PHILOSOPHY is making a serious move on the playful art of flirting.
Do flirts have to know what they're up to? How can you prove yourself innocent on a flirting charge? Can you flirt with a robot and where would it get you anyway?
Carrie Jenkins, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra, teases out some answers in her paper The Philosophy of Flirting, soon to appear in the London-based The Philosophers' Magazine.
The idea came to her during a romantic dinner in Lisbon.
"(My partner, Daniel Nolan) is a philosopher as well so, being two philosophers, we weren't actually flirting, we were talking about flirting," Jenkins says.
Being two philosophers, they didn't exactly agree but, adopting her tentative approach to the philosophy of flirting, "we moved to the next level and tried to decide: were we flirting by talking about flirting?"
And why not? As Jenkins says in her paper, it may be quite flirtatious - for a couple in the know - to hum a snatch of Puccini.
Yet what everyone would recognise as flirtatious behaviour - eye contact that lingers - might not be proof of a flirt. It might just be poor eyesight.
"One can behave flirtatiously without flirting," Jenkins writes.
"An Englishwoman visiting Italy who touches her earlobes a lot in the presence of a particular person, without realising the cultural significance of this action, would be behaving flirtatiously in that context but is doing so without flirting."
So Jenkins insists that the flirter must intend to flirt and what's intended is to nudge romance or sex on to the agenda in a knowing, playful way.
This could be good news for those falsely accused of flirting: deny intention.
And if intention is everything, and you mistake an online chatbot for a fellow human who might well come across, then you could find yourself flirting with a non-person.
Perhaps it's not surprising that Jenkins is a philosophical friend of the flirt; her PhD supervisor at Trinity College, Cambridge, was Simon Blackburn, whose book Lust came to the defence of a deadly - and sometimes friendless - sin.
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