gibson. Ikke overraskende valgte de logiske formalistene forskjellig fra de russiske litteraere formalistene og avstod fra modernistisk litteratur. I de sjeldne tilfeller hvor fiksjonslitteratur har vaert på banen, har det (ifølge Gibson) vaert med et eksempel fra en Sherlock Holmes-fortelling. Analytisk filosofi og språkkunst står steilt mot hverandre, så fjernt det er mulig å komme. Når Ronald de Sousa og Peter Lamarque (hver for seg) og Jesse Prinz og Eric Mandelbaum (sammen) innledningsvis bestemmer poesien, er det med termer som «Opacity», «Dense» og «Semantic Finegrainedness». Idealet er gjennomsiktighet, men disse filosofene tar høyde for at visse saksforhold kaller på semantisk subtilitet og tetthet som legitimerer slakkere krav til klarhet. Fra litteraturvitenskapelige hold virker til
Cogent Arts & Humanities
Is it possible to do philosophy by writing lyric poems-or reading them? How can a poem be genuine... more Is it possible to do philosophy by writing lyric poems-or reading them? How can a poem be genuinely philosophical, and can a philosophical poem do something that straightforward philosophical writing cannot do? Some have suggested that poems and philosophical writings have different aims and are subject to different and conflicting demands, which would render it difficult if not impossible to write a successful philosophical poem. I suggest that while this is true with respect to the aims of the standard academic philosophical journal essay, there is a different way of doing philosophical work-one that pays close attention to actual thought processes and that dramatizes the interplay of ideas-that lyric poetry is quite well suited to take on. Such work may be significant not only in helping us better understand human consciousness, but in letting us grasp insights and aspects of our experience of the world which the philosophical demand for simple, unified theories might otherwise tempt us to minimize or ignore altogether.
In: The Things that Really Matter, ed. Michael Hauskeller, London: UCL Press 2022, 201-226.
UCL Press, 2022
While being rooted in the academic discourse, The Things That Really Matter comprehensively explo... more While being rooted in the academic discourse, The Things That Really Matter comprehensively explores the most fundamental aspects of human life in an accessible, non-technical language, adding fresh perspectives and new arguments and considerations that are designed to stimulate further debate and, in some cases, a deliberate redirection of research interests in the respective areas. It features a series of conversations about the things in our life that we all, in one way or another, wrestle with if we are at all concerned about what kind of world we live in and what our role in all this is: things like birth, age, and death, good and evil, the meaning of life, the nature of the self and the role the body plays for our identity, our gendered existence, love and faith, free will, beauty, and our experience of the sacred.
Situating abstract ideas in concrete experience, The Things That Really Matter encourages the reader to participate in an open-ended dialogue involving a variety of thinkers with different backgrounds and orientations. Lively and accessible, it shows thinking as an open-ended process and a collaborative endeavour that benefits from talking to each other rather than against each other, featuring real conversations, where ideas are explored, tested, changed, and occasionally dropped. It is thinking in motion, personal yet universal.