Love A History

Lovers know that love is both vast and intense. This would seem to make it resistant to philosophical or rational analysis. Yet love’s vastness and intensity are what carry it into all spheres of our lives–ethical, political, spiritual, physical. As a result, considerations of what it means to love and to be loved, and what is worth loving and worth being, are inextricable from our most deeply-held commitments in ethics, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Love is impossible then for philosophers to ignore–which explains, at least in part, why love has been a central concept of philosophical inquiry over the last several millennia, in the west and beyond.

The aim of this volume is twofold. First, it chronicles the most significant moments in this concept’s long and remarkable evolutionary life, ranging from ancient Hebrew and Greek and Christian conceptions of love to those advanced by thinkers from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Levinas. Second, in addition to profiling these discrete historical moments, this volume also aims to tell an interconnected story, such that those who read it cover-to-cover might be able to walk away with a sense of the larger arc of its historical evolution, and specifically the ways in which love’s horizons shifted from the transcendent to the immanent over the course of its history. Like other volumes in the series, the book is interspersed with short reflection chapters that touch on an array of people and subjects including Martin Luther King, Jr., Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Platonic love poetry, which supplement the work’s philosophical discussions.