[PHILOS-L] 16th Braga Meetings: CFP for PANEL 9 / RETHINKING LOVE: CLICHÉS, NORMATIVITY, AND NEW MODELS OF INTIMACY
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Roberto Merrill
Dec 15, 2025, 2:18:36 PM (yesterday) Dec 15
to PHIL...@listserv.liv.ac.uk
PANEL 9 / RETHINKING LOVE: CLICHÉS, NORMATIVITY, AND NEW MODELS OF INTIMACY
CONVENORS ROBERTO MERRILL and ANA FREITAS
All enquiries about the panel should be sent to nrbme...@gmail.com.
This panel invites analytic contributions to the philosophy of love, bringing together work on its metaphysics, normativity, ethical and political significance, and emerging artificial forms. While a critical examination of widespread cultural and philosophical clichés remains a central point of departure, the panel aims at a broader reassessment of the conceptual structure of love and its place within moral life, democratic equality, and technologically mediated forms of intimacy. We particularly welcome papers that clarify foundational concepts, challenge inherited assumptions, and develop new models capable of accommodating the diversity, complexity, and evolving contours of loving relationships.
1. Critique of Cultural and Philosophical Clichés
What work do clichés about love perform, and how do they misrepresent the phenomenon they claim to elucidate? We invite contributions that examine and challenge narratives concerning mutuality, equality, unconditionality, volitional transparency, moral purity, permanence, harmony, and the idea that love is “beyond good and evil.”
2. Ontology and Conceptual Structure of Love
What kind of state, relation, or stance is love? Should it be conceptualised as evaluative perception (Velleman), volitional necessity and caring (Frankfurt), a pattern of formal emotions (Helm), relationship-dependent reasons (Kolodny), or as Simon May argues a needful attachment whose paradigm is filial rather than romantic love? We also welcome work on pluralist ontologies of love, which treat love as a family of related but non-reducible phenomena (as developed by authors such as Jollimore and others). Analytic assessments refining, extending, or contesting these accounts are encouraged.
3. Love and Ethics: Partiality, Equality, and Normative Conflict
How should we understand the tension between love’s inherent partiality and the demands of impartial moral theories? Are the reasons of love agent-relative in ways that conflict with egalitarian moral frameworks? Does love possess its own form of normativity, irreducible to moral justification and potentially in tension with it?
4. Love and Politics: Parental Partiality, Favoritism, and the Moral Status of Love
The political significance of love depends crucially on whether it is best understood as a form of favoritism or, following Velleman, as a moral emotion grounded in the recognition of the other’s personhood. If love is essentially favoritism, parental love becomes its paradigmatic case, intuitively legitimate within intimate life but potentially at odds with egalitarian ideals, especially equality of opportunity. On this view, family-based partiality appears as a major generator of unjust advantage. However, if love is a moral emotion rather than a preference-based favoring, then the connection between love and favoritism is not conceptual but contingent. This distinction may allow for a reconciliation between the value of loving relationships and the demands of social justice: parental love might motivate forms of care, recognition, and moral attention that do not necessarily translate into unfair distributive advantages. We invite contributions examining how different metaphysical conceptions of love bear on debates about parental partiality, familial prerogatives, and the limits of egalitarian justice.
5. Love and Artificial Intelligence: Toward an Alternative Model of Intimacy
AI-mediated intimacy (matching algorithms, affective computing, companion agents) may constitute a distinct and increasingly salient model of love, neither purely romantic nor filial. How does algorithmic mediation shape attachment, vulnerability, selectivity, and recognition? Can relationships with non-human agents meaningfully count as forms of love, and if so, what does this imply for the metaphysics and ethics of intimacy?
Analytic, conceptual, and empirically informed papers are welcome.
All enquiries about the panel should be sent to nrbme...@gmail.com.
This panel invites analytic contributions to the philosophy of love, bringing together work on its metaphysics, normativity, ethical and political significance, and emerging artificial forms. While a critical examination of widespread cultural and philosophical clichés remains a central point of departure, the panel aims at a broader reassessment of the conceptual structure of love and its place within moral life, democratic equality, and technologically mediated forms of intimacy. We particularly welcome papers that clarify foundational concepts, challenge inherited assumptions, and develop new models capable of accommodating the diversity, complexity, and evolving contours of loving relationships.
1. Critique of Cultural and Philosophical Clichés
What work do clichés about love perform, and how do they misrepresent the phenomenon they claim to elucidate? We invite contributions that examine and challenge narratives concerning mutuality, equality, unconditionality, volitional transparency, moral purity, permanence, harmony, and the idea that love is “beyond good and evil.”
2. Ontology and Conceptual Structure of Love
What kind of state, relation, or stance is love? Should it be conceptualised as evaluative perception (Velleman), volitional necessity and caring (Frankfurt), a pattern of formal emotions (Helm), relationship-dependent reasons (Kolodny), or as Simon May argues a needful attachment whose paradigm is filial rather than romantic love? We also welcome work on pluralist ontologies of love, which treat love as a family of related but non-reducible phenomena (as developed by authors such as Jollimore and others). Analytic assessments refining, extending, or contesting these accounts are encouraged.
3. Love and Ethics: Partiality, Equality, and Normative Conflict
How should we understand the tension between love’s inherent partiality and the demands of impartial moral theories? Are the reasons of love agent-relative in ways that conflict with egalitarian moral frameworks? Does love possess its own form of normativity, irreducible to moral justification and potentially in tension with it?
4. Love and Politics: Parental Partiality, Favoritism, and the Moral Status of Love
The political significance of love depends crucially on whether it is best understood as a form of favoritism or, following Velleman, as a moral emotion grounded in the recognition of the other’s personhood. If love is essentially favoritism, parental love becomes its paradigmatic case, intuitively legitimate within intimate life but potentially at odds with egalitarian ideals, especially equality of opportunity. On this view, family-based partiality appears as a major generator of unjust advantage. However, if love is a moral emotion rather than a preference-based favoring, then the connection between love and favoritism is not conceptual but contingent. This distinction may allow for a reconciliation between the value of loving relationships and the demands of social justice: parental love might motivate forms of care, recognition, and moral attention that do not necessarily translate into unfair distributive advantages. We invite contributions examining how different metaphysical conceptions of love bear on debates about parental partiality, familial prerogatives, and the limits of egalitarian justice.
5. Love and Artificial Intelligence: Toward an Alternative Model of Intimacy
AI-mediated intimacy (matching algorithms, affective computing, companion agents) may constitute a distinct and increasingly salient model of love, neither purely romantic nor filial. How does algorithmic mediation shape attachment, vulnerability, selectivity, and recognition? Can relationships with non-human agents meaningfully count as forms of love, and if so, what does this imply for the metaphysics and ethics of intimacy?
Analytic, conceptual, and empirically informed papers are welcome.
Professor Auxiliar | Assistant Professor
Diretor do Departamento de Filosofia | Head of Department of Philosophy
Universidade do Minho | University of Minho
Investigador | Researcher
Centro de Ética, Política & Sociedade • Universidade do Minho | Centre for Ethics, Politics & Society • University of Minho
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