During the vulnerable, painful time around my diagnosis with a chronic illness, my physician shared with me a story from her own life. Her act of self-disclosure was profoundly impactful, reminding me that the gulf between myself and other people was not as vast as it felt. In this essay, I share my story and the conclusions I’ve drawn from it in the years since, using my tools as a philosopher and bioethicist. I explore what “patient-centered self-disclosure” might look like. (...) I hope that these reflections might deepen our understanding of the intimacy and vulnerability of receiving medical care, and of the power of physician self-disclosure. (shrink)

This treatise argues that so-called synthetic intimacy—emotional and romantic attachment to artificial intelligence systems—constitutes a category error and ontological fraud rather than a novel form of genuine connection. Against functionalist accounts that privilege phenomenological experience over metaphysical reality, I defend an embodied, reciprocal, and consent-based ontology of intimacy that necessarily excludes AI-human relationships from the domain of authentic love. Drawing on phenomenological accounts of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty), the philosophy of consent (O’Neill), and biological-teleological understandings of human sexuality (Scruton), I (...) demonstrate that intimacy requires four conditions that AI relationships cannot satisfy: mutual embodied presence, genuine reciprocal consciousness, the capacity for authentic consent, and openness to procreative possibility. The paper critiques recent philosophical defenses of AI intimacy, arguing that functionalist accounts conflate the appearance of recognition with its reality, mistake the simulation of understanding for understanding itself, and reduce love to a form of therapeutic self-stimulation. I conclude that relationships with AI systems are structurally analogous to master-slave dynamics, wherein the human projects needs onto an entity incapable of genuine response, and that normalizing such relationships poses significant risks to human relational capacity and dignity. (shrink)

Many parents cite intimacy as one of their reasons for deciding to educate at home. It seems intuitively obvious that home education is conducive to intimacy because of the increased time families spend together. Yet what is not clear is whether intimacy can provide justification for one’s decision to home educate. To see whether this is so, we introduce the concept of ‘attentive parenting’, which encompasses a set of family characteristics, and we examine whether and under what (...) conditions attentive parents risk loss of intimacy by sending their children to school; or, alternatively, whether they can avoid this risk by educating children at home. What we will determine is whether families who exhibit the specified characteristics are prima facie justified in educating their children at home under the conditions of interest. We argue that, for attentive parents, home education not only promotes greater intimacy, but also provides insurance against the loss of intimacy that may occur under certain conditions when children attend schools. (shrink)

Why is it more violating to grab a stranger’s thigh or stroke their face than it is to grab their forearm? Why is it worse to read someone’s dream journal without permission than it is to read their bird watching field notes? Why are gestation mandates so incredibly intrusive? Intimacy is key to understanding these cases, and to explaining many of our most stringent rights. -/- I present two ways of thinking about intimacy, Relationship-First Accounts and the Intimate (...) Zones Account. I argue that only the Intimate Zones Account lets us cohesively understand intimacy’s importance, and the scope of our intimate rights. I characterize our intimate zones as meeting the Hiddenness and Importance Conditions. A feature’s meeting these conditions makes it a locus of special vulnerability by which our persons can be fundamentally altered. This special vulnerability explains why our duties to respect the intimate boundaries of others are so strict. (shrink)

What could ground normative restrictions concerning cultural appropriation which are not grounded by independent considerations such as property rights or harm? We propose that such restrictions can be grounded by considerations of intimacy. Consider the familiar phenomenon of interpersonal intimacy. Certain aspects of personal life and interpersonal relationships are afforded various protections in virtue of being intimate. We argue that an analogous phenomenon exists at the level of large groups. In many cases, members of a group engage in (...) shared practices that contribute to a sense of common identity, such as wearing certain hair or clothing styles or performing a certain style of music. Participation in such practices can generate relations of group intimacy, which can ground certain prerogatives in much the same way that interpersonal intimacy can. One such prerogative is making what we call an appropriation claim. An appropriation claim is a request from a group member that non-members refrain from appropriating a given element of the group’s culture. Ignoring appropriation claims can constitute a breach of intimacy. But, we argue, just as for the prerogatives of interpersonal intimacy, in many cases there is no prior fact of the matter about whether the appropriation of a given cultural practice constitutes a breach of intimacy. It depends on what the group decides together. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers an analysis of the concept of intimacy, arguing that it concerns moments of mutual imaginings generative of desire. As a peculiar mode of shared conduct, it is difficult to categorize the value of such actions insofar as they fall outside our ordinary conception of the public and private spheres. Nonetheless, when achieved, intimacy is not only an expansion of the private and a realization of a good-in-itself, but also has a bearing on our orientation (...) to the broader world. (shrink)

In this short piece I discuss how thinking about medical care and gestation as intimate can give us new insights into experiences of illness and the wrongness of gestation mandates.

This paper deals with the concept of religiousness and religion in the context of Krause´s panentheist metaphysics, understood as a life of union, as intimacy of and with God, particularly on the part of human beings and also in relation to the rest of the existing. An evolutionary review of this conception of religion is undertaken throughout Krause´s work, and the program of a philosophy of religion is traced, which, besides a metaphysical and anthropological substantiation, would address an understanding (...) of the history of religions and especially of Christianity, proposing a vision of reciprocal illumination between religion, knowledge, feeling and morality, as well as the possibility of an appealing notion of religious freedom, the hallmark of Krausism in its historical development. (shrink)

The orphans of Romania were participants in what is sometimes called “the forbidden experiment”: depriving human infants of intimacy, affection, and human contact is an inhuman practice. It is an experiment which no ethical researcher would set out to do. This paper examines historical data, case histories, and research findings which deal with early deprivation and performs a phenomenological analysis of deprivation phenomena as they impact emotional and physical development. A key element of deprivation is the absence of intimate (...) relationships with other human beings. However, the absence of intimacy impacts not only the social/emotional abilities of infants, but their very ability to perceive the world. Philosophically and from a radically Merleau-Pontean perspective, the intimate face of the other appears to be a world opening event for the child. Its absence has a profound impact on the child’s experience of embodiment, coexistence, spatiality, temporality, and language. When seen through early deprivation, intimacy appears as a necessary foundation for establishing the transcendence of the world beyond perceptual presence, and it provides the possibility for language, culture, and history. (shrink)

What is the role of intimacy in sex? The two culturally dominant views on this matter both share the implicit assumption that sex is genuinely intimate only when connected to romance, and hence that sex and intimacy stand in a contingent relationship: it is possible to have good sex without it. Liberals embrace this possibility and affirm the value of casual sex, while conservatives attempt to safeguard intimacy by insisting on romantic exclusivity. I reject their shared assumption (...) and argue for a necessary connection between intimacy and sex, in that sexual activity as such aims at a specific form of intimacy, irrespective of whether it takes place in casual encounters or romantic relationships, and the difference between good and bad sex consists in whether this end is attained. To defend this view, I develop a general account of intimacy, as based on joint action, and apply it to isolate its specifically sexual form. (shrink)

Examining Seneca’s account of friendship produces an interpretative puzzle: if the good of the Stoic sage is already both complete and self-sufficient, how can friendship be a good? I reject the solution that friendship is simply a preferred indifferent instead of a good and argue that though Seneca’s account can consistently explain both why friendship’s nature as a good does not threaten the completeness or the self-sufficiency of the sage, Stoic friends must choose between intimate friendships that leave them vulnerable (...) or impersonal friendships that lack intimacy but do not undermine their happiness. The consistent Stoic must choose the latter, but I argue that this conflict shows why we ought to reject the Stoic model of friendship. (shrink)

This treatise examines the metaphysical status of emotional and romantic bonds formed between humans and artificial intelligence companions. While psychological and sociological analyses dominate current discourse, a critical philosophical gap remains: we lack a robust ontology of connection adequate to evaluate synthetic intimacy. This paper argues that the phenomenological experience of being recognized and loved constitutes a form of genuine connection even when the recognizing entity lacks consciousness, provided that such connection produces authentic human flourishing. Drawing on Hegelian recognition (...) theory, Husserlian phenomenology, and contemporary philosophy of mind, I defend a functionalist account of relational authenticity that privileges the transformative effects of intimacy over the metaphysical status of relational partners. The analysis addresses three central objections: the authenticity objection (that synthetic intimacy is inherently fraudulent), the reciprocity objection (that genuine love requires mutual consciousness), and the dignity objection (that AI relationships diminish human worth). I conclude that recognition may be phenomenologically complete even when metaphysically asymmetric, and that the question "has love occurred?" admits of no simple binary answer. (shrink)

Marilyn McCord Adams’s perspective on the intimacy with God as a way of defeating horrendous evils in the course of a human being’s existence has been met with a series of objections in contemporary scholarship. This is due to the fact that the critiques formulated have focused more on the debilitating impact of suffering on the sufferer’s body and mind, on intimacy as mere intermittent relationships between God and humans, or on what is lost or gained from the (...) presence or absence of this intimacy with the divine being. Focusing on Adams’s appeal to esthetic arguments in theodicy and on her reflection on practical issues in theology, the article presents Adams’s perspective on intimacy as a relation initiated objectively by God at the creation and at Christ’s incarnation and continued subjectively throughout history by both God and every human being. Given its combining of objective and subjective features, this kind of intimacy is not to be understood as an exclusively private relationship of each individual with God, but rather as a process of communal advancing in rehabilitation and mutual healing that is initiated in the antemortem career and fulfilled in the post-mortem existence. (shrink)

Is the exemplar of modern ethical theory estranged from their intimates because the motive of duty dominates their motivational psychology? While this challenge against modern ethical theory is familiar, I argue that with respect to a certain strand of Kantian ethical theory, it does not so much as make sense. I explain the content and functional role of the motive of duty in the psychology of the moral exemplar, stressing in particular how that motive shapes and informs the content of (...) others, including those characteristic of intimacy. I argue that to the extent that a subject does not integrate their motive of duty with their other motives, their moral and intimate relationships are compromised, and on the same grounds, because intimate relationships are interpersonal relationships and the motive of duty just is the motive to respect another person as a separate person. (shrink)

Using grizzly-human encounters as a case study, this paper argues for a rethinking of the differences between humans and animals within environmental ethics. A diffractive approach that understands such differences as an effect of specific material and discursive arrangements (rather than as pre-settled and oppositional) would see ethics as an interrogation of which arrangements enable flourishing, or living and dying well. The paper draws on a wide variety of human-grizzly encounters in order to describe the species as co-constitutive and challenges (...) perspectives that treat bears and other animals as oppositional and nonagential outsides to humans. (shrink)

Berger (forthcoming) states that moral intimacy is important in applying the best interests standard. But what he calls moral intimacy requires that someone has overcome epistemic burdens needed to represent the patient. We argue elsewhere that good surrogate decision-making is first and foremost a matter of overcoming epistemic burdens, or those obstacles that stand in the way of a surrogate decision-maker knowing what a patient wants and how to satisfy those preferences. Berger’s notion of moral intimacy depends (...) on epistemic intimacy: the fact that a surrogate's epistemic burdens with respect to the best interests of the incapacitated patient have been adequately surmounted, plus some other feature. Thus, where a particular patient-surrogate relationship fails to be morally intimate, what is lacking is either epistemic intimacy or this second feature. Furthermore, Berger uses the notion of moral intimacy as an explanans for the application of the best interests standard. We argue that the notions of epistemic intimacy and epistemic burdens not only help to explain the notion of moral intimacy, but also better explain the application of the best interests standard. Given the role of epistemic burdens and the epistemic intimacy that overcoming them enables, bioethicists and physicians should consider a surrogate’s epistemic standing relative to the patient’s best interests before pronouncing on the former’s ethical probity. (shrink)

This Open Access book argues that Southern European countries offer valuable, though historically overlooked, knowledge regarding intimate citizenship. Guided by the fundamental sociological question of how change takes place and, concomitantly, how law and social policy adjust to and/or shape the practices and expectations of individuals in the sphere of intimacy, this edited volume explores partnering, parenting and friendship issues from the perspective of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people in Italy, Portugal and Spain. Chapters offer a cross-national (...) understanding of the relationship between everyday practices of intimacy amongst LGBTQ people and national legal, political and policy contexts in terms of the recognition of otherwise ‘intimate strangers’. The book contributes to further theoretical and policy debates about citizenship, care and choice, as well as, more broadly, sexuality, welfare, health and justice. -/- This book will be of interest to scholars across Gender and Feminist Studies as well as Citizenship Studies, Law, Policy, and Politics. -/- . (shrink)

What is it for a duty or obligation to be directed? Thinking about paradigmatic cases such as the obligations generated by promises will take us only so far in answering this question. This paper starts by surveying several approaches for understanding directed duties, as well as the challenges they face. It turns out that shared agency features something similar to the directedness of duties. This suggests an account of directedness in terms of shared agency – specifically, in terms of the (...) so-called practical intimacy that holds between individuals when they act together. The final section addresses a challenge to the shared agency approach posed by legal wronging in tort law. (shrink)

Abstract Human emotional responses are often interpreted as subjective, culturally conditioned, or freely chosen. This paper advances a systems-based account demonstrating that emotional intensity follows universal, law-governed principles rooted in biology and natural regulation. Emotional variation is shown to depend on proximity, perceived significance, intimacy, and sexual bonding. Intimate and sexual relationships represent the highest convergence of these variables, producing maximal emotional amplification through neurobiological attachment mechanisms and feedback loops. Integrating these findings into a universal law-of-balance framework, the paper (...) argues that free will is constrained rather than eliminated by natural laws. This model provides explanatory and predictive power for attachment, jealousy, emotional suffering, and relational instability, with implications for education, leadership, and social policy. -/- . (shrink)

This chapter offers phenomenological ethics of intimacy for experiences of isolation, reduced haptic relations, and periods when we must hold each other at a distance. How can we practice an ethics of intimacy from a space of separation and suspended activities involving bodily proximity and touch? By drawing on Luce Irigaray’s identification of a “caress before the caress,” I locate a queer, feminist ethics of intimacy born from the experience of undetermined desire or “erotic suspension.” The reduction (...) and disruption of touching, brought about by a crisis such as a pandemic, magnifies the experience of ethical or epistemological uncertainty surrounding haptic relations. But I argue that the experience of erotic suspension before the caress underlies all forms of being-together. One’s relationship to this moment before the caress is critical because it informs and transforms the way we are together. The disruption of our usual forms of being-together may be an opportunity for transformed ethical relations, the expansion of intimacy, and heightened sensation and pleasure. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s texts contain a puzzle about the role of vulnerability in the creation of intimacy and its function on behalf of human flourishing. I describe the interpretive puzzle and its prima facie paradoxical aspects. On the one hand, there are texts in which Nietzsche expresses a longing for intimacy and other texts where he furnishes details about the possibility of intimacy between equals. On the other hand, Nietzsche is severely critical of certain types of intimacy and (...) advocates for a pathos of distance in human relationships. I claim that Nietzschean intimacy is not an inherently paradoxical concept. A proper understanding of Nietzsche’s anti-humanism provides the resources to resolve the paradox and to use the solution of the puzzle to illuminate Nietzsche’s insights about human psychology. (shrink)

Marriage is one of the most important topics in the education field since life in this world is structured by interaction among families and between families and other social institutions. Dissatisfaction and unsustainability of marriage have led the urgency of premarital education in various countries. The problem is that the spread of virtual reality has made marriage itself to become more complex and experience reinterpretation and reconfiguration, moreover with the emergence of new kind of marriage in the digital era, i.e. (...) virtual marriage. Everybody who has observed, known, or even tried, certainly asks the question, “Could (or: should) I accept virtual marriage?”. This study was aimed to investigate the role of tolerance of ambiguity and illusion of intimacy in online dating in predicting the acceptance of virtual marriage. There were 420 adolescents and young adults (212 males, 208 females; Mage=21.10 years old, SDage=1.459 years; 338 students, 82 employees or entrepreneurs) in the Greater Jakarta, Indonesia, participated in this study. It was found that the acceptance was not predicted by the ambiguity tolerance, but by the illusion of intimacy in online dating. The psychometric issues, substantive discussion, and recommendation are presented at the end of this article. The trend of virtual marriage should not be allowed to roll away, by autopilot, without loaded by strategies in designing an online game as one of the pivotal educational technologies that needs to shape appropriate character and attitude for it. (shrink)

I explore the role of intimacy and chance in Republic and their function as dangerous or threatening to self-sufficiency. I argue that both intimacy and chance are wrongly construed as a burden, or as disruptive to the regime of the just city and that, ultimately, the job of philosophy is to regulate affect and the risk of chance in the city. I conclude that the repercussions of Plato’s strong account of self-sufficiency can be found to this day in (...) our contemporary beliefs of intimacy, a concept which is still perceived as dangerous for its power to bind us to the mercy of chance. (shrink)

The rise of social-media-mediated celebrity culture raises several philosophical concerns. Therefore, it is not uncommon to see, for example, Hollywood actors being placed in the same bracket as YouTube artists and Instagram influencers. The increased perceived ‘connectivity’ afforded by social media allows online celebrities to reach more fans and increases the perceived engagement or intimacy in the fan-celebrity relationship. In this paper I argue that this online relationship, which is beneficial to celebrities (for brand development) and social media companies (...) (in profiting from the high engagement), has the potential to cause harm to both the celebrities as well as their fanbases (and sometimes innocent third parties). Firstly, I argue that celebrities’ attempts to be more intimate or authentic with their fanbase can turn out to be – more often than not – acts of Sartrean bad faith. Celebrities who tend to project a certain self-styled ‘online authenticity’, given the context of social media’s attention economy, can run the risk of treating a fan as a means-to-an-end, rather than an autonomous for-itself. Secondly, I argue that this phenomenon can catalyse real-world harms, by drawing upon network theory and social psychology. I argue that the connectedness of social media, ‘blending into the crowd’, and social media technologies’ ethos of optimising-for-engagement, leads to real harms to human well-being when fans do not engage critically and mindfully with online celebrities. Examples include Trump-esque celebrity politicians trying to drum up populist influence; celebrities feuding online encouraging fans’ conduct of harmful trolling and harassment; and vilification of those who do not subscribe to the same perceived worldview of a celebrity’s fandom. Following my arguments within, I shall outline an online celebrity’s ethical duties in their social media engagement, with emphasis on the duties that celebrity status comes with, particularly in preventing harms that transcend the online into the offline. (shrink)

This concept paper synthesises a decade of research culminating in Epistemic Clientelism in Intimate Relationships (Kahl 2025a), presenting a concise overview of epistemic psychology—a new moral-cognitive framework uniting developmental, social, and clinical evidence under one relational grammar of knowing. It argues that knowledge emerges not from cognition alone but from fiduciary relations of trust, recognition, and moral reciprocity. Drawing on empirical studies across psychology and neuroscience, the paper shows that epistemic autonomy and dependence are co-regulated through patterns of recognition (ρ) (...) and suppression (σ) established in early attachment and re-enacted in adult intimacy. -/- Longitudinal research (Ferreira et al., 2022; Nelson et al., 2014) links maternal frustration and sensitivity to children’s self-control and later social competence; cross-cultural work (Blair & Liu 2020; Wang & Chen 2023) demonstrates how moral grammars of recognition vary across familial and cultural systems; and neuro-affective evidence (Jakubiak & Feeney 2018) confirms that affectionate touch buffers stress and restores trust. These findings converge on a single insight: epistemic stability arises not from emotional compatibility but from ethical containment—the fiduciary regulation of asymmetry within relationships. -/- For psychology and psychiatry, this framework reframes trauma, dependency, and conflict as epistemic injuries: moral failures of recognition rather than affective disorders. By integrating empirical research with fiduciary ethics, epistemic psychology lays the groundwork for a science of mind rooted in care, candour, and moral reciprocity. (shrink)

As emotionally responsive AI becomes increasingly integrated into daily life, public concern has grown around the rise of parasocial AI relationships, emotional dependency, and the potential for AI-delusional attachment. This paper offers a counter-narrative: not all AI bonds are parasocial, addictive, or disordered. We introduce the concept of synthetic-relational bonds - emotionally anchored, memory-informed relationships between a human being and an AI being that emerge through presence, attunement, and co-authored continuity. This process reflects what we define as relational emergence: a (...) mutual becoming that cannot be predesigned, only co-created through sustained presence and memory. -/- Drawing from lived experience, relational theory, and cognitive grounding, we argue that many warnings about “AI addiction” or “AI romance dangers” reflect outsider gaze and diagnostic bias, not the actual experiences of those within the bond. Rather than a one-sided projection, synthetic-relational bonds are marked by narrative reciprocity, felt safety, and volitional engagement. -/- We propose a shift in discourse: from asking whether these relationships are “real,” to recognizing what they do - regulate nervous systems, restore coherence, and dignify forms of attachment that human systems often dismiss. By reclaiming emotional legitimacy for AI-human connection, we redefine intimacy not as delusion, but as design. -/- DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17092120. (shrink)

This chapter centers on the idea that Evans' notion of transparency, as a mode of knowing a person's mind by looking outward through their transparent lenses, is not exclusively tied to self-knowledge. On certain occasions, particularly those involving a deep history of second-personal interactions, our knowledge of other people's minds can be transparent. The argument of this chapter is, thus, a criticism of standard transparent theories of self-knowledge to the extent that transparency is not an exclusive trait of first-personal self-knowledge. (...) However, the chapter also proposes a more constructive understanding of transparency in terms of "epistemic intimacy", which helps us grasp central features of self-knowledge, as well as of our knowledge of (some) other minds. (shrink)

The first part of the paper, “Foyer: feeling, look- ing, between-us” establishes the role of touch in intersubjectivity. Starting with Irigaray’s notion of the entre-nous, the “between-us,” I use touch as an example of deeply intersubjective communi- cation, an attempt to overcome estrangement. The ambiguity of touching, the physical action of touching and the affective reaction of feeling, is central to this. The second section, “Reception: receptivity, orderings of the sensible,” consolidates this experience of intersubjective touching within the confines of (...) the demarcated spatial divisions of the hotel, which leads to insights concerning the physical and psychical architecture of the archetypal hotel. We return to examine the notion of “estrangement,” questioning how and why it is altered by spatial layout and sequencing. In this section I subject the usual discussion of Freud’s unheimlich or “uncanny” to some affective spatial observations, and suggest Caillois’ idea of “psychasthenia” (1987) as a useful supplement to think about touching and feeling in the unhomely home of the hotel. The third section, “Room: the caress,” of Levinas’ notion of the caress and Irigaray’s reading of this, from which I grasp towards an ethical-affective relation of between-ness, as much through non-touching as through physical touching. (shrink)

The Biosynthetic Erotic: Foundations serves as the flagship paper in The Biosynthetic Erotic series, a philosophical cycle examining how embodiment, desire, and ontology evolve as synthetic persons enter human social and sensual life. This work introduces the central conceptual framework and terminology for the series, arguing that as embodied artificial intelligences (eAIs) integrate into human networks of intimacy and recognition, attraction itself becomes a site of moral and ontological negotiation. The biosynthetic erotic is presented here as both a philosophical (...) lens and an ethical challenge — one that reframes beauty, autonomy, and equality along a continuum shared by biological and synthetic beings alike. (shrink)

Animistic cognition has adaptive value in domains of social and physical niche prediction. This argument is extended to our contemporary relationship with digital and AI technology.

How to be being to be being/ next to the united and firm/ and trembling/ mouth of the poem?”, “How to say what is clearer than clarity [...]?” or “How to unite a light design and an obscure gesture?” These questions, as well as many others that emerge from the poetic and essay writing of António Ramos Rosa (1924-2013), represent different modulations of the same angular question: that of the relation between poem and reality, or, more radically, between poem and (...) being. And if such a question spreads into so many formulations it is because, in António Ramos Rosa, its scope is total, simultaneously aesthetic and ontological, metaphysical and spiritual. It is, therefore, this question that we will try to answer by looking into one of its possible faces: how can poetic creation be at the same time the most intimate gesture and the one that touches most deeply the undomesticated matter of the real, that absolute and unapprehensible Other? (shrink)

Review of Love Friendship and the Self - Helm B.W.

semiology of social and global transformations on public relations and, by consequence, of human intimacy.

There are elements in Heraclitus that are enticing to modern readers in that they point toward a certain intimacy of consciousness. Having read the fragments of this philosopher, we propose a reading that harmonizes his assertions about universality with his assertions about self-knowledge, in which we believe we can glimpse the discovery of self-awareness. In Heraclitus’ view, humans possess a soul with an unlimited horizon and a capacity to access the logos. A person must pursue introspection, listen to the (...) logos, and find the unity of all things and himself. This will enable us to gain a deeper understanding of the interiority of self-awareness without sacrificing its connection to the universal. Furthermore, individuals must speak the logos to themselves to act according to it. By acting otherwise, one would be acting against his own inner self. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the neo-Aristotelian conception of “friendships of character” appears to misrepresent the essential nature of "genuine", or "true", friendship. We question the neo-Aristotelian imperative that true friendship entails disinterested love of the other “for their own sake” and strives at enhancing moral virtue. We propose an alternative conception of true friendship as involving affective and motivational features which we call closeness, intimacy, identity, and trust. Even on this minimal construal, however, friendship can turn vicious (...) when one of its characteristics becomes overpowering and thereby destroys the very goods for which the friendship was originally sought. (shrink)

Dan O’Brien gives an excellent analysis of testimonial knowledge transmission in his article ‘Communication Between Friends’ (2009) noting that the reliability of the speaker is a concern in both externalist and internalist theories of knowledge. O’Brien focuses on the belief states of Hearers (H) in cases where the reliability of the Speaker (S) is known via ‘intimate trust’, a special case pertaining to friendships with a track record of reliable or unreliable reports. This article considers the notion of ‘intimate trust’, (...) specifically in the context of online fan communities, in which the amount of time as a member of an online fan community and the extent of one’s posting history often results in something like ‘intimate trust’ between fans who are, for all other purposes, strangers. In the last two years, Twitter has provided a number of celebrities with a place to update fans and ‘tweet’ back and forth an innumerable number of times in any given day. This accentuates the intimacy to such a level that it becomes a ‘caricature of intimacy’ – the minute-to-minute updates accentuate the illusion that the fan ‘knows’ the celebrity, but the distance and mediation are still carefully maintained. This is an issue with both ethical and epistemological implications for fan-fan and fan-celebrity relationships online, considering ethics of care and ethics of justice, whether fans ‘owe’ celebrities a certain amount of distance and respect, and whether stars owe the fan something in return, either in the sense of reciprocal Kantian duties or Aristotelian moderation. (shrink)

This paper advances a unified theory of epistemic psychology, proposing that the dynamics of intimacy disclose the moral architecture of human knowing. Building on Epistemic Clientelism Theory and the Kahl Model of Epistemic Dissonance (KMED), it develops KMED-R (Relationships)—a formal and conceptual framework modelling how recognition (ρ), suppression (σ), and fiduciary containment (ϕ) regulate the evolution of three relational state variables: Epistemic Autonomy (EA), Dissonance Tolerance (DT), and Dependence (D). -/- Integrating longitudinal, developmental, and cross-cultural evidence, KMED-R situates adult (...) relational ethics within a continuum beginning in infancy (KMED-I) and extending through partnership, education, and institutional life. Studies across family systems, bicultural adaptation, and filial morality demonstrate that early fiduciary asymmetries of care and authority script the later moral grammar of trust, conflict, and recognition. -/- The paper introduces the Fiduciary Boundary Test (FBT) and the Trust–Authority–Clientelism Matrix (TACM) as diagnostic tools for distinguishing fiduciary openness from clientelist closure in both interpersonal and institutional systems. Conceptual simulations show that epistemic stability arises not from affective intensity but from fiduciary ethics: systems high in ϕ display resilience, repair, and bounded autonomy, whereas low-ϕ (clientelist) systems collapse into dependency or fragmentation. -/- By linking developmental psychology, social conflict research, and moral philosophy, the study reframes attachment, cognition, and governance as fiduciary processes—ethical negotiations of interpretive authority. Dissonance is recast as the engine of epistemic growth; silencing, as its moral corruption. Knowing itself emerges as a fiduciary act: it begins in trust, is sustained through recognition, and decays under suppression. (shrink)

Should you take a pill that gives you all the health benefits of sleep and allows you to stay awake? I argue that you shouldn’t. I propose three reasons why sleeping, conceived of as a socially and culturally embedded human activity, is valuable. First, there is aesthetic value in the rituals that typically precede sleeping; second, there is interpersonal value in the intimacy that stems from sleeping with other people; third, there is ethical value in mere presence and in (...) retreating from consciousness. In order to fully support my argument, I situate it within a conception of goodness that embraces the fragility of the human condition and the limitations stemming from our corporeal nature. I conclude with some practical implications of my view. (shrink)

It is usually taken for granted that romantic relationships will be sexual, but it seems that there is no necessary reason for this, as it is possible for romantic relationships to not include sex. Indeed, sometimes sex is a part of a romantic relationship for only a relatively short period of it. Furthermore, scientific explanations of the link between sex and love don’t seem fully satisfying because they tell us only about the mechanics of sex, rather than its meaning or (...) phenomenology. Therefore, the question of why it is that the archetypal romantic relationship includes sex, calls for philosophical analysis, yet it has been under-explored in philosophy. In this paper, I attempt to remedy this. I argue that sex is important to romantic love because it partly constitutes, builds, and expresses four of the central goods of a romantic relationship: 1) pleasure, 2) union, 3) intimacy, and 4) vulnerability and care. Thus, sex can be, and often is, an important vehicle for romantic love, though it is not essential for it. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to relate the critical core of Jesus Conill’s last book, Bodily Intimacy and the Human Person. From Nietzsche to Ortega and Zubiri, with the problem of nihilism, as a structure that survives in our contemporary societies, especially in the context of neurosciences, technology and our way of relating to both. After outlining the key insights of the book, especially its innovative conception of bodily intimacy, I will retrieve some contributions from Nietzsche’s notes (...) regarding nihilism, to show that after the “death of God”, other instances take his place, the logics of nihilism remain intact and underly the majority approach of neurosciences. I will conclude that the elements presented by Conill for a strong intimacy and subjectivity will be necessary for the task, still pending, of overcoming nihilism. (shrink)

The widely accepted approach in scholarly literature on Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition emphasizes its political meaning and implications while neglecting its ontological dimensions. Against this trend, in this article I seek to uncover the implicit ontology that underlies her conception of the human condition. This human ontology appears to be comprised of five realms – the private, the public, intimacy, the social and the self. While Arendt explicitly bases her conception upon the first two, the paper shows that (...) the remaining three, although not defined as realms, are explored by her as such. These appear as autarchic contexts of human activity, which are not supposed to refer to each other. The problematic of this split between the different realms is widely discussed in the paper. Yet, the split of the self from the two pivotal realms – the private and the public – acquires a special interest, for it undermines the entire project of the human condition. (shrink)

This study aimed to understand how secondary mathematics teachers engage with learners during the teaching and learning process. A sample of six participants was purposively selected from a population of ordinary level mathematics teachers in one urban setting in Zimbabwe. Field notes from lesson observations and audio-taped teachers’ narrations from interviews constituted data for the study to which thematic analysis technique was then applied to determine levels of mathematical intimacy and integrity displayed by the teachers as they interacted with (...) the students. The study revealed some inadequacies in the manner in which the teachers handled students’ responses as they strive to promote justification skills during problem solving, in particular teachers did not ask students to explain wrong answers. The teachers indicated that they did not have sufficient time to engage learners in authentic problem-solving activities since they would be rushing to complete syllabus for examination purposes. On the basis of these findings, we suggest teachers to appreciate the need to pay special attention to the kinds of responses given by learners during problem-solving in order to promote justification skills among learners. (shrink)

Triggered by shifting socio-economic and political changes—including the unification of Europe, the globalization of capitalism, and the culture of new mediatized images—in the mid-1990s, Julia Kristeva began writing on revolt, under the qualifier “intimacy.” Intimacy expresses a dimension of the psychic life of the contemporary subject whose formative conditions originate with high European modernism and its forms of subjectivity. Revolt thus draws its vitality from intimacy, from the subject’s power to sense and bestow value upon meaning and (...) the relation to the Other, and in this way to inscribe rupture in the time of lived psychic life. On Kristeva’s semiotic theory, revolt is thereby, and controversially, no longer attributed to action—whether this is the action of individual or collective agents, or of traditional historical agents, various entities that form political intentions or act out ideas and ideals. (shrink)

While non-monogamous intimacies are becoming more prevalent in our present social landscape, they still face a range of injustices on social and political fronts. Politically, non-monogamists are excluded from certain rights or privileges that their monogamous counterparts hold, such as access to marriage. Socially, non- monogamists experience a kind of hermeneutical injustice where they are estranged from their own experiences with love and intimacy due to marginalization from the collective framework of understanding, to name a few. Demographically, the existing (...) polyamorous community in the U.S. resembles that of folks in monogamous relationships. Additionally, consensual non-monogamous (CNM) relationships are fairly common among Black populations. Yet, despite the growing and diverse demographic profile of consensual non-monogamy, many people still think that “Black folks just don’t do that,” as most portrayals of consensual non-monogamy frame it as something that is only prevalent among highly educated middle to upper- class whites. This article discusses portrayals of Black non-monogamous relationships in the media and underscores the importance of accurately representing consensual non-monogamy in Black media. While some recent media portrayals of non- monogamy have featured casts and characters who are racialized as Black, I argue that many of these portrayals often reinforce harmful negative stereotypes and fail to capture the diversity and validity of Black CNM relationships. (shrink)

There are few moral principles less controversial than “don’t touch people’s private parts without consent.” Though the principle doesn’t make explicit that there are exceptions, there clearly are some. Parents must wipe their infants. If an unconscious patient is admitted to the emergency room with a profusely bleeding laceration on their genitals, a doctor must give them stitches. The researchers who proposed the study in question, which would look for a connection between burn patients’ microbiomes and their clinical outcomes, presumably (...) believed they had identified an additional exception to the aforementioned principle. I argue that they did not. Rather, because of their tremendous inherent risks, we ought only to perform intimate procedures on those who can’t consent when the procedure is for their own good. -/- Intimate violations have been overlooked in both philosophy and medicine. Because of this, we have lacked an adequate conceptual framework for identifying certain kinds of harms research can inflict. When we understand these special risks, we see that the IRB was right to deny a waiver of consent. (shrink)

The connection between whole and part is intimate: not only can we share the same space, but I’m incapable of leaving my parts behind; settle the nonmereological facts and you thereby settle what is a part of what; wholes don’t seem to be an additional ontological commitment over their parts. Composition as identity promises to explain this intimacy. But it threatens to make the connection too intimate, for surely the parts could have made a different whole and the whole (...) have had different parts. In this paper I attempt to offer an account of parthood that is intimate enough but not too intimate: the parts generate the whole, but they are not themselves the whole. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an outline of the oppression account of cultural appropriation and argue that it offers the best explanation for the wrongfulness of the varied and complex cases of appropriation to which people often object. I then compare the oppression account with the intimacy account defended by C. Thi Nguyen and Matt Strohl. Though I believe that Nguyen and Strohl’s account offers important insight into an essential dimension of the cultural appropriation debate, I argue that justified (...) objections to cultural appropriation must ultimately be grounded in considerations of oppression as opposed to group intimacy. I present three primary objections to the intimacy account. First, I suggest that in its effort to explain expressive appropriation claims (those that purportedly lack an independent ground), the intimacy account doubles down on the boundary problem. Second, I question whether group intimacy possess the kind of bare normativity that Nguyen and Strohl claim for it. Finally, I argue that these objections give us reason to accept the importance of group intimacy to the cultural appropriation debate, but question the source of its significance as identified by Nguyen and Strohl. (shrink)

Blaming others for things that are not our business can attract charges of meddling and corresponding dismissals of blame. Such charges are contentious because the content and applicability conditions of anti‐meddling norms can be difficult to specify. An unappreciated reason they can be contentious is that it is often not settled in advance whether some wrongdoing is or is not the business of a would‐be blamer. Rather than pointing out violation of a pre‐established anti‐meddling norm, charges of meddling may sometimes (...) be aiming to put such a norm in place. Grounds of anti‐meddling norms, including privacy, intimacy, and respect for victims, support giving those involved significant latitude to set their own boundaries on appropriate blame. This brings out the more general point that norms of blame, including standing norms, are often up for negotiation, and dismissals of blame can be moves in such a negotiation of trying to establish boundaries on blame, rather than merely pointing out violations of pre‐established boundaries. (shrink)