PHL 606 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Alan Soble, Irving Singer, Learned Society
14 Jan 2017
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Document Summary
In a modern, scientific society, we have a tendency to reduce things to their component parts without thinking of the relation of one part to another or of each part to the whole. Irving singer begins in just this way: love is a means of placing value on something, and he finds two clear ways in which we do this. Unlike our abovementioned tendency, though, he seeks a third, more holistic way of understanding love. Alan soble, in comparison, tries to dissect singer"s conflation of appraisal and bestowal, claiming that they are two distinct things. Singer starts his essay with the assumption that love is a means of valuing something. There are, however, two different ways that we can come to value something, according to singer: It is possible to have a positive estimation of something or someone based on our perception or discovery of certain qualities that we assume are possessed by something.
