Online research in philosophy

The exclusive relationship, either as a pair or even as a married pair, has regained its attraction. Obviously, the traditional roles, the economically dependent woman who stands by the side of the ‘strong man’, no longer represent the pair bond.

This article addresses the emergence of human personality in evolution. The mechanisms of natural and sexual selection developed by Darwin are not sufficient to explain the sense of self. Therefore we attempt to trace the evolutionary process back to a form of selection termed “emotional selection.” This involves reconstructing selection out of subjective qualities and showing how emotions enable human forms of life that are relevant for the cultural level of cooperation that marks our species. We see a paradigm shift (...) in the concept of emotional selection that binds emotion and evolution closer together, thus closing the explanatory gap between classical ethology and modern evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

This paper is about erotic love as source of the self. Unlike in the Platonic tradition, love is interpreted in the light of human mating systems. Following modern sociobiological theories I reconstruct the pair-bond as the original site in the evolution of man. For the philosophy of mind it follows that the unity of personal consciousness can be explained as a dialectic of emotional nearness to and distance from the beloved other.