Pilar Lopez-Cantero

If the subway take guy ever stops me my take will be: it’s hard to navigate tech to make multi-sessions conferences online, but small-scale workshops can be livestreamed with minimal effort and not doing so is an excuse (have purposely saved this for a time where no one can take it as a subtweet)

‘Desire in one of its rawest forms’: what do we know about limerence? For everything from pop music to poetry, overwhelming infatuation offers inspiration and storylines. But when might this tip over into something a little less healthy?

I enjoyed this article on limerence during the weekend, and much more when I unexpectedly read commentary by Sam Shpall, who is one of my favourite living philosophers (I have recommended his tripartite theory of love paper dozens of times)

Not saying you are wrong about the madness, but I understood the increase as resulting from reducing the >1y that a paper could be stuck in Ethics with no guarantee of publication. At least to me, reduced times means that I can consider submitting without resigning to parking a paper away for ages

Facebook reminds me today that it’s been 11 years since my MSc graduation, and our pictures with the broom we bought for the occasion will never not make me smile

I know these things are often confidential but I would love to find out how to get a publisher to launch a paper back from the get go, if you or anyone else reading wants to share

Clicked the link expecting a hefty price tag and I was delighted to see that the paperback is only 36 euro with the discount!

Deadline on Monday!

Gracias, guardo esto para leerlo luego. Me parece curioso que Jaén (mi lugar de origen) se mencione tanto en esta pieza como en la del Guardian, siendo además un sitio donde estoy segura de que superamos la media de nostálgicos

It was Franco who marketed Spain as a cheap getaway for northern Europeans, creating and enforcing a trend of savage urbanism that ended completely trashing our Mediterranean coast with mass tourism. One of my wishes for Spain is to find a way to undo those harms, but it is very complicated

Spain has too rosy a view of Franco’s regime. Let’s remind ourselves of its horrors | Giles Tremlett Little is taught about the murderous, incompetent dictatorship – and now almost one in five young people say Franco was good for the country, says historian Giles Tremlett

Let’s not forget that this regime was supported internationally while starving people, jailing queer and roma people, unionists and supporters of the left, submitting women, and making islamophobia, antisemitism and Catholic fundamentalism some of its key messages. For four long decades.

Since I started working on phil of the city I have learned so much more about how random stuff works. This month I am looking into SUVs, roads, and litter for three different papers/projects. This is probably my favourite job ever 🚗🛣️🚯

Instead of some proportion from much of the British media class, we are treated to the tragicomic absurdity of a former British prime minister willing to admonish the national broadcaster and demand the resignation of its Director General, all in the name of defending Donald Trump's reputation for truth-telling. But it's worse than that- it is a textbook example of how populists win. We have the ridiculous carnival of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, of all people, admonishing the BBC for its lack of integrity. And they can get away with it, because no-one expects anything from them and yet we expect everything from the people and places who actually give a damn.

This is a genuinely intolerable reality…

Three weeks left to submit to our conference in June 2026 -- submit your abstract via this form!

This is basically what just happened to Lily Allen’s ex!

Hahah this teaches me for not looking properly into things. Sometimes people say they have “discovered” areas of research and I get how that can upset people (it upsets me!), so I wanted to clarify that is not what I was doing. Now off the internet and to read about hype studies!

I’m reading this as playful shade and I don’t mind it, but there truly was nothing (not 1 paper) written on break-ups on the discipline my PhD is on (analytic philosophy, where there is also tons of work on implicature!)

Philosophy of Breakups This is a call for abstracts to present at The Philosophy of Breakups, organized by the Conceptual Foundations of Conflict Project at the University of Southern California.  Please submit a PDF f...

Next year there will be a conference on the phil/o breakups! When I started my PhD there was *nothing* written on break-ups, but since then there has been amazing work on the end of relationships by ppl like Monika Betzler, Chris Crowley, Joe Saunders, or Richard Healy. Already can’t wait for this!

I remain neutral about other uses of chatbots in break-ups, but these have to be looked at too. The paper is part of a SI on Grief in the Digital Age, so I wanted to raise wider questions about the role of continuing bonds in grief, which has often been seen as positive (including by me) /&6

All of this tells us that when used to build continuing bonds, break-up bots are oppressive by design: they are made to foster each of these harms. This is all taking the best scenario where the ex consents to it! So this kind of tech should be regulated before it becomes widespread/ 5

Third, by engaging w break-up chatbots users capitulate to oppressive master narratives about romantic life (like ‘amatonormativity’, according to which a fulfilling life can only be had in a romantic relationship). They then enter an oppressive narrative niche that they themselves help building/4

Philosopher Marilyn Friedman, who wrote in Autonomy, Gender and Politics that heterosexual romantic partnership should be like a federation of autonomy, not one side taking over the other's

Simone de Beauvoir in a B&W picture with a face that is clearly judging you, since she has also said many times that women's autonomy is at risk in normative romantic life

Second, bc interaction w bots is built exclusively on the user's terms, it fosters self-serving relationships and power imbalances, even depriving the ex-partner of an unrelinquishable normative power. Precisely what feminist philosophers warn about romantic life/3

A picture of Wilson, the volleyball in the movie Castaway

First, they put users in an imaginary relationship. Here I make an analogy with Tom Hanks's relationship with Wilson (drawing from Norlock's original example). Unlike Tom&Wilson, the relationship w the bot is grounded on misdirected love, so bots keep the user engaged in a meaningless project/2

Pilar Lopez-Cantero, The ethics of break-up chatbots - PhilPapers This paper offers the first normative analysis of break-up chatbots, which simulate an ex-partner's conversational style. I argue that technologies that have the (potential) aim of fostering continuin...

You've probably heard of deathbots, but did you know about break-up bots? It's possible to create a digital duplicates of an ex and chat to them as if they never left in the 1st place. In my forthcoming paper in Phenom & the Cog Sciences, I discuss 3 factors against continuing bonds w ex-bots/1

Including a very cool project on grief!!

Thank you! I will read your chapter and intro; this is incredibly helpful

3) there is a tendency to stick the labels to specific contexts or applied settings where 'knowledge' is involved without much thought going into what the notion of epistemic injustice (or sub-categories) are picking up. Does that make sense?

Oh yes sure, I think there could be three problems (which I don't necessarily endorse): 1) so many subcategories have diluted the explanatory power of 'epistemic injustice', 2) there is a 'category race' which expands the terminology without necessarily deepening the understanding of EI

Epistemic injustice friends: I know some people complain a lot about terminological inflation in the debate, but has someone put this in an actual article (bonus if they have said why this is bad?)

Check out the latest issue from affiliated journal Passion, the SI 'Emotions—More Like Stars or Constellations?', edited by Heidy Meriste and Bruno Mölder (Tartu). The issue asks how to categorize emotions, and how much weight should we put on the study of folk emotion concepts. Open access! /1

PSA 🔈Our call for abstracts for EPSSE 2026 is now open! Our 2026 annual conference will be hosted in Germany by Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt on 24-26 June 2026 💫

Deadline for abstracts on all things philosophy of emotions: 1 December 2025

www.epsse.org/call-for-abs...