Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/02/2026
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
Can love reshape the way we see the world—and what happens when that vision falters? Justin White, Associate Professor of Philosophy, will examine the dynamic interplay of love, grief, and perception at this week’s Humanities Center Colloquium on Thursday, April 2nd at 3:30 pm in 4010 JFSB. We hope you’ll join us. Refreshments will be served.
Title: Love, Grief, and the Structure of a World
In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty claims that “projects polarize the world, causing a thousand signs to appear, as if by magic, that guide action, as signs in a museum guide the visitor.” On this picture, a loving relationship, likely a paradigmatic project for Merleau-Ponty, polarizes one’s world, causing signs to appear and guiding one’s actions. And this fits with prominent conceptions of love. Harry Frankfurt, for example, thinks that a crucial function of love is the way it can organize one’s volitional life. Yet, given the thoroughly bodily and worldly nature of human existence and the potential for competing projects, what we see in the Merleau-Pontyan sense can be unstable and shifting. While our loving commitments can be world polarizing, shaping how we see things and possibilities, they can also be fragile, not always as decisive or persistent as we might like them to be. Love and its polarizing effects, however, can also be very resilient, as we can see clearly in the experience of grief, when a loving relationship can continue to shape a world, even after the beloved is no longer present in the same way.
In short, love and grief help illuminate both the power and the precarity of what Merleau-Ponty calls personal acts, both the power of commitment and the potential for disruption. In this paper, I draw on love and grief to explore this dynamic and thread the needle in a way that (a) appreciates how commitments shape our everyday being in the world in fundamental ways, while (b) recognizing how our bodily existence is not under our immediate voluntary control.
About our presenter:
Justin White received his PhD from University of California, Riverside and is an associate professor of philosophy. He was an academic visitor with the philosophy faculty at Oxford University for Trinity Term 2025. His research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy (especially phenomenology and existentialism) and contemporary philosophy of agency and moral psychology. Among other things, he is interested in love, skill, self-ignorance, and the process of personal change, including how we take (or avoid) responsibility for our actions and ourselves. His scholarship has been published in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, European Journal of Philosophy, Southern Journal of Philosophy, and Midwest Studies in Philosophy, as well as various edited volumes. He is currently working on a book project on perception, agency, and human existence in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.
