agapism

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a·gap·ism

(ah'gahp-izm),

A doctrine exalting nonsexual love.

[G. agapē, brotherly love]

agapism

A philosophy of altruism, selflessness and brotherly fellowship (non-sexual love), first espoused by Henry Mayhew, a British social philospher in the 1850s; it was radopted 40 years later by an American philosopher, CS Peirce, and 60 years after that by the American hippie movement.

References in periodicals archive ?

An important argument is that, for him, signification is fulfilled with love, idea that follows the doctrine of agapism (evolution by the principle of love), and therefore, a person's learning should be the result of a free choice, as freedom is the main characteristic of love, and ultimately the true condition for growth.

Alin Oltenau: Philosophy of Education in the Semiotics of Charles Peirce. A Cosmology of Learning and Loving

(6) Quotations such as the above, together with Nietzsche's skeptical writings regarding standard Judeo-Christian ethics, have led to the view among some of his readers that superior, powerful individuals can and should transcend agapism (i.e., the ethics of compassion and love).

Portraits of egoism in classic cinema III: Nietzschean portrayals

At stake in many of the essays is making a distinction between self-interested eudaimonism and self-sacrificing agapism to show how the former pales in comparison to the latter, in terms of moral cogency.

Evolution, games, and God; the principle of cooperation

Chapter six discusses subjective theories of value, including emotivism and agapism. A central claim of this chapter is that if value is subjective--either "feeling, pleasure, emotion, liking, or attitudes--then the world is devalued." Chapter seven takes up relational theories.

McDonald, Hugh P.: Creative Actualization: A Meliorist Theory of Values

Peirce coined the term agapism, alluding to the kind of love the New Testament God has toward his creatures, to capture the sense of design that emerges over the evolution of the universe but is not reducible to chance and/or necessity.

Intelligent design theory: a site for contemporary sociology of knowledge

Hall's analysis, by delineating the continuity of personal identity, existential implications, moral implications, moral psychology, and the ethics and individualism of agapism, unequivocally established "the fundamental kinship between [Jonathan] Edwards and Bellamy" (29).

The Awakening of Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward at Religious Influence(*)

The ultimate object of Bellamy's agapism, like Edwards's, includes more than humanity for it also embraces nothing less than the largest possible whole to which human beings are a part.

Thus, the difference between them as to how agapism is realized seems to come down to this: It is the difference between the balancing of a lesser and a greater self, such that neither outweighs the other, and the enlarging sufficiently of a single self Either way the promise is the same--a fuller, richer, and happier existence as well as a moral one.