The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love is pleased to announce its Fall-Winter 2023 virtual seminar and invites papers and panel proposals in any area of the philosophy of sex and love, particularly those that (broadly) explore one or more of the following themes:

1. Autonomy, Respect, and Trust in Sexual and Romantic Relationships
2. Asexuality
3. Disability and pleasure
4. Moral Considerations of Sexual Fantasies
5. Marriage and Morals
6. Black Feminist love politics (see Nash 2012)
7. Lordean erotics
8. The Epistemology of Sexual Consent
9. Sex in the post-Roe era
10. Love as a (or a necessary condition of) transformative praxis particularly for Black and Brown futures
11. Womanism
12. The Nature of Love
13. Feminist Perspectives on Partiality
14. Sexual Freedom and Agency
15. Pleasure Activism (see Brown 2019)
16. Objectification
17. Radical love and religion (in general and Black liberation theology and love and/or Womanist liberation theology and love in particular)
18. Love, sex, and pleasure beyond whiteness
19. Self-love and trans* identity
20. Philosophy of Sex Education
21. Teaching philosophies of love and sex

We welcome submissions of individual abstracts as well as proposals for joint sessions. Please submit your abstract using this form.

The deadline for abstract submission (up to 500 words) is July 31, 2023, and notification of acceptance will be sent by August 15, 2023.

The seminar will include both invited and refereed talks, providing an opportunity for a diverse range of perspectives and discussions on the topics of interest. We are particularly interested in proposals that promote gender equality and diversity, and encourage submissions from researchers with various institutional affiliations, at different stages of their professional careers, from diverse geographical origins, and from underrepresented groups.

Please join us for SPSL’s May Virtual Seminar with Sharon Krishek of Hebrew University: “We Were Meant For Each Other: The Correspondence That Grounds One’s Love.”

Wednesday, May 24th at 1pm EST. Zoom link: https://temple.zoom.us/J/95868533928

Join us Thursday, April 27th at 1pm EST for Sex and Science with Ray Pederson (University of Minnesota), Lauren Wilson (University of Minnesota), and Pieter Adriaens (Ku Leuven).

Zoom Link: temple.zoom.us/j/95868533928

Join SPSL for the next virtual seminar on Thursday, March 30th at 1pm. Speakers Francesca Miccoli (Universita degli Studi di Milano) and Ayda Niknami (UC San Diego) explore questions Beyond Monogamy. Join us here:  https://temple.zoom.us/j/95868533928

Please join The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love for our February Virtual Seminar, Rethinking Love with speakers Pilar Lopez-Cantero (University of Tilburg) and Joel Ballivian (UW-Madison), and our chair and organizer, Eli Benjamin Isreal (Temple). 

We’ll meet next Thursday, 2/23 at 1pm EST on Zoom, here: https://temple.zoom.us/j/95868533928

Please join us for SPSL’s Virtual Seminar, Ways of Being in the Digital Age. Wednesday, January 25th at 1pm here: https://temple.zoom.us/j/95868533928

Join us to discuss Problems of Consent with Elinor Mason, Margot Witte, and Katrina Haaksma. Zoom link here: https://temple.zoom.us/j/95868533928

Join us for the inaugural session of SPSL’s Vritual Seminar, Thursday August 25 at 1pm EST. Zoom link here.

“In this talk–“Playful Sex: A Kantian Account”–I develop ideas from my Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Account regarding the many ways in which we can engage sexuality playfully. The talk starts from an analogy I draw in Sex, Love, and Gender between playing squash and having sex. I then introduce some basic, philosophical ideas of Kant’s that we can use to better understand how we develop, transform, and integrate into a dynamic sexual, erotic whole what Kant calls our “vital forces” and our “animality,” “humanity,” and “personality” through aesthetic-teleological, associative, and conceptual means. Rather than ending up with the alienating and strangely moralizing conception of sexuality typically attributed to Kant and the Kantians, the resulting account is very useful as we try to get into view how playfulness can be productively and constructively engaged as we strive to flourish sexually.”