Raimond Gaita's Nun and Unconditional Love

Raimond Gaita’s witness of a nun engaging with patients in the psychiatric hospital where he worked as a student indelibly marked both his life and his philosophising. What he witnessed helped shape for him a conception of “absolute” value, linked to the power of love, which has animated nearly everything he has written in moral philosophy. Much in this conception I find compelling. But I also find some of the ways Gaita has undertaken to articulate the significance of his witness of the nun elusive and/or puzzling. In a spirit of critical collaboration, I revisit some of what Gaita says on that score. By slightly shifting the light at various points, I hope to let some aspects of the scene Gaita depicts show themselves a little differently. At the end I touch briefly on a difference that taking Gaita seriously arguably makes to the way one does moral philosophy.