James Giles

James Giles (born 1958) is a Canadian philosopher and psychologist.

He has written about the philosophy of perception, personal identity and the self, mindfulness, Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, and has published theories of the evolution of human hairlessness, the nature of sexual desire, sexual attraction, and gender.

His wide range of academic interests and often controversial views have earned him the title of an "interdisciplinary maverick."

Giles was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, grew up in West Point Grey, and graduated from Point Grey Secondary School.

He studied at the University of British Columbia (BA Hons, MA) and at the University of Edinburgh (PhD).

In addition to teaching at UBC and Edinburgh, he has also taught at the University of Aalborg, the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Hawaii College of Kansai University, Japan, the University of Guam, and La Trobe University, Australia.

He now lectures in psychology at Roskilde University in Denmark, and at the Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge.

In addition to his academic research, Giles has also written for several media, including Monitor on Psychology, The Copenhagen Post, The Ottawa Citizen, Science of Relationships, The Vancouver Sun, Daily Pacific News, and The Conversation, among others.

Giles takes Hume's notion of personal identity being a fiction and develops it in terms of Buddhist accounts of no-self and theories of language.

Giles points out that many theories of personal identity are reductive theories.

They try to reduce the idea of personal identity to elements such as memory, personality, or bodily continuity.

The no-self theory, however, is an eliminative theory.

That is, it eliminates the idea of personal identity altogether.

He allows that we are sometimes aware of psychological and emotional states that seem to give immediate awareness of self.

He argues, however, that what we are aware of at these times is not an persisting self, but rather a "constructed or condensed self-image", namely "a composite of related images and meanings referring to how I see myself at that moment".

These moments, however, make only rare appearances in consciousness.

Giles is a major proponent of the no-self theory.

His contributions have been anthologized, received extensive discussion in such diverse fields as philosophy, psychology, history, and communication, and called one of the best comparative studies of Hume and Buddhist philosophy.

Giles has also argued for the role of the no-self theory in contemporary mindfulness-based interventions.

His original account of the place of the no-self theory here has been widely cited and discussed.

In a radical interpretation of early Taoist philosophy, Giles argues that the Tao has little to do with mysticism or cosmology.

Rather, it refers to human awareness.

The Taoist accounts of return and non-action, says Giles, provide us with insights into the nature of awareness and how meditative states can co-exist within and thus underpin everyday awareness.

This works through what he calls the double return, or a back and forth of stillness and constant flow of awareness.

Giles compares this view of awareness with ancient Greek, Buddhist, existentialist, and analytic accounts of philosophy of mind in an "extension of the global philosophical palette".

Giles first published his theory of sexual desire in an article entitled "A Theory of Love and Sexual Desire" in 1994.

The vulnerability and care theory of love was put forward by Giles in his article, "A Theory of Love and Sexual Desire" (1994) and later developed in his book The Nature of Sexual Desire (2004/2008).

Giles also presents his theory in a TEDx Talk'.

According to Giles, romantic love is a complex of reciprocal desires for mutual vulnerability and care.

One desires to be vulnerable before the beloved in order that the beloved may show care.

This theory was developed in The Nature of Sexual Desire in 2004/2008.

Sexologists usually account for sexual desire either in terms of social constructionism or as a biological characteristic essential to reproduction.

Giles rejects both these views, and attempts to show by a phenomenological approach that sexual desire is an existential need rooted in the human condition, based on a feeling of incompleteness from the experience of one's own gender as a form of disequilibrium.

The desired person's gender, whether the same or different from one's own gender, is seen as completing one's own gender.

As Crockett says, "The core of Giles' argument with regard to the relationship between gender and sexuality is that (gendered) sexual orientation is essential to the experience of sexual desire."

Although the theory shows similarities to earlier theories such as those of Thomas Nagel on sexual perversion, or of Aristophanes on romantic love in Plato's Symposium, Giles' core thesis is quite distinct.

This is the idea that sexual desire is just the desire for mutual baring and caressing.

Baring and caressing are thus the true objects of sexual desire.

Giles' book on sexual desire has been extensively discussed and reviewed in journals from an array of different disciplines.

Giles is also known for both his critique of the attempt to pathologize high levels of sexual behaviour and his rejection of the idea that sexual orientation is socially constructed.