Philosophy of love is the field of social philosophy and ethics that attempts to describe the nature of love. It is a branch of the humanities that allows us to understand and study the complex structure of compassion through the use of philosophical foundations.
Facts
Disputed
Key DebateThe fungibility problem: if love for a particular person is justified by appeal to the valuable properties of that person, the beloved seems replaceable by anyone else who has the same or better properties; Badhwar concedes that the object of love is fungible in principle, though very unlikely in practice, while Whiting and Delaney reply that the historical and relational properties belonging to the particular beloved, the fact of this shared history, are what love actually responds to, and no substitute could duplicate that. 1 Key DebateWhether love essentially involves a distinctive kind of evaluation of the beloved, and if so what that evaluation amounts to, remains a live and hotly disputed question at the center of the philosophy of love. 1 Central QuestionCan love for a particular person be justified, and if personal love can be justified at all, what kind of reason could ever justify loving this person rather than another? 1 Key DebateUnion views hold that love consists in forming a shared we in which the lovers' interests, concerns and even identities merge or partly fuse, a position associated with Robert Nozick, Roger Scruton and Robert Solomon; critics reply that this account of love does away with each lover's individual autonomy, since it erases the very distinction between the lover's interests and the beloved's that would let one be concerned for the other's own sake rather than a fused, shared self. 1 Connections
Associated With
Plato's Symposium, staging a series of speeches in praise of eros, is the foundational Western text on the philosophy of love.
The Second Sex's analysis of love as a lived, gendered structure, and de Beauvoir's critique of romantic self-abnegation, is a core modern text in the philosophy of love.
Sources
1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Informationentry: Love, Introduction
This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such.
entry: Love, section 1
Again, whether love essentially involves a distinctive kind of evaluation, and if so how to make sense of that evaluation, is hotly disputed.
entry: Love, section 2 Love as Union
union views, by doing away with a clear distinction between your interests and mine, thereby undermine this sort of independence and so undermine the autonomy of the lovers.
entry: Love, section 6
The second worry concerns the fungibility of the object of love.
View the Source Philosophy of Love (Wikipedia)
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Philosophy of love is the field of social philosophy and ethics that attempts to describe the nature of love. It is a branch of humanities that allows us to understand and study the complex structure of compassion by the use of philosophical foundations.
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