The CEU Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk

(as part of its Departmental Colloquium series)

by

Edward Harcourt (Oxford University)

on

'Virtues and Vices of Attachment'

Tuesday, 29 January, 2013, 5.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412

ABSTRACT

Is love a response to rational autonomy (Velleman), or nothing to do with reason (Frankfurt)? This paper aims to do justice to both outlooks by offering a philosophical interpretation of attachment theory. The concept of love is argued to coincide roughly with that of attachment - a bond to another person for its own sake - and as such not a response to any particular properties (the Frankfurtian insight). However, attachments are to be seen as an Aristotelian ‘field’ divided into normative subspaces (secure and the various kinds of insecure attachment; compare the Aristotelian virtues and vices). It is thus a kind of bond that – as in secure attachment - is made good to the extent that intimacy is combined with the due acknowledgment of one’s own and the other’s autonomy (the Vellemanian insight). The paper also thereby shows why the concept of love is unified across parental, filial and ‘romantic’ subvarieties.