Harry Frankfurt has a comprehensive and, at times, compelling, account of love, which are outlined in several of his works. However, he does not think that romantic love fits the ideal of love as it ‘includes a number of vividly distracting elements, which do not belong to the essential nature of love as a mode of disinterested concern’. In this paper, I argue that we can, nonetheless, learn some important things about romantic love from his account. Furthermore, I will suggest, (...) conversely, that there is distinct value in romantic love, which derives from the nature of the relationship on which it is based. Frankfurt tries to take agape and reformulate it so that it can also account for love of particular people. Whilst he succeeds, to some extent, in describing parental love, he fails to accurately describe romantic love and friendship, and, moreover, overlooks what is distinctly valuable about them. Although it was not his intention to describe romantic love, by failing to include features such as reciprocity in his account of love, Frankfurt leaves no room for a kind of love that is important and valuable to many people. (shrink)

A research resource created by the Metaphysics of Love project. -/- The Metaphysics of Love Project is an interdisciplinary investigation into the nature of romantic love, supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant and by the funding of Principal Investigator Carrie Jenkins's Canada Research Chair. The project is running from 2016 to 2019, following a successful pilot project that ran from 2014 to 2016 (funded by a Hampton Research Grant from the University of British (...) Columbia). (shrink)

Widespread misanthropy, understood as the disposition to reject society, is at once a permanent source of instability and injustice, and yet also a valuable support of cherished liberal practices, such as toleration. We must seek therefore to ‘civilise’ the misanthropic temper. Michel de Montaigne provides an instructive case study in this context, for he successfully moderated his misanthropy by his conviviality and friendship. The non-conditional character of Montaignean friendship functions to moderate rational misanthropic antipathy and thereby suggests a striking reinterpretation (...) of civic friendship. Montaigne may seem an unpromising ally for contemporary defenders of civic friendship, but in fact his essays provide a valuable resource for the political theory of community. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that community presupposes consensus on the good. As a result, liberals who acknowledge the permanence of pluralism have struggled to explain how a liberal society could realise the good of community. Here it is argued that our initial assumption is wrong. Conflict can serve as a source of political community. Our devotion to the things we care about provides us with reason to embark on a quest aimed at the elimination of conflict. The quest will require (...) us to engage in the cooperative activity of dialogue with our moral adversaries. It is in this activity of dialogue, and not at the quests end, that political community can be located. (shrink)

Speaking roughly, there are two competing accounts of the basis of love. First, the appraisal view: love is based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved. Second, the bestowal view: love is not based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved, but love is based in the lover, who then bestows value onto the beloved. While both models deserve due attention, the bestowal model is of present concern. Despite numerous virtues, the bestowal model faces (...) trenchant objections. In this paper, I outline and defend a version of bestowal love, according to which bestowal love is based in the lover’s motivating reasons, and which preserves the virtues while overcoming the difficulties facing bestowal love. (shrink)