greek philosophy essay

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

8 Origins of Greek Philosophy

The pre-socratics.

Review Video  — The Ionian Origins of Greek Philosophy by Daniel Riaño  (11)

About 600 BCE, the Greek cities of Ionia were the intellectual and cultural leaders of Greece and the number one sea-traders of the Mediterranean. Miletus, the southernmost Ionian city, was the wealthiest of Greek cities and the main focus of the “Ionian awakening” — a name for the initial phase of classical Greek civilization, coincidental with the birth of Greek philosophy.

The first group of Greek philosophers is a triad of Milesian thinkers: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Their main contribution was the development and application of theory purely based on empirical observation of natural phenomena. They seemed to all agree on the notion that all things come from a single “primal origin or substance.” Thales believed it was water; Anaximander said it was a substance different from all other known substances, “infinite, eternal and ageless;” and Anaximenes claimed it was air.

Observation was important among the Milesian school. Thales predicted an eclipse, which took place in 585 BCE, and it seems he had been able to calculate the distance of a ship at sea from observations taken at two points. Anaximander, based on the fact that human infants are helpless at birth, argued that if the first human had somehow appeared on earth as an infant, it would not have survived: therefore, humans have evolved from other animals whose offspring are fitter. The science among Milesians was stronger than their philosophy and somewhat rudimentary, but it encouraged observation in many subsequent thinkers and was also a good stimulus to approach in a rational fashion many of the traditional questions that had previously been answered through myth, thus ushering in the epistemological and metaphysical world of the later philosophers.  (3)

Aristotle, Metaphysics

Reading from  Aristotle, Metaphysics

Book One: Section 1.983b–1.990a.

Most of the earliest philosophers conceived only of material principles as underlying all things. That of which all things consist, from which they first come and into which on their destruction they are ultimately resolved, of which the essence persists although modified by its affections — this, they say, is an element and principle of existing things. Hence, they believe that nothing is either generated or destroyed, since this kind of primary entity always persists. Similarly, we do not say that Socrates comes into being  absolutely  when he becomes handsome or cultured, nor that he is destroyed when he loses these qualities; because the substrate, Socrates himself, persists. In the same way nothing else is generated or destroyed; for there is some one entity (or more than one) which always persists and from which all other things are generated. All are not agreed, however, as to the number and character of these principles.  (12)

The Milesians, Thales and Anaximander

Thales, the founder of this school of philosophy, says the permanent entity is water (which is why he also propounded that the earth floats on water). Presumably, he derived this assumption from seeing that the nutriment of everything is moist, and that heat itself is generated from moisture and depends upon it for its existence (and that from which a thing is generated is always its first principle). He derived his assumption, then, from this; and also from the fact that the seeds of everything have a moist nature, whereas water is the first principle of the nature of moist things.  (12)

ANAXIMANDER  (c 610–c 546 BCE) of Miletus was a student of Thales and recent scholarship argues that he, rather than Thales, should be considered the first western philosopher owing to the fact that we have a direct and undisputed quote from Anaximander while we have nothing written by Thales. Anaximander invented the idea of models, drew the first map of the world in Greece, and is said to have been the first to write a book of prose. He traveled extensively and was highly regarded by his contemporaries. Among his major contributions to philosophical thought was his claim that the ‘basic stuff’ of the universe was the apeiron, the infinite and boundless, a philosophical and theological claim which is still debated among scholars today and which, some argue, provided Plato with the basis for his cosmology.

Simplicius writes, Of those who say that it is one, moving, and infinite, Anaximander, son of Praxiades, a Milesian, the successor and pupil of Thales, said that the principle and element of existing things was the apeiron [indefinite or infinite] being the first to introduce this name of the material principle. He says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements but some other apeiron nature, from which come into being all the heavens and the worlds in them. And the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens ‘according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of time,’ as he describes it in these rather poetical terms. It is clear that he, seeing the changing of the four elements into each other, thought it right to make none of these the substratum, but something else besides these; and he produces coming-to-be not through the alteration of the element, but by the separation off of the opposites through the eternal motion. (  Physics  , 24)

This statement by Anaximander regarding elements paying penalty to each other according to the assessment of time is considered the oldest known piece of written Western philosophy.

Thales claimed that the First Cause of all things was water but Anaximander, recognizing that water was another of the earthly elements, believed that the First Cause had to come from something beyond such an element. His answer to the question of `Where did everything come from?’ was the apeiron, the boundless, but what exactly he meant by `the boundless’ has given rise to the centuries-old debate. Does `the boundless’ refer to a spatial or temporal quality or does it refers to something inexhaustible and undefined?

While it is impossible to say with certainty what Anaximander meant, a better understanding can be gained through his `long since’ argument, which  Aristotle  phrases this way in his  Physics  .

Some make this First Cause (namely, that which is additional to the elements) the Boundless, but not air or water, lest the others should be destroyed by one of them, being boundless; for they are opposite to one another (the air, for instance, is cold, the water wet, and the fire hot). If any of them should be boundless, it would long since have destroyed the others; but now there is, they say, something other from which they are all generated. (204b25–29)

In other words, none of the observable elements could be the First Cause because all observable elements are changeable and, were one to be more powerful than the others, it would have long since eradicated them. As observed, however, the elements of the earth seem to be in balance with each other, none of them holding the upper hand and, therefore, some other source must be looked to for a First Cause. In making this claim,  Anaximander becomes  the first known philosopher to work in abstract, rather than natural, philosophy and  the first metaphysician  even before the term `metaphysics’ was coined.

He charted the heavens, traveled widely, was the first to claim the earth floated in space, and the first to posit an unobservable First Cause (which, whether it influenced Plato, certainly shares similarities with Aristotle’s Prime Mover). Diogenes Laertius writes, “Apollodorus, in his  Chronicles  , states that in the second year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad, [Anaximander] was sixty-four years old. And soon after he died, having flourished much about the same time as Polycrates, the tyrant, of Samos.” A statue was erected at Miletus in Anaximander’s honor.  (13)

The Eleatics Parmenides and Zeno of Elea

Parmenides  (c. 485 BCE) of Elea was a Greek philosopher from the colony of Elea in southern Italy. He is known as the founder of the Eleatic School of philosophy, which taught a strict Monistic view of reality. Philosophical Monism is the belief that all of the sensible world is of one, basic substance and being, un-created and indestructible.

Parmenides was a younger contemporary of Heraclitus who claimed that all things are constantly in motion and change (that the basic `stuff’ of life is change itself). Parmenides’ thought could not be further removed from that of Heraclitus in that Parmenides claimed nothing moved, change was impossibility, and that human sense perception could not be relied upon for an apprehension of Truth.

The Philosopher of Changeless Being

According to Parmenides, “There is a way which is and a way which is not” (a way of fact, or truth, and a way of opinion about things) and one must come to an understanding of the way “which is” to understand the nature of life. Known as the Philosopher of Changeless Being, Parmenides’ insistence on an eternal, single Truth and his repudiation of relativism and mutability would greatly influence the young philosopher Plato and, through him, Aristotle (though the latter would interpret Parmenides’ Truth quite differently than his master did). Plato devoted a dialogue to the man, the Parmenides, in which Parmenides and his student, Zeno, come to Athens and instruct a young Socrates in philosophical wisdom. This is quite an homage to the thought of Parmenides in that, in most dialogues, Plato presents Socrates as the wise questioner who needs no instruction from anyone. While Parmenides was an older contemporary of Socrates, it is doubtful the two men ever met.

Zeno of Elea

Zeno of Elea was Parmenides’ most famous student and wrote forty paradoxes in defense of Parmenides’ claim that change — and even motion — were illusions which one must disregard in order to know the nature of oneself and that of the universe. Zeno’s work was intended to clarify and defend Parmenides’ statements, such as… reality is One. Nothing is capable of inherently changing in any significant fashion because the very substance of reality is unchangeable and ‘nothingness’ cannot be comprehended.

Nothing Can Come from Nothing

Even so, it seems that Parmenides’ ideas themselves were hard to comprehend for his listeners, necessitating Zeno’s mathematical paradoxes. Parmenides’ main point, however, was simply that nothing could come from nothing and that `being’ must have always existed.

Being & Not Being

Simply put, his argument is that since ‘something’ cannot come from ‘nothing’ then ‘something’ must have always existed in order to produce the sensible world. This world we perceive, then, is of one substance – that same substance from which it came – and we who inhabit it share in this same unity of substance. Therefore, if it should appear that a person is born from `nowhere’ or that one dies and goes somewhere else, both of these perceptions must be wrong since that which is now can never have been ‘not’ nor can it ever ‘not be’. In this, Parmenides may be developing ideas from the earlier philosopher Pythagoras (c. 571–c.497 BCE) who claimed the soul is immortal and returns to the sensible world repeatedly through reincarnation. If so, however, Parmenides very radically departed from Pythagorean thought which allows that there is plurality present in our reality. To Parmenides, and his disciples of the Eleatic School, such a claim would be evidence of belief in the senses which, they insisted, could never be trusted to reveal the truth. The Eleatic principle that all is one, and unchanging, exerted considerable influence on later philosophers and schools of thought. Besides Plato (who, in addition to the dialogue, Parmenides also addressed Eleatic concepts in his dialogues of the Sophist and the Statesman) the famous Sophist Gorgias employed Eleatic reasoning and principles in his work as Aristotle would also do later, principally in his Metaphysics.  (14)

Pluralists and Atomists

Empedocles  , from the ancient Greek city of Akragas, (Agrigentum in Latin), modern Agrigento, in Sicily, appears to have been partly in agreement with the Eleatic School, partly in opposition to it. On the one hand, he maintained the unchangeable nature of substance; on the other, he supposes a plurality of such substances — i.e. four classical elements, earth, water, air, and fire. Of these the world is built up, by the agency of two ideal motive forces — love as the cause of union, strife as the cause of separation.

The first explicitly materialistic system was formed by Leucippus (5  th  century BCE) and his pupil  Democritus  of Abdera (460–370 BCE) from Thrace. This was the doctrine of atoms — small primary bodies infinite in number, indivisible and imperishable, qualitatively similar, but distinguished by their shapes. Moving eternally through the infinite void, they collide and unite, thus generating objects which differ in accordance with the varieties, in number, size, shape, and arrangement, of the atoms which compose them.  (15)

Another View: Creation in the Philosophy of Ancient India: Rig Veda

The philosophical question of cosmogenesis has been approached in many different ways in Greece as we have seen in the beginning of this Module; here is an example of the question’s response from another perspective.  (1)

“Then was neither nonexistent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. What covered in, and where? And what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water? The ONE breathed without air by self-impulse; through the heat of tapas (desire) was manifest (1) Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation? The Gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows then whence it first came into being? He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.” (Rig-Veda 10.129.1-7)

There is another account on how the universe started, which has no equivalent in any other tradition. The universe is actually the dream of a god who after 100 Brahma years, dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep, and the universe dissolves with him. After another 100 Brahma years, he recomposes himself and begins to dream again the great cosmic dream. Meanwhile, there are infinite other universes elsewhere, each of them being dreamt by its own god.  (16)

What might each of these interpretations conclude should their arguments continue to develop? (The question is rhetorical. You need not consider it an assignment, but rather keep it in mind as we move to the next Module.)  (1)

Philosophy in the Humanities Copyright © by Lumen Learning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Essays in ancient Greek philosophy

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

245 Previews

12 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by station46.cebu on March 12, 2021

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy II

Alternative formats available from:.

• Google Play

View Table of Contents

Request Desk or Examination Copy Request a Media Review Copy

• Share this:

Table of contents

Introduction

Journal and Standard Reference Abbreviations

I. Pre-Socratics

John Ferguson

Xenophanes' Scepticism

James H. Lesher

Parmenides' Way of Truth and B16

Jackson P. Hershbell

"Nothing" as "Not-being": Some Literary Contexts that Bear on Plato

Alexander P. D. Mourelatos

Anaxagoras in Response to Parmenides

David J. Furley

Anaxagoras and Epicurus

Margaret E. Reesor

Form and Content in Gorgias' Helen and Palamedes : Phetoric, Philosophy, Inconsistency and Valid Argument in some Greek Thinkers

Arthur W. H. Adkins

Socrates and Prodicus in the Clouds

Z. Philip Ambrose

The Socratic Problem: Some Second Thoughts

Eric A. Havelock

Doctrine and Dramatic Dates of Plato's Dialogues

Robert S. Brumbaugh

The Tragic and Comic Poet of the Symposium

Diskin Clay

Charmides' First Definition: Sophrosyne as Quietness

L. A. Kosman

The Arguments in the Phaedo Concerning the Thesis That the Soul Is a Harmonia

C. C. W. Taylor

The Form of the Good in Plato's Republic

Gerasimos Santas

Logos in the Theaetetus and the Sophist

Edward M. Galligan

Episteme and Doxa : Some Reflections on Eleatic and Heraclitean Themes in Plato

Robert G. Turnbull

III. Aristotle

On the Antecedents of Aristotle's Bipartite Psychology

William W. Fortenbaugh

Heart and Soul in Aristotle

Theodore Tracy

Eidos as Norm in Aristotle's Biology

Anthony Preus

Intellectualism in Aristotle

Aristotle's Analysis of Change and Plato's Theory of Transcendent Ideas

Chung-Hwan Chen

The Fifth Element in Aristotle's De Philosophia : A Critical Reexamination

David E. Hahm

IV. Post-Aristotelian Philosophy

Problems in Epicurean Physics

David Konstan

Zeno and Stoic Consistency

John M. Rist

The Stoic Conception of Fate

Josiah B. Gould

Plotinus and Paranormal Phenomena

Richard T. Wallis

Metriopatheia and Apatheia : Some Reflections on a Controversy in Later Greek Ethics

John M. Dillon

Description

Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy, Volume Two, reflects the refinements in scholarship and philosophical analysis that have impacted classical philosophy in recent years. It is a selection of the best papers presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy during the last decade. The papers presented indicate a shift in accent from a predominant preference for the application of linguistic methods in the study of texts to a more intensified concern for contextual examinations of philosophical concepts. The works of both younger scholars and senior authors show a more liberal, yet controlled, use of historical and cultural elements in interpretation. The papers also reflect advances in scholarship in adjacent fields of Greek studies.

From pre-Socratic to post-Aristotelian philosophers, the papers in this volume are intended to stimulate interest in the major accomplishments of classical philosophers. This work augments its companion volume Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy.

John P. Anton is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. Anthony Preus is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

"The essays are a genuine contribution to the field. They provide a number of fresh insights and uniformly have something intellectually important to say. " — Dr. Aldo Tassi, Loyola College in Maryland

1.1 What Is Philosophy?

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Identify sages (early philosophers) across historical traditions.
• Explain the connection between ancient philosophy and the origin of the sciences.
• Describe philosophy as a discipline that makes coherent sense of a whole.
• Summarize the broad and diverse origins of philosophy.

It is difficult to define philosophy. In fact, to do so is itself a philosophical activity, since philosophers are attempting to gain the broadest and most fundamental conception of the world as it exists. The world includes nature, consciousness, morality, beauty, and social organizations. So the content available for philosophy is both broad and deep. Because of its very nature, philosophy considers a range of subjects, and philosophers cannot automatically rule anything out. Whereas other disciplines allow for basic assumptions, philosophers cannot be bound by such assumptions. This open-endedness makes philosophy a somewhat awkward and confusing subject for students. There are no easy answers to the questions of what philosophy studies or how one does philosophy. Nevertheless, in this chapter, we can make some progress on these questions by (1) looking at past examples of philosophers, (2) considering one compelling definition of philosophy, and (3) looking at the way academic philosophers today actually practice philosophy.

Historical Origins of Philosophy

One way to begin to understand philosophy is to look at its history. The historical origins of philosophical thinking and exploration vary around the globe. The word philosophy derives from ancient Greek, in which the philosopher is a lover or pursuer ( philia ) of wisdom ( sophia ). But the earliest Greek philosophers were not known as philosophers; they were simply known as sages . The sage tradition provides an early glimpse of philosophical thought in action. Sages are sometimes associated with mathematical and scientific discoveries and at other times with their political impact. What unites these figures is that they demonstrate a willingness to be skeptical of traditions, a curiosity about the natural world and our place in it, and a commitment to applying reason to understand nature, human nature, and society better. The overview of the sage tradition that follows will give you a taste of philosophy’s broad ambitions as well as its focus on complex relations between different areas of human knowledge. There are some examples of women who made contributions to philosophy and the sage tradition in Greece, India, and China, but these were patriarchal societies that did not provide many opportunities for women to participate in philosophical and political discussions.

The Sages of India, China, Africa, and Greece

In classical Indian philosophy and religion, sages play a central role in both religious mythology and in the practice of passing down teaching and instruction through generations. The Seven Sages, or Saptarishi (seven rishis in the Sanskrit language), play an important role in sanatana dharma , the eternal duties that have come to be identified with Hinduism but that predate the establishment of the religion. The Seven Sages are partially considered wise men and are said to be the authors of the ancient Indian texts known as the Vedas . But they are partly mythic figures as well, who are said to have descended from the gods and whose reincarnation marks the passing of each age of Manu (age of man or epoch of humanity). The rishis tended to live monastic lives, and together they are thought of as the spiritual and practical forerunners of Indian gurus or teachers, even up to today. They derive their wisdom, in part, from spiritual forces, but also from tapas , or the meditative, ascetic, and spiritual practices they perform to gain control over their bodies and minds. The stories of the rishis are part of the teachings that constitute spiritual and philosophical practice in contemporary Hinduism.

Figure 1.2 depicts a scene from the Matsya Purana, where Manu, the first man whose succession marks the prehistorical ages of Earth, sits with the Seven Sages in a boat to protect them from a mythic flood that is said to have submerged the world. The king of serpents guides the boat, which is said to have also contained seeds, plants, and animals saved by Manu from the flood.

Despite the fact that classical Indian culture is patriarchal, women figures play an important role in the earliest writings of the Vedic tradition (the classical Indian religious and philosophical tradition). These women figures are partly connected to the Indian conception of the fundamental forces of nature—energy, ability, strength, effort, and power—as feminine. This aspect of God was thought to be present at the creation of the world. The Rig Veda, the oldest Vedic writings, contains hymns that tell the story of Ghosha, a daughter of Rishi Kakshivan, who had a debilitating skin condition (probably leprosy) but devoted herself to spiritual practices to learn how to heal herself and eventually marry. Another woman, Maitreyi, is said to have married the Rishi Yajnavalkya (himself a god who was cast into mortality by a rival) for the purpose of continuing her spiritual training. She was a devoted ascetic and is said to have composed 10 of the hymns in the Rig Veda. Additionally, there is a famous dialogue between Maitreyi and Yajnavalkya in the Upanishads (another early, foundational collection of texts in the Vedic tradition) about attachment to material possessions, which cannot give a person happiness, and the achievement of ultimate bliss through knowledge of the Absolute (God).

Another woman sage named Gargi also participates in a celebrated dialogue with Yajnavalkya on natural philosophy and the fundamental elements and forces of the universe. Gargi is characterized as one of the most knowledgeable sages on the topic, though she ultimately concedes that Yajnavalkya has greater knowledge. In these brief episodes, these ancient Indian texts record instances of key women who attained a level of enlightenment and learning similar to their male counterparts. Unfortunately, this early equality between the sexes did not last. Over time Indian culture became more patriarchal, confining women to a dependent and subservient role. Perhaps the most dramatic and cruel example of the effects of Indian patriarchy was the ritual practice of sati , in which a widow would sometimes immolate herself, partly in recognition of the “fact” that following the death of her husband, her current life on Earth served no further purpose (Rout 2016). Neither a widow’s in-laws nor society recognized her value.

In similar fashion to the Indian tradition, the sage ( sheng ) tradition is important for Chinese philosophy . Confucius , one of the greatest Chinese writers, often refers to ancient sages, emphasizing their importance for their discovery of technical skills essential to human civilization, for their role as rulers and wise leaders, and for their wisdom. This emphasis is in alignment with the Confucian appeal to a well-ordered state under the guidance of a “ philosopher-king .” This point of view can be seen in early sage figures identified by one of the greatest classical authors in the Chinese tradition, as the “Nest Builder” and “Fire Maker” or, in another case, the “Flood Controller.” These names identify wise individuals with early technological discoveries. The Book of Changes , a classical Chinese text, identifies the Five (mythic) Emperors as sages, including Yao and Shun, who are said to have built canoes and oars, attached carts to oxen, built double gates for defense, and fashioned bows and arrows (Cheng 1983). Emperor Shun is also said to have ruled during the time of a great flood, when all of China was submerged. Yü is credited with having saved civilization by building canals and dams.

These figures are praised not only for their political wisdom and long rule, but also for their filial piety and devotion to work. For instance, Mencius, a Confucian philosopher, relates a story of Shun’s care for his blind father and wicked stepmother, while Yü is praised for his selfless devotion to work. In these ways, the Chinese philosophical traditions, such as Confucianism and Mohism, associate key values of their philosophical enterprises with the great sages of their history. Whether the sages were, in fact, actual people or, as many scholars have concluded, mythical forebearers, they possessed the essential human virtue of listening and responding to divine voices. This attribute can be inferred from the Chinese script for sheng , which bears the symbol of an ear as a prominent feature. So the sage is one who listens to insight from the heavens and then is capable of sharing that wisdom or acting upon it to the benefit of his society (Cheng 1983). This idea is similar to one found in the Indian tradition, where the most important texts, the Vedas, are known as shruti , or works that were heard through divine revelation and only later written down.

Although Confucianism is a venerable world philosophy, it is also highly patriarchal and resulted in the widespread subordination of women. The position of women in China began to change only after the Communist Revolution (1945–1952). While some accounts of Confucianism characterize men and women as emblematic of two opposing forces in the natural world, the Yin and Yang, this view of the sexes developed over time and was not consistently applied. Chinese women did see a measure of independence and freedom with the influence of Buddhism and Daoism, each of which had a more liberal view of the role of women (Adler 2006).

A detailed and important study of the sage tradition in Africa is provided by Henry Odera Oruka (1990), who makes the case that prominent folk sages in African tribal history developed complex philosophical ideas. Oruka interviewed tribal Africans identified by their communities as sages, and he recorded their sayings and ideas, confining himself to those sayings that demonstrated “a rational method of inquiry into the real nature of things” (Oruka 1990, 150). He recognized a tension in what made these sages philosophically interesting: they articulated the received wisdom of their tradition and culture while at the same time maintaining a critical distance from that culture, seeking a rational justification for the beliefs held by the culture.

Connections

The chapter on the early history of philosophy covers this topic in greater detail.

Among the ancient Greeks, it is common to identify seven sages. The best-known account is provided by Diogenes Laërtius, whose text Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is a canonical resource on early Greek philosophy. The first and most important sage is Thales of Miletus . Thales traveled to Egypt to study with the Egyptian priests, where he became one of the first Greeks to learn astronomy. He is known for bringing back to Greece knowledge of the calendar, dividing the year into 365 days, tracking the progress of the sun from solstice to solstice, and—somewhat dramatically—predicting a solar eclipse in 585 BCE. The eclipse occurred on the day of a battle between the Medes and Lydians. It is possible that Thales used knowledge of Babylonian astronomical records to guess the year and location of the eclipse. This mathematical and astronomical feat is one of Thales’s several claims to sagacity. In addition, he is said to have calculated the height of the pyramids using the basic geometry of similar triangles and measuring shadows at a certain time of day. He is also reported to have predicted a particularly good year for olives: he bought up all the olive presses and then made a fortune selling those presses to farmers wanting to turn their olives into oil. Together, these scientific and technical achievements suggest that at least part of Thales’s wisdom can be attributed to a very practical, scientific, and mathematical knowledge of the natural world. If that were all Thales was known for, he might be called the first scientist or engineer. But he also made more basic claims about the nature and composition of the universe; for instance, he claimed that all matter was fundamentally made of up water. He also argued that everything that moved on its own possessed a soul and that the soul itself was immortal. These claims demonstrate a concern about the fundamental nature of reality.

Another of the seven sages was Solon , a famed political leader. He introduced the “Law of Release” to Athens, which cancelled all personal debts and freed indentured servants, or “debt-slaves” who had been consigned to service based on a personal debt they were unable to repay. In addition, he established a constitutional government in Athens with a representative body, a procedure for taxation, and a series of economic reforms. He was widely admired as a political leader but voluntarily stepped down so that he would not become a tyrant. He was finally forced to flee Athens when he was unable to persuade the members of the Assembly (the ruling body) to resist the rising tyranny of one of his relatives, Pisistratus. When he arrived in exile, he was reportedly asked whom he considered to be happy, to which he replied, “One ought to count no man happy until he is dead.” Aristotle interpreted this statement to mean that happiness was not a momentary experience, but a quality reflective of someone’s entire life.

Beginnings of Natural Philosophy

The sage tradition is a largely prehistoric tradition that provides a narrative about how intellect, wisdom, piety, and virtue led to the innovations central to flourishing of ancient civilizations. Particularly in Greece, the sage tradition blends into a period of natural philosophy, where ancient scientists or philosophers try to explain nature using rational methods. Several of the early Greek schools of philosophy were centered on their respective views of nature. Followers of Thales, known as the Milesians , were particularly interested in the underlying causes of natural change. Why does water turn to ice? What happens when winter passes into spring? Why does it seem like the stars and planets orbit Earth in predictable patterns? From Aristotle we know that Thales thought there was a difference between material elements that participate in change and elements that contain their own source of motion. This early use of the term element did not have the same meaning as the scientific meaning of the word today in a field like chemistry. But Thales thought material elements bear some fundamental connection to water in that they have the capacity to move and alter their state. By contrast, other elements had their own internal source of motion, of which he cites the magnet and amber (which exhibits forces of static electricity when rubbed against other materials). He said that these elements have “soul.” This notion of soul, as a principle of internal motion, was influential across ancient and medieval natural philosophy. In fact, the English language words animal and animation are derived from the Latin word for soul ( anima ).

Similarly, early thinkers like Xenophanes began to formulate explanations for natural phenomena. For instance, he explained rainbows, the sun, the moon, and St. Elmo’s fire (luminous, electrical discharges) as apparitions of the clouds. This form of explanation, describing some apparent phenomenon as the result of an underlying mechanism, is paradigmatic of scientific explanation even today. Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, used logic to conclude that whatever fundamentally exists must be unchanging because if it ever did change, then at least some aspect of it would cease to exist. But that would imply that what exists could not exist—which seems to defy logic. Parmenides is not saying that there is no change, but that the changes we observe are a kind of illusion. Indeed, this point of view was highly influential, not only for Plato and Aristotle, but also for the early atomists, like Democritus , who held that all perceived qualities are merely human conventions. Underlying all these appearances, Democritus reasoned, are only atomic, unchanging bits of matter flowing through a void. While this ancient Greek view of atoms is quite different from the modern model of atoms, the very idea that every observable phenomenon has a basis in underlying pieces of matter in various configurations clearly connects modern science to the earliest Greek philosophers.

Along these lines, the Pythagoreans provide a very interesting example of a community of philosophers engaged in understanding the natural world and how best to live in it. You may be familiar with Pythagoras from his Pythagorean theorem, a key principle in geometry establishing a relationship between the sides of a right-angled triangle. Specifically, the square formed by the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the two squares formed by the remaining two sides. In the figure below, the area of the square formed by c is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares formed by a and b. The figure represents how Pythagoras would have conceptualized the theorem.

The Pythagoreans were excellent mathematicians, but they were more interested in how mathematics explained the natural world. In particular, Pythagoras recognized relationships between line segments and shapes, such as the Pythagorean theorem describes, but also between numbers and sounds, by virtue of harmonics and the intervals between notes. Similar regularities can be found in astronomy. As a result, Pythagoras reasoned that all of nature is generated according to mathematical regularities. This view led the Pythagoreans to believe that there was a unified, rational structure to the universe, that the planets and stars exhibit harmonic properties and may even produce music, that musical tones and harmonies could have healing powers, that the soul is immortal and continuously reincarnated, and that animals possess souls that ought to be respected and valued. As a result, the Pythagorean community was defined by serious scholarship as well as strict rules about diet, clothing, and behavior.

Additionally, in the early Pythagorean communities, it was possible for women to participate and contribute to philosophical thought and discovery. Pythagoras himself was said to have been inspired to study philosophy by the Delphic priestess Themistoclea. His wife Theano is credited with contributing to important discoveries in the realms of numbers and optics. She is said to have written a treatise, On Piety , which further applies Pythagorean philosophy to various aspects of practical life (Waithe 1987). Myia, the daughter of this illustrious couple, was also an active and productive part of the community. At least one of her letters has survived in which she discusses the application of Pythagorean philosophy to motherhood. The Pythagorean school is an example of how early philosophical and scientific thinking combines with religious, cultural, and ethical beliefs and practices to embrace many different aspects of life.

How It All Hangs Together

Closer to the present day, in 1962, Wilfrid Sellars , a highly influential 20th-century American philosopher, wrote a chapter called “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” in Frontiers of Science and Philosophy . He opens the essay with a dramatic and concise description of philosophy: “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” If we spend some time trying to understand what Sellars means by this definition, we will be in a better position to understand the academic discipline of philosophy. First, Sellars emphasizes that philosophy’s goal is to understand a very wide range of topics—in fact, the widest possible range. That is to say, philosophers are committed to understanding everything insofar as it can be understood. This is important because it means that, on principle, philosophers cannot rule out any topic of study. However, for a philosopher not every topic of study deserves equal attention. Some things, like conspiracy theories or paranoid delusions, are not worth studying because they are not real. It may be worth understanding why some people are prone to paranoid delusions or conspiratorial thinking, but the content of these ideas is not worth investigating. Other things may be factually true, such as the daily change in number of the grains of sand on a particular stretch of beach, but they are not worth studying because knowing that information will not teach us about how things hang together. So a philosopher chooses to study things that are informative and interesting—things that provide a better understanding of the world and our place in it.

To make judgments about which areas are interesting or worthy of study, philosophers need to cultivate a special skill. Sellars describes this philosophical skill as a kind of know-how (a practical, engaged type of knowledge, similar to riding a bike or learning to swim). Philosophical know-how, Sellars says, has to do with knowing your way around the world of concepts and being able to understand and think about how concepts connect, link up, support, and rely upon one another—in short, how things hang together. Knowing one’s way around the world of concepts also involves knowing where to look to find interesting discoveries and which places to avoid, much like a good fisherman knows where to cast his line. Sellars acknowledges that other academics and scientists know their way around the concepts in their field of study much like philosophers do. The difference is that these other inquirers confine themselves to a specific field of study or a particular subject matter, while philosophers want to understand the whole. Sellars thinks that this philosophical skill is most clearly demonstrated when we try to understand the connection between the natural world as we experience it directly (the “manifest image”) and the natural world as science explains it (the “scientific image”). He suggests that we gain an understanding of the nature of philosophy by trying to reconcile these two pictures of the world that most people understand independently.

Read Like a Philosopher

“philosophy and the scientific image of man”.

This essay, “ Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man ” by Wilfrid Sellars, has been republished several times and can be found online. Read through the essay with particular focus on the first section. Consider the following study questions:

• What is the difference between knowing how and knowing that? Are these concepts always distinct? What does it mean for philosophical knowledge to be a kind of know-how?
• What do you think Sellars means when he says that philosophers “have turned other special subject-matters to non-philosophers over the past 2500 years”?
• Sellars describes philosophy as “bringing a picture into focus,” but he is also careful to recognize challenges with this metaphor as it relates to the body of human knowledge. What are those challenges? Why is it difficult to imagine all of human knowledge as a picture or image?
• What is the scientific image of man in the world? What is the manifest image of man in the world? How are they different? And why are these two images the primary images that need to be brought into focus so that philosophy may have an eye on the whole?

Unlike other subjects that have clearly defined subject matter boundaries and relatively clear methods of exploration and analysis, philosophy intentionally lacks clear boundaries or methods. For instance, your biology textbook will tell you that biology is the “science of life.” The boundaries of biology are fairly clear: it is an experimental science that studies living things and the associated material necessary for life. Similarly, biology has relatively well-defined methods. Biologists, like other experimental scientists, broadly follow something called the “scientific method.” This is a bit of a misnomer, unfortunately, because there is no single method that all the experimental sciences follow. Nevertheless, biologists have a range of methods and practices, including observation, experimentation, and theory comparison and analysis, that are fairly well established and well known among practitioners. Philosophy doesn’t have such easy prescriptions—and for good reason. Philosophers are interested in gaining the broadest possible understanding of things, whether that be nature, what is possible, morals, aesthetics, political organizations, or any other field or concept.

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/1-introduction

• Authors: Nathan Smith
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: Introduction to Philosophy
• Publication date: Jun 15, 2022
• Location: Houston, Texas
• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/1-introduction
• Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/1-1-what-is-philosophy

© Dec 19, 2023 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

• Home ›
• Reviews ›

The Quest for the Good Life: Ancient Philosophers on Happiness

Øyvind Rabbås, Eyjólfur K. Emilsson, Hallvard Fossheim, and Miira Tuominen (eds.), The Quest for the Good Life: Ancient Philosophers on Happiness , Oxford University Press, 2015, 307pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198746980.

Reviewed by Riin Sirkel, University of Vermont

This volume, containing fourteen papers, focuses on happiness in ancient Greek philosophy. There has been growing interest in happiness and its history within various disciplines like psychology, social sciences, literary studies, as well as in popular culture. Indeed, this shift of interest has been characterized as a "eudaimonic turn", where "eudaimonic" comes from the Greek eudaimonia , standardly translated as "happiness". [1] Thus, the focus of this volume is very much in line with our contemporary interests, but above all it contributes to the scholarship on ancient Greek ethics.

There is an abundance of volumes on ancient ethics, but this one stands out in two ways. Firstly, it is not mainly about Aristotle, who is the canonical figure in ancient ethics, but also includes papers on Plato, Hellenistic schools, the Greek commentators, and Augustine. The inclusion of philosophers of late antiquity deserves special mention, for even though their philosophy represents a crucial link between ancient and medieval philosophy, their ethics has not yet been sufficiently explored. Secondly, this volume takes "the notion of happiness as its primary focus" (5), where the intended contrast is presumably with volumes that focus primarily on virtue or excellence. [2] It is true that of the two central notions of ancient ethics -- eudaimonia or happiness and aretê or virtue -- the scholarly discussions have tended towards virtue, which is encouraged also by the development of virtue ethics. The focus on virtue and virtue ethics has privileged some themes and topics over others, which might help to explain why some themes discussed in this volume (e.g. happiness and time, or happiness as godlikeness) have not received much scholarly attention, although they figure frequently in ancient discussions. The greatest strength of this volume is that by shifting the focus from virtue to happiness it brings to light new issues, topics, and approaches, and shows that ancient ethics is richer, more complex and less homogeneous than is often assumed.

What makes it an interesting volume also makes it difficult to review. To display the diversity of themes and authors, I have included short summaries of all papers, which I have arranged thematically. One of the dominant themes (if not the most dominant theme) of the volume is the relation between happiness and time. I will discuss papers on this theme in slightly greater detail, and then make some evaluative remarks about the volume as a whole. Also, it is worth noting that the volume derives from the project Ethics in Antiquity: The Quest for the Good Life at the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo, and testifies to the lively interest in eudaemonist ethics in Nordic countries.

For ancient philosophers, eudaimonia is not a particular kind of experience or feeling, but a particular kind of life, where reason almost always plays an important role. The link between happiness and reason is clearly drawn by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics ( NE ) I 7, where he argues that happiness resides in rational activity in accordance with virtue. This argument is discussed by Øyvind Rabbås in " Eudaimonia , Human Nature, and Normativity: Reflections on Aristotle's Project in Nicomachean Ethics Book I". He aims to explain how Aristotle's ethics can be both naturalist and practically normative, i.e. based in a conception of human nature as a rational being, and at the same time give guidance on how we ought to live. The connection between happiness and reason is particularly tight in the Platonist tradition, with Plotinus identifying the happy life with the life of intellect. Plotinus' thoughts on happiness are discussed by Alexandrine Schniewind (and touched upon by Eyjólfur K. Emilsson and Miira Tuominen). Schniewind shows in "Plotinus' Way of Defining ' Eudaimonia ' in Ennead I 4 [46] 1-3" that Plotinus' puzzling remarks about his predecessors in the two opening chapters of Ennead I 4 are intended to clear the way for his own definition of happiness.

As well as a connection between happiness and reason, the volume demonstrates that there is a close connection between happiness and godlikeness in ancient ethics. This theme is mentioned in several papers, and taken up in detail by Svavar Hrafn Svavarsson in "On Happiness and Godlikeness before Socrates". Starting from the observation that Plato and Aristotle share the idea that happiness "consists in being as like god as possible" (28), he traces the development of this idea from Homer and Hesiod, through lyric poets, to Heraclitus. He shows how the focus shifts from happiness as external success, entirely dependent on gods, to internal factors responsible for this success. Another significant shift takes place in late antiquity, and is addressed by Christian Tornau in "Happiness in this Life? Augustine on the Principle that Virtue is Self-sufficient for Happiness". Augustine denies the possibility of achieving happiness in this life and regards happiness as a gift of divine grace, but nonetheless holds on to the traditional idea that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Tornau examines his attempt to resolve this dilemma through redefining virtue.

While this volume focuses primarily on happiness, rather than on virtue, the connection between happiness and virtue is an important theme in ancient ethics. Most ancient Greek philosophers agree that in order for one to be happy, one needs to be virtuous, though opinions differ as to whether being virtuous is sufficient for happiness. The Stoics famously take virtue, understood as wisdom, to be sufficient for the happy life, and a common complaint against their account is that the status of the wise person is outside the reach of regular people. Katerina Ierodiakonou's "How Feasible is the Stoic Conception of Eudaimonia ?" considers and responds to objections presented by the Stoics' ancient critics. She argues that Stoic moral principles do not rule out moral progress, and their conception of eudaimonia , as an aspiration towards an ideal, is no less feasible than that of other ancient ethical theories. Ierodiakonou's paper is perhaps most directly about virtues, whereas other papers discuss virtues more or less indirectly.

Justice as one of the cardinal virtues is discussed in two papers on Plato's dialogues. In "Wanting to Do What Is Just in the Gorgias ", Panos Dimas walks the reader through the Gorgias, and shows that Socrates fails to offer a substantive defense of the view that people want to do what is just, when they know it. Socrates' failure, he proposes, is due to a lack of a positive theory of justice, and the Gorgias may thus be seen as paving the way for the discussion in the Republic . In "Plato's Defence of Justice: The Wrong Kind of Reason?" Julia Annas focuses on Socrates' answer in the Republic to the question of why one should be just. His answer is that being just will lead to living a happy life. Prichard famously complained that this is a wrong kind of answer, since ordinarily people suppose that the reason for being just should not appeal to one's happiness, but to its being the right thing to do. Annas focuses on a recent version of this objection, according to which there are indications in Plato himself that, when defending justice in a eudaemonist way, he is ignoring an alternative answer available to his audience. She offers a close reading of relevant passages, showing that these do not support the "wrong kind of answer" objection. Gösta Grönroos' focus in "Why Is Aristotle's Vicious Person Miserable?" is not on virtue and happy life, but rather on vice and miserable life. He aims to explain why the bad person is miserable, proposes that one reason is her mental conflict, and gives an account of what this conflict amounts to.

Although most ancient philosophers take virtue to be a constituent of happiness, there are also some exceptions. Epicureans take happiness to consist in pleasure, and Dimas' aim in "Epicurus on Pleasure, Desire, and Friendship" is to clarify what being a hedonist amounts to for Epicurus. He argues that Epicurus is a psychological and ethical hedonist, examines his divisions of pleasure and desire, and explains how Epicurus' hedonism fits with his views on virtue and friendship. Also the Pyrrhonian sceptics did not connect happiness with virtue but with the sceptical suspension of belief. The relation between the suspension of belief and happiness as tranquillity is discussed by Svavarsson in "The Pyrrhonian Idea of a Good Life". He discusses four kinds of texts and testimonies on Pyrrhonian tranquillity, with special emphasis on Sextus Empiricus and his perplexing attempt to establish that "the sceptic aims at tranquility but attains it by chance" (197).

Finally, a recurring themee is happiness and time, which deserves special mention. While this theme has received almost no attention from scholars, the papers in this volume demonstrate that it occupies an important role in ancient discussions. In "Aristotle on Happiness and Long Life", Gabriel Richardson Lear gives an interpretation of Aristotle's claim in NE I 7 that happiness requires a complete (or perfect, teleion ) life. The same claim is discussed by Emilsson in "On Happiness and Time", where he contrasts the views of Aristotle with post-Aristotelian authors, who give up the complete life requirement. Tuominen considers, in "Why Do We Need Other People to be Happy? Happiness and Concern for Others in Aspasius and Porphyry", the relation between self-interest and concern for others by examining Aspasius' and Porphyry's views. She shows how Aspasius, in commenting on Aristotle's claim in NE I 7, makes the concern for others central for happiness: happiness requires a complete life because one needs to do as much good as possible, also to others. Under this theme may also be subsumed Hallvard Fossheim's "Aristotle on Happiness and Old Age", which discusses (following Aristotle) the impact of old age on virtue and happiness.

At this point I would like to pause, for a moment, to consider proposed interpretations of Aristotle's claim that happiness resides in rational activity "in a complete life", for "one day does not make someone blessed and happy, and neither does a short time" (1098a16-20). On Lear's interpretation, the virtuous activity that constitutes happiness must be something habitual, stable and self-knowing. It takes time for the virtuous activity to become a stable and self-knowing way of life, a person needs "a relatively long time of acting well in order for it to be evident -- to herself and also to her fellow citizens -- that virtuous is what she is " (143). Lear's interpretation implies that the person, who has acquired virtue and acts accordingly, but does it only for a short time (e.g. because she dies young) is not happy (cf. 141). However, this seems counterintuitive, and one is inclined to make the same sort of observation that Lear herself makes earlier in the paper: "Aristotle thinks of the brave person as willing to give up a life that is, in a sense, already happy -- it is precisely for this reason that the prospect of death is painful for him" (137). Yet, her own proposal suggests that the brave person who dies on the battlefield, having obtained the virtue of bravery only recently, would not be considered happy. Emilsson seems to hold (unlike Lear) that we can judge the person who has obtained virtue and acts accordingly to be happy, but we should in our judgement leave open the possibility that things may change in the future. So, we will not judge the person to be happy unconditionally, but "ascribe happiness to a living person who is doing well on the condition that he will stay so till the end and nothing disastrous happens to him" (240). It is not clear how to cash out the details of this proposal, but Emilsson's paper is certainly thought provoking, and together with Lear's, provides a good starting point for further discussions. The same can be said for various other pieces in the volume.

So let me now make some evaluative remarks about the volume as a whole. As the above summaries show, the volume is deep and includes a wide variety of ancient authors. The variety is certainly a strength, but it invokes some questions about the selection of topics. I was left with the lingering question about the role and contribution of Socrates to the ancient eudaemonist tradition, i.e. the tradition that takes eudaimonia as the highest good and ultimate aim of all human endeavor. The volume includes a paper on the Gorgias , and a remark in the introduction that Plato's thought is "a peculiar case in our story" (24). This is because Plato never offers as extensive and systematic treatment of eudaimonia as Aristotle, and yet this topic is "clearly central to his thought" (24), which is then backed up with references to Plato's dialogues, including Socratic dialogues. However, it does not become clear what is the distinctive role of Socrates is this "story", and whether the editors would agree with those authors who take Socrates to be the founder of the eudaemonist tradition. [3] If they would, then wouldn't Socrates deserve more than a passing glance?

Also, the shift of focus from virtue to happiness has advantages that were outlined in the introduction, but placing the primary focus on happiness involves also some potential worries. For instance, even though this volume is about happiness, there's actually not too much discussion about what happiness amounts to, or how to achieve it. The answers to these questions are often just assumed, and the authors move on to discussing some other aspect of the eudaemonist framework. This might be the result of this shift of focus. For most Greek philosophers, the question "What is happiness?" will lead to the discussion of virtue, so it would be difficult to focus on this question without focusing on virtue. Yet, this is what the volume wants to avoid doing. Also, when the editors speak about the goal of the volume, they say that "the first and immediate motivation is to give the reader a sense of how ancient thinkers approached the topic [of happiness and the good life]" (5). Given the importance of virtue in the ancient approach, one wonders whether the volume achieves this aim without placing substantial focus on virtue. Just as the one-sided focus on virtue may hide away some interesting aspects of ancient ethics, there is a corresponding worry that the focus on happiness may paint a one-sided, if not misleading, picture of ancient ethics.

Further, the ancient philosophers' answer to the question "What is happiness?" may be controversial. This is particularly so in the case of Aristotle, who distinguishes between moral virtues and intellectual virtues. His account of happiness in the first books of NE suggests that he ascribes the central role to the former, holding that happiness resides in the morally virtuous action guided by reason, whereas his account in the last book of NE identifies the virtuous activity that constitutes happiness with theoretical contemplation, and it is far from clear how these accounts are supposed to fit together. This difficulty is discussed briefly by Lear, and mentioned by Fossheim, while others rely on one account or other, without making their view explicit. So Grönroos assumes that the virtuous and happy person is morally virtuous, whereas Svavarsson, in claiming that for Aristotle happiness consists in godlikeness, evidently associates happiness with theoretical contemplation. While the expert can orient herself within different interpretations and assumptions, this will be challenging for those not familiar with the issues involved.

Consequently, one might have some worries about accessibility, especially as this volume is intended not only for experts but for non-experts as well. It is true that reading some individual papers may be challenging without background in ancient philosophy, but I would encourage the reader to keep on reading, since the papers nicely contribute to one another, and collectively give the reader a good sense of ancient discussions of happiness. I agree that "there is a lot to be learnt today concerning the nature and content of happiness from proper understanding of the ancient debates" (5). Familiarizing ourselves with these debates makes us better aware of our prejudices concerning happiness, compels us to revise some of our presuppositions (e.g. about the subjectivist nature of happiness), and generally improves our thinking about happiness. So, all in all, I would not go as far as to say that reading this volume will make you happy, but it certainly is a rewarding experience.

[1] See The Eudaimonic Turn: Well-Being in Literary Studies , edited by James O. Pawelski and D. J. Moores, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. For a comprehensive account of current happiness research, see Oxford Handbook of Happiness , edited by Susan A. David, Ilona Boniwell, Amanda Conley Ayers, Oxford University Press, 2013.

[2] The editors see Julia Annas' Morality of Happiness (Oxford University Press, 1993) as most closely connected to their project, but add that "even here the focus seems to be more on virtue and morality than on happiness as such" (5).

[3] See, e.g., Terence Irwin, The Development of Ethics : A Historical and Critical Study ; Volume 1: From Socrates to the Reformation , Oxford University Press, 2007, esp. pp. 22-23.

Greek Mythology, Religion, Philosophy, and History Essay

In the history of the World, no other society has had such a rich mix of religion, mythology, philosophy, and history as the ancient Greeks. Some experts claim that the genesis of this intermingling lay in the overtly polytheistic nature of ancient Greek religion which worshipped a pantheon of gods. The Mediterranean region with its diverse seafaring traditions was a birthplace for the intermingling of cultures. Polytheism led to the Greeks adopting a remarkable tolerant attitude towards the viewpoints and beliefs of others.

Over a period of time, such broad attitudes became fertile ground for the exercise of human imagination leading to the birth of great epics steeped in legend, mixed with actual historical facts, and the dawn of modern philosophical thought. The operative utility of this tradition of philosophy gave rise to the Greek city-states, the first form of a democratic society. According to Knierim, “The ancient Greeks viewed the world in a way that one would today perhaps describe as ‘holistic’. Science, philosophy and politics were interwoven and combined into one worldview” (1). This essay attempts to describe the ancient Greek period from 2700 B.C to the 4th century B.C with a view to explain the interrelation between Greek religion, mythology, philosophy, and history.

Greek religion can be classified into four main periods. During the period 2700-1100 B.C, the religion of the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures was practiced in the region of Crete and the Aegean Basin. This religion was predominantly based on female deities. Other figures of animals with human heads suggested that some form of animism was also prevalent. The ancient religious stories of the Minoans and the Mycenaean were transmitted orally to the other parts of the Mediterranean region which later fused with the Greek traditions and religious practices.

As the Greek societies evolved, so did their religion, and the next period 1100-750 B.C is referred to as the ‘Heroic Age’ made famous by Homer and Hesiod. It was during this period that the pantheon of Greek gods attained their fame and acceptance by the Greeks. The third period witnessed a move away from polytheism to the era of rational thinking and skepticism also known as the ‘Golden Age of Athens, spanning from the 6 th century to 4 th century B.C. The final period, Greco-Roman ranged from 2 nd century B.C to 2 nd century A.D which basically led to the export of Greek philosophical thought the world over.

The effect of Greek mythology on religion and history is so entwined that often it becomes difficult to distinguish the two. The Greek pantheon of Gods presided over by Zeus, made famous by Hesiod and Homer became the focal point of Greek religion. Not only were mythological stories attributed to the Olympiad Gods, but they also became the basis for regulating Greek society too. Lloyd-Jones ( 2006) states that “ The early poet Hesiod explains that “Zeus gave to kings the them es, the principles of justice by which they ruled”(460). The mythologies encouraged the practice of sacrifice to the various gods to achieve defined ends. “Greek armies always made a divinatory sacrifice before going into battle, and the general took the omens after a sacrifice before deciding to go into action”. (Lloyd-Jones,2006, p.461).

The establishment of the Oracle of Delphi in honor of the Greek God Apollo took a political hue when every ruler far and wide consulted the Oracle to determine the course of action for conquest, administration of the state, and a host of other decisions. So popular was its usage that not only did the Greeks use the Oracle, but also other non-Greek kingdoms.

In Greek society, myth and history too were inexorably intertwined. A typical example is exemplified by the Trojan War, which according to many historians and archaeologists, was a real historical event. But the myth surrounding the idea of building the Trojan horse is attributed to the divine intervention of the Greek Goddess Pallas-Athene (Minerva). According to Berens, “She also taught the Greeks how to build the wooden horse by means of which the destruction of Troy was effected”(43).

Homer’s epics Iliad and Odyssey served as a rallying point for the Greek society. The Gods and Goddesses as described by Homer were revered by the Greeks and “these works came to serve as both epic and bible, providing a vivid ideal of manly prowess set in a framework of religious belief” (Time-Life Book, 1988, 53). The Olympic Games founded in 776 BC were dedicated to the God Zeus. The Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C between the Greeks and the Persians was a true historical event.

However, the so-called feat of a messenger running the entire 42 km from the war front to Athens is a legend that has no historical proof but nevertheless is entwined in popular culture leading to the institution of the famous marathon runner in the Olympic Games.

The Greek Philosophers had an undeniably relevant role in the development of Greek History. Solon who was elected as the archon of Athens in 594 B.C laid the framework of a democratic society. Socrates propounded the ‘test of reason’ as a philosophy of rationalism. “Instead of building on the myopic ideas of mythology, he began a rational inquiry into the riddles that nature presents. This inquiry is based on reflection and reason alone, and it may be his greatest achievement” (Knierim, 4).

Reasoning, rationalism, and critical thinking were the natural evolution of a polytheistic creed steeped in intolerance and intellectual inquiry into the nature of things. This tradition of reasoning finally led to the denouncement of the numerous Greek Gods by the Greek philosophers. By the end of the fifth century B.C, Greek philosophy became more scientific in its outlook. “ Plato denounced the immorality of the gods as portrayed by Homer and the other poets”( Lloyd-Jones, 2006 p.463).

Aristotle moderated the harsh critique of Gods propounded by Plato and his brand of ethics was more accommodative to traditional Greek religion. It, therefore, comes as no surprise that Aristotelian logic still finds popular support in these modern times. Despite the onslaught of rationalism and reasoning, traditional Greek gods continued to be worshipped and were supplemented in the Greco-Roman period by Roman Gods. The cults survived for eight centuries after Plato till the 4 th century A.D when the Christian emperor Theodosius banned and persecuted the followers of polytheism leading to their decline.

In conclusion, it can be said that the unique blend of mythology, religion, philosophy, and history in the Greek traditions survived for over a thousand years because of the syncretistic nature of the Greek thought, based on polytheistic processes which yielded an unusual degree of tolerance not to be seen in the later monotheistic creed of Christianity and Islam.

Some historians claim that this ability to assimilate differing thought came not only because of the genius of the Greek people but also because of the influence of Eastern thought which came by through the extensive trade links that Greece had with the East. The rich blend of myth, religion, philosophy and its effect on the history of the western world gave the grounding for the development of modern western philosophical thought of rationalism and reasoning. It also laid foundations for a political system that was soon to dominate the modern world – Democracy.

Works Cited

Berens, E.M. “Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome”. Project Gutenberg. 2007. Web.

Gillian, Moore and Editors of Time-Life Books. 1988. “ A Soaring Spirit”. A volume of Time-Life Series History of the World. Time-Life Books inc. Time Warner Inc. USA.

Knierim, Thomas. “Pre-Socratic Greek Philosophy”. 2008. Web.

Llyod-Jones, Hugh. 2001. “Ancient Greek Religion”. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society vol. 145, no. 4. Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, September 29). Greek Mythology, Religion, Philosophy, and History. https://ivypanda.com/essays/greek-mythology-religion-philosophy-and-history/

"Greek Mythology, Religion, Philosophy, and History." IvyPanda , 29 Sept. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/greek-mythology-religion-philosophy-and-history/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Greek Mythology, Religion, Philosophy, and History'. 29 September.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Greek Mythology, Religion, Philosophy, and History." September 29, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/greek-mythology-religion-philosophy-and-history/.

1. IvyPanda . "Greek Mythology, Religion, Philosophy, and History." September 29, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/greek-mythology-religion-philosophy-and-history/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Greek Mythology, Religion, Philosophy, and History." September 29, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/greek-mythology-religion-philosophy-and-history/.

• Polytheism, Monotheism, and Humanism
• Polytheism of Ancient Greek and Babylonians Compared
• Hesiod's Views on Art and Poetry
• Zeus’s Literary Journey Through Mythology
• Important Virtues in Human Life: Plato’s Protagoras and Hesiod’s Works and Days
• Zeus’ Mythology
• Pantheon and Parthenon Historical Monuments
• The Architectural Significance of Pantheon Dome
• The Pantheon of Rome and the Parthenon of Athens
• The Parthenon and the Pantheon in Their Cultural Context
• Mayan Architecture, Its Meaning and Creators
• Sumer and Akkadian Cities, Towns and Villages, 3,500 - 2,000 BC
• Western Civilizations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome,Greece
• The Culture of Ancient Egypt
• Ubaid and Uruk: Emergence of Mesopotamian Cities

• Project Gutenberg
• 73,406 free eBooks
• 43 by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Read now or download (free!)

Similar books, about this ebook.

• Privacy policy
• About Project Gutenberg
• Terms of Use
• Contact Information

The Impact of Ancient Greek Philosophy on Modern Day Thought

How did Greek philosophy influence today’s culture? Why is Ancient Greek philosophy important for modern literature? Here, you’ll find answers to these and other questions. Keep reading to get some ideas and inspiration for your essay!

Introduction

Contribution of ancient greek philosophy on modern thought, ancient greek philosophy impact on education, ancient greek philosophy impact on religion, ancient greek philosophy influence on politics, works cited.

Ancient Greek philosophy has arguably played the greatest role in shaping modern thought, particularly Western culture. It emerged in the 6th century BC and was largely explored in Ancient Greece and the rest of the Roman Empire. It tackled several areas, including ethics, politics, rhetoric, mathematics, metaphysics, logic, astronomy, and biology. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are the most influential classical philosophers with the most significant impact on modern thought.

Their contributions to advancing art, politics, and science were immense. They pioneered the art of exploring nature rationally and developing theories explaining the universe’s existence. Greek philosophers combined ideas from science, philosophy, art, and politics to form a holistic worldview that moved them away from the then-popular mythological perspective. The application of logic, reason, and inquiry is why ancient Greek philosophy (pre-Socratic, Classical Greek, and Hellenistic philosophy) has shaped modern thought, both in the East and West.

There is undeniable evidence that parallels exist between ancient Greek philosophy and modern thought in several fields. However, the Greeks adopted a holistic view of the world, which was developed through the combination of various disciplines, including science, religion, philosophy, and art (Adamson 34). This worldview is different today, even though ancient philosophers continue to influence modern thought in immense ways.

For example, deductive science originated from Thales’ propositions about right angles (Adamson 54). The philosopher argued that the inscription of a triangle in a semicircle formed a right angle. This concept might seem simple and overrated. However, it is used in contemporary society by mathematicians in the field of geometry (Rooney 36). Moreover, deductive reasoning is widely applied as a tool for generating propositions. The idea that all forms of a substance can be broken down into constituent elements was more deeply explored during the Thales era than in any other period.

The influence of Aristotle’s work can be seen in various areas of modern thought. The thinker formulated the concept of true knowledge acquisition. In that regard, he taught that it is only when a thoughtful soul disregards world events that it acquires true understanding (Adamson 65). He argued that the information received through the senses is usually polluted and confusing to people. He believed that any form of education aims to attain a specific human ideal. Aristotle argued that education is the best way for human beings to achieve their fundamental concerns and develop themselves wholly (Heinaman 52).

These ideas are applied in today’s education system, where learning is aimed at developing character, helping students discover who they are, and unraveling the possibilities of human potential. The philosopher also taught that only education can enable people to become truly human despite possessing natural abilities (Adamson 72). Aristotle’s education theory is widely used in many countries as the foundation for educational policies and practice.

Pythagoras popularized the Pythagorean Theorem, still widely used today in mathematics. Many historians argue that it is the originator of the discipline of mathematics in the West (Rooney 43). It is taught as a foundational concept in mathematics in schools worldwide. In addition, the theory has been utilized by many researchers in the formulation of other hypotheses that aid in understanding and solving various challenges in the modern world. Aristotle founded a school in 385 B.C.E, heralding the creation of higher learning institutions.

Several fundamental concepts that Greek philosophers developed are taught in today’s educational institutions. Examples include materialism, rationalism, metaphysics, idealism, empiricism, and ethics (Rooney 46). These ideologies continue to influence modern thought in the social and political fields. The metaphysical question regarding the origin of the universe and the existence of God had its roots in ancient Greek philosophy (Heinaman 78).

However, modern philosophers and thinkers continue to grapple with it in search of an answer. Epistemological queries of good and evil, right and wrong, as well as true and false, were formulated by Greek philosophers in an attempt to understand the world (Adamson 58). These concepts greatly influence modern thought, particularly in the fields of religion, politics, and sociology. They are incorporated into the curricula of many secondary and tertiary institutions to help students comprehend and resolve complex issues.

The concept of atoms was formulated by Democritus of Abdera and Leucippus of Miletus, who postulated that the soul was made up of spherical atoms that could move (Rooney 57). They proposed that all matter comprises tiny particles that are inseparable. This idea formed the basis for most of today’s research and advancements in atomic science. The two philosophers are regarded as the fathers of the modern atomic theory.

Other philosophers believed atoms were tiny particles that could not be seen or destroyed and were entirely solid (Rooney 58). They existed in various shapes and sizes and lacked an internal structure. These ideas were corrected and developed further by scientists and researchers in the modern world. However, Greek philosophers were a source of life-changing ideas and theories that continue to influence several fields in present-day society.

Socrates is credited for making philosophy a key discipline people use to define ethics and question societal morality. His philosophy was primarily founded on the art of asking questions. Human thoughts and opinions were crucial to his teachings. His method of inquiry involved asking a series of questions that led to unearthing people’s beliefs and values (Rooney 59). Socrates’ most vivid influence on modern thought can be seen in teaching.

Instructors widely use the Socratic Method to help students arrive at conclusions by themselves without telling directly the message that is being conveyed (Adamson 87). This teaching method allows individuals to explore and think on their own. This method fosters greater understanding and encourages necessary logical thought, especially in research.

Historians maintain that Greek philosophy was not a direct source of spiritual beliefs in the development of Christianity. However, its influence is evident from the systems used in Christian teaching and discussion, as well as the understanding of biblical truth. For instance, early Christians such as Paul and John used certain philosophical methods to teach their faith. Christian theology is better understood by the application of philosophical methods that have their origin in ancient Greece.

The influence of Greek philosophy on modern thought is widely observed in religion. The contemporary understanding, interpretation, and meaning of the human soul would have been impossible without the insights developed by Greek philosophers (Gibson 43). Thales of Miletus was the foremost thinker to propose the concept of the human soul, which was later further developed by Plato. Plato believed that the human soul had three parts: the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive (Gibson 48). He argued that the appetitive part was why people had desires they wished to fulfill (Heinaman 86).

These arguments had several weaknesses. However, the attempts made by ancient philosophers to understand the universe and explain its phenomena facilitated the proposition of better concepts. Aristotle argued that the soul was the most critical part of a human being because of its superiority to the body (Gibson 51). This argument shaped the ideologies of numerous contemporary Christian theologians who believe that the soul is an individual’s most important part.

The development of Christianity was dominated by the incorporation of ideologies from Stoicism and Platonism into its ethics and theology. The fusion of Platonic and Aristotelian teachings with Christianity led to the birth of beliefs such as omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence of God, which are the foundations of modern religion (Gibson 60). The religious view of God as an Infinite being has its roots in the Platonic Theory of Forms.

This theory postulated that every physical thing in the world was a shadow of a perfect form, which later became theorized as God (Gibson 63). The modern concept of God was borrowed from Hellenic Christians who had adopted it from ancient Greek philosophy that attributed infinite qualities such as power, knowledge, goodness, and love to God (Rooney 98). His infinite nature meant that He was changeless and immutable. Modern religion is founded on the belief that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient and that He is a perfect and infinite being (Gibson 65). Tenets of Greek philosophy led to the development of the various creeds and theologies that churches teach in the modern Christian world.

The history of political philosophy dates back to the Plato era. The Greeks’ political structure involved city-states that implemented various forms of political organization that Plato classified as monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny, and timocracy (Rooney 101). The development of democratic states in modern-day society can be attributed to the insights of ancient thinkers. Political ideologies used today can be found in the works of Plato (Republic) and Aristotle (Politics and Nicomachean Ethics). Ancient Greek philosophers deeply explored the concepts of politics, justice, and equality.

Concepts from Plato’s three dialogues, namely, the Republic, the Laws, and The Statesman, are used to clarify political concepts in modern-day politics. Issues such as justice, order, proper governance, and equality dominate discussions in both social and political contexts in the same way they did in ancient Greece (Rooney 112). Plato argued that a prosperous society is distinguished by three main aspects: courage, justice, moderation, and wisdom. Plato suggested that the soul must refrain from degrading vices such as lust and greed for an individual’s leadership to be effective (Rooney 75).

Corruption is rampant because of people’s involvement in corruption, founded on greed for power and wealth. Leaders are admonished to shun corruption because it degrades societies and compromises effective leadership and development. It is essential to propagate fairness to serve justice for all. Freedom, justice, and equity are three main ideas that inform political thought in today’s society (Rooney 85).

Civilizations throughout the world aim to create governments and communities that foster these values. Modern liberal democracies are founded on fundamental principles, including freedom, the rule of law, and equality. Today’s Western democracy resembles the governance system proposed by Plato, whose success depends on promoting virtue. The thinker believed that acquiring a specific body of knowledge would enable societies to deal with rampant issues such as corruption, immorality, and factionalism. Plato’s concepts used in political affairs today include fairness, the mixed constitution, practical wisdom necessary for good leadership, the rule of law, and the promotion of fairness and justice.

A thorough study of modern thought shows that ancient Greek philosophy played a crucial role in its development, both in people’s lifestyles and the advancement of specific disciplines. Ancient philosophers combined knowledge in arts, science, ethics, and logic to explain the universe’s origin and its various phenomena. Several modern civilizations owe their progress to ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato, Socrates, Thales, and Aristotle. Ancient philosophical concepts are used in education, politics, sociology, and religion. A departure from mythological beliefs to reason and inquiry characterized the development of philosophy in ancient Greece.

Thinkers like Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato played a monumental role in shaping modern thought. The modern political theory and the creation of institutions of higher learning are attributed to the works of Aristotle. Plato advocated for creating a good political society ruled by wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. These ideals are the fundamental principles that guide the prosperity of governments, nations, communities, and societies.

Adamson, Peter. Classical philosophy: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps . Oxford University press, 2014.

Gibson, John Winslow. The Undisclosed in Ancient Greek Philosophy and Religion: Looking Again at Plato’s Dialogues and the Eleusian Mysteries . Dog Ear Publishing, 2017.

Heinaman, Robert, editor . Plato and Aristotle’s Ethics . Routledge, 2016.

Rooney, Ann. The Story of Philosophy: From Ancient Greeks to Great Thinkers of Modern Times . Arcturus Publishing, 2014.

Cite this paper

• Chicago (N-B)
• Chicago (A-D)

StudyCorgi. (2021, June 9). The Impact of Ancient Greek Philosophy on Modern Day Thought. https://studycorgi.com/the-impact-of-ancient-greek-philosophy-on-modern-day-thought/

"The Impact of Ancient Greek Philosophy on Modern Day Thought." StudyCorgi , 9 June 2021, studycorgi.com/the-impact-of-ancient-greek-philosophy-on-modern-day-thought/.

StudyCorgi . (2021) 'The Impact of Ancient Greek Philosophy on Modern Day Thought'. 9 June.

1. StudyCorgi . "The Impact of Ancient Greek Philosophy on Modern Day Thought." June 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/the-impact-of-ancient-greek-philosophy-on-modern-day-thought/.

Bibliography

StudyCorgi . "The Impact of Ancient Greek Philosophy on Modern Day Thought." June 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/the-impact-of-ancient-greek-philosophy-on-modern-day-thought/.

StudyCorgi . 2021. "The Impact of Ancient Greek Philosophy on Modern Day Thought." June 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/the-impact-of-ancient-greek-philosophy-on-modern-day-thought/.

This paper, “The Impact of Ancient Greek Philosophy on Modern Day Thought”, was written and voluntary submitted to our free essay database by a straight-A student. Please ensure you properly reference the paper if you're using it to write your assignment.

Before publication, the StudyCorgi editorial team proofread and checked the paper to make sure it meets the highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, fact accuracy, copyright issues, and inclusive language. Last updated: August 24, 2023 .

If you are the author of this paper and no longer wish to have it published on StudyCorgi, request the removal . Please use the “ Donate your paper ” form to submit an essay.

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my child, and my friend. This task has typically proceeded hand-in-hand with philosophical analyses of these kinds of personal love, analyses that in part respond to various puzzles about love. Can love be justified? If so, how? What is the value of personal love? What impact does love have on the autonomy of both the lover and the beloved?

1. Preliminary Distinctions

2. love as union, 3. love as robust concern, 4.1 love as appraisal of value, 4.2 love as bestowal of value, 4.3 an intermediate position, 5.1 love as emotion proper, 5.2 love as emotion complex, 6. the value and justification of love, other internet resources, related entries.

In ordinary conversations, we often say things like the following:

• I love chocolate (or skiing).
• I love doing philosophy (or being a father).
• I love my dog (or cat).
• I love my wife (or mother or child or friend).

However, what is meant by ‘love’ differs from case to case. (1) may be understood as meaning merely that I like this thing or activity very much. In (2) the implication is typically that I find engaging in a certain activity or being a certain kind of person to be a part of my identity and so what makes my life worth living; I might just as well say that I value these. By contrast, (3) and (4) seem to indicate a mode of concern that cannot be neatly assimilated to anything else. Thus, we might understand the sort of love at issue in (4) to be, roughly, a matter of caring about another person as the person she is, for her own sake. (Accordingly, (3) may be understood as a kind of deficient mode of the sort of love we typically reserve for persons.) Philosophical accounts of love have focused primarily on the sort of personal love at issue in (4); such personal love will be the focus here (though see Frankfurt (1999) and Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) for attempts to provide a more general account that applies to non-persons as well).

Even within personal love, philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called “love”: eros , agape , and philia . It will be useful to distinguish these three and say something about how contemporary discussions typically blur these distinctions (sometimes intentionally so) or use them for other purposes.

‘ Eros ’ originally meant love in the sense of a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual passion (Liddell et al., 1940). Nygren (1953a,b) describes eros as the “‘love of desire,’ or acquisitive love” and therefore as egocentric (1953b, p. 89). Soble (1989b, 1990) similarly describes eros as “selfish” and as a response to the merits of the beloved—especially the beloved’s goodness or beauty. What is evident in Soble’s description of eros is a shift away from the sexual: to love something in the “erosic” sense (to use the term Soble coins) is to love it in a way that, by being responsive to its merits, is dependent on reasons. Such an understanding of eros is encouraged by Plato’s discussion in the Symposium , in which Socrates understands sexual desire to be a deficient response to physical beauty in particular, a response which ought to be developed into a response to the beauty of a person’s soul and, ultimately, into a response to the form, Beauty.

Soble’s intent in understanding eros to be a reason-dependent sort of love is to articulate a sharp contrast with agape , a sort of love that does not respond to the value of its object. ‘ Agape ’ has come, primarily through the Christian tradition, to mean the sort of love God has for us persons, as well as our love for God and, by extension, of our love for each other—a kind of brotherly love. In the paradigm case of God’s love for us, agape is “spontaneous and unmotivated,” revealing not that we merit that love but that God’s nature is love (Nygren 1953b, p. 85). Rather than responding to antecedent value in its object, agape instead is supposed to create value in its object and therefore to initiate our fellowship with God (pp. 87–88). Consequently, Badhwar (2003, p. 58) characterizes agape as “independent of the loved individual’s fundamental characteristics as the particular person she is”; and Soble (1990, p. 5) infers that agape , in contrast to eros , is therefore not reason dependent but is rationally “incomprehensible,” admitting at best of causal or historical explanations. [ 1 ]

Finally, ‘ philia ’ originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one’s friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one’s country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977). Like eros , philia is generally (but not universally) understood to be responsive to (good) qualities in one’s beloved. This similarity between eros and philia has led Thomas (1987) to wonder whether the only difference between romantic love and friendship is the sexual involvement of the former—and whether that is adequate to account for the real differences we experience. The distinction between eros and philia becomes harder to draw with Soble’s attempt to diminish the importance of the sexual in eros (1990).

Maintaining the distinctions among eros , agape , and philia becomes even more difficult when faced with contemporary theories of love (including romantic love) and friendship. For, as discussed below, some theories of romantic love understand it along the lines of the agape tradition as creating value in the beloved (cf. Section 4.2 ), and other accounts of romantic love treat sexual activity as merely the expression of what otherwise looks very much like friendship.

Given the focus here on personal love, Christian conceptions of God’s love for persons (and vice versa ) will be omitted, and the distinction between eros and philia will be blurred—as it typically is in contemporary accounts. Instead, the focus here will be on these contemporary understandings of love, including romantic love, understood as an attitude we take towards other persons. [ 2 ]

In providing an account of love, philosophical analyses must be careful to distinguish love from other positive attitudes we take towards persons, such as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such attitudes as liking in terms of its “depth,” and the problem is to elucidate the kind of “depth” we intuitively find love to have. Some analyses do this in part by providing thin conceptions of what liking amounts to. Thus, Singer (1991) and Brown (1987) understand liking to be a matter of desiring, an attitude that at best involves its object having only instrumental (and not intrinsic) value. Yet this seems inadequate: surely there are attitudes towards persons intermediate between having a desire with a person as its object and loving the person. I can care about a person for her own sake and not merely instrumentally, and yet such caring does not on its own amount to (non-deficiently) loving her, for it seems I can care about my dog in exactly the same way, a kind of caring which is insufficiently personal for love.

It is more common to distinguish loving from liking via the intuition that the “depth” of love is to be explained in terms of a notion of identification: to love someone is somehow to identify yourself with him, whereas no such notion of identification is involved in liking. As Nussbaum puts it, “The choice between one potential love and another can feel, and be, like a choice of a way of life, a decision to dedicate oneself to these values rather than these” (1990, p. 328); liking clearly does not have this sort of “depth” (see also Helm 2010; Bagley 2015). Whether love involves some kind of identification, and if so exactly how to understand such identification, is a central bone of contention among the various analyses of love. In particular, Whiting (2013) argues that the appeal to a notion of identification distorts our understanding of the sort of motivation love can provide, for taken literally it implies that love motivates through self -interest rather than through the beloved’s interests. Thus, Whiting argues, central to love is the possibility that love takes the lover “outside herself”, potentially forgetting herself in being moved directly by the interests of the beloved. (Of course, we need not take the notion of identification literally in this way: in identifying with one’s beloved, one might have a concern for one’s beloved that is analogous to one’s concern for oneself; see Helm 2010.)

Another common way to distinguish love from other personal attitudes is in terms of a distinctive kind of evaluation, which itself can account for love’s “depth.” Again, whether love essentially involves a distinctive kind of evaluation, and if so how to make sense of that evaluation, is hotly disputed. Closely related to questions of evaluation are questions of justification: can we justify loving or continuing to love a particular person, and if so, how? For those who think the justification of love is possible, it is common to understand such justification in terms of evaluation, and the answers here affect various accounts’ attempts to make sense of the kind of constancy or commitment love seems to involve, as well as the sense in which love is directed at particular individuals.

In what follows, theories of love are tentatively and hesitantly classified into four types: love as union, love as robust concern, love as valuing, and love as an emotion. It should be clear, however, that particular theories classified under one type sometimes also include, without contradiction, ideas central to other types. The types identified here overlap to some extent, and in some cases classifying particular theories may involve excessive pigeonholing. (Such cases are noted below.) Part of the classificatory problem is that many accounts of love are quasi-reductionistic, understanding love in terms of notions like affection, evaluation, attachment, etc., which themselves never get analyzed. Even when these accounts eschew explicitly reductionistic language, very often little attempt is made to show how one such “aspect” of love is conceptually connected to others. As a result, there is no clear and obvious way to classify particular theories, let alone identify what the relevant classes should be.

The union view claims that love consists in the formation of (or the desire to form) some significant kind of union, a “we.” A central task for union theorists, therefore, is to spell out just what such a “we” comes to—whether it is literally a new entity in the world somehow composed of the lover and the beloved, or whether it is merely metaphorical. Variants of this view perhaps go back to Aristotle (cf. Sherman 1993) and can also be found in Montaigne ([E]) and Hegel (1997); contemporary proponents include Solomon (1981, 1988), Scruton (1986), Nozick (1989), Fisher (1990), and Delaney (1996).

Scruton, writing in particular about romantic love, claims that love exists “just so soon as reciprocity becomes community: that is, just so soon as all distinction between my interests and your interests is overcome” (1986, p. 230). The idea is that the union is a union of concern, so that when I act out of that concern it is not for my sake alone or for your sake alone but for our sake. Fisher (1990) holds a similar, but somewhat more moderate view, claiming that love is a partial fusion of the lovers’ cares, concerns, emotional responses, and actions. What is striking about both Scruton and Fisher is the claim that love requires the actual union of the lovers’ concerns, for it thus becomes clear that they conceive of love not so much as an attitude we take towards another but as a relationship: the distinction between your interests and mine genuinely disappears only when we together come to have shared cares, concerns, etc., and my merely having a certain attitude towards you is not enough for love. This provides content to the notion of a “we” as the (metaphorical?) subject of these shared cares and concerns, and as that for whose sake we act.

Solomon (1988) offers a union view as well, though one that tries “to make new sense out of ‘love’ through a literal rather than metaphoric sense of the ‘fusion’ of two souls” (p. 24, cf. Solomon 1981; however, it is unclear exactly what he means by a “soul” here and so how love can be a “literal” fusion of two souls). What Solomon has in mind is the way in which, through love, the lovers redefine their identities as persons in terms of the relationship: “Love is the concentration and the intensive focus of mutual definition on a single individual, subjecting virtually every personal aspect of one’s self to this process” (1988, p. 197). The result is that lovers come to share the interests, roles, virtues, and so on that constitute what formerly was two individual identities but now has become a shared identity, and they do so in part by each allowing the other to play an important role in defining his own identity.

Nozick (1989) offers a union view that differs from those of Scruton, Fisher, and Solomon in that Nozick thinks that what is necessary for love is merely the desire to form a “we,” together with the desire that your beloved reciprocates. Nonetheless, he claims that this “we” is “a new entity in the world…created by a new web of relationships between [the lovers] which makes them no longer separate” (p. 70). In spelling out this web of relationships, Nozick appeals to the lovers “pooling” not only their well-beings, in the sense that the well-being of each is tied up with that of the other, but also their autonomy, in that “each transfers some previous rights to make certain decisions unilaterally into a joint pool” (p. 71). In addition, Nozick claims, the lovers each acquire a new identity as a part of the “we,” a new identity constituted by their (a) wanting to be perceived publicly as a couple, (b) their attending to their pooled well-being, and (c) their accepting a “certain kind of division of labor” (p. 72):

A person in a we might find himself coming across something interesting to read yet leaving it for the other person, not because he himself would not be interested in it but because the other would be more interested, and one of them reading it is sufficient for it to be registered by the wider identity now shared, the we . [ 3 ]

Opponents of the union view have seized on claims like this as excessive: union theorists, they claim, take too literally the ontological commitments of this notion of a “we.” This leads to two specific criticisms of the union view. The first is that union views do away with individual autonomy. Autonomy, it seems, involves a kind of independence on the part of the autonomous agent, such that she is in control over not only what she does but also who she is, as this is constituted by her interests, values, concerns, etc. However, 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. If autonomy is a part of the individual’s good, then, on the union view, love is to this extent bad; so much the worse for the union view (Singer 1994; Soble 1997). Moreover, Singer (1994) argues that a necessary part of having your beloved be the object of your love is respect for your beloved as the particular person she is, and this requires respecting her autonomy.

Union theorists have responded to this objection in several ways. Nozick (1989) seems to think of a loss of autonomy in love as a desirable feature of the sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher (1990), somewhat more reluctantly, claims that the loss of autonomy in love is an acceptable consequence of love. Yet without further argument these claims seem like mere bullet biting. Solomon (1988, pp. 64ff) describes this “tension” between union and autonomy as “the paradox of love.” However, this a view that Soble (1997) derides: merely to call it a paradox, as Solomon does, is not to face up to the problem.

The second criticism involves a substantive view concerning love. Part of what it is to love someone, these opponents say, is to have concern for him for his sake. However, union views make such concern unintelligible and eliminate the possibility of both selfishness and self-sacrifice, for by doing away with the distinction between my interests and your interests they have in effect turned your interests into mine and vice versa (Soble 1997; see also Blum 1980, 1993). Some advocates of union views see this as a point in their favor: we need to explain how it is I can have concern for people other than myself, and the union view apparently does this by understanding your interests to be part of my own. And Delaney, responding to an apparent tension between our desire to be loved unselfishly (for fear of otherwise being exploited) and our desire to be loved for reasons (which presumably are attractive to our lover and hence have a kind of selfish basis), says (1996, p. 346):

Given my view that the romantic ideal is primarily characterized by a desire to achieve a profound consolidation of needs and interests through the formation of a we , I do not think a little selfishness of the sort described should pose a worry to either party.

The objection, however, lies precisely in this attempt to explain my concern for my beloved egoistically. As Whiting (1991, p. 10) puts it, such an attempt “strikes me as unnecessary and potentially objectionable colonization”: in love, I ought to be concerned with my beloved for her sake, and not because I somehow get something out of it. (This can be true whether my concern with my beloved is merely instrumental to my good or whether it is partly constitutive of my good.)

Although Whiting’s and Soble’s criticisms here succeed against the more radical advocates of the union view, they in part fail to acknowledge the kernel of truth to be gleaned from the idea of union. Whiting’s way of formulating the second objection in terms of an unnecessary egoism in part points to a way out: we persons are in part social creatures, and love is one profound mode of that sociality. Indeed, part of the point of union accounts is to make sense of this social dimension: to make sense of a way in which we can sometimes identify ourselves with others not merely in becoming interdependent with them (as Singer 1994, p. 165, suggests, understanding ‘interdependence’ to be a kind of reciprocal benevolence and respect) but rather in making who we are as persons be constituted in part by those we love (cf., e.g., Rorty 1986/1993; Nussbaum 1990).

Along these lines, Friedman (1998), taking her inspiration in part from Delaney (1996), argues that we should understand the sort of union at issue in love to be a kind of federation of selves:

On the federation model, a third unified entity is constituted by the interaction of the lovers, one which involves the lovers acting in concert across a range of conditions and for a range of purposes. This concerted action, however, does not erase the existence of the two lovers as separable and separate agents with continuing possibilities for the exercise of their own respective agencies. [p. 165]

Given that on this view the lovers do not give up their individual identities, there is no principled reason why the union view cannot make sense of the lover’s concern for her beloved for his sake. [ 4 ] Moreover, Friedman argues, once we construe union as federation, we can see that autonomy is not a zero-sum game; rather, love can both directly enhance the autonomy of each and promote the growth of various skills, like realistic and critical self-evaluation, that foster autonomy.

Nonetheless, this federation model is not without its problems—problems that affect other versions of the union view as well. For if the federation (or the “we”, as on Nozick’s view) is understood as a third entity, we need a clearer account than has been given of its ontological status and how it comes to be. Relevant here is the literature on shared intention and plural subjects. Gilbert (1989, 1996, 2000) has argued that we should take quite seriously the existence of a plural subject as an entity over and above its constituent members. Others, such as Tuomela (1984, 1995), Searle (1990), and Bratman (1999) are more cautious, treating such talk of “us” having an intention as metaphorical.

As this criticism of the union view indicates, many find caring about your beloved for her sake to be a part of what it is to love her. The robust concern view of love takes this to be the central and defining feature of love (cf. Taylor 1976; Newton-Smith 1989; Soble 1990, 1997; LaFollette 1996; Frankfurt 1999; White 2001). As Taylor puts it:

To summarize: if x loves y then x wants to benefit and be with y etc., and he has these wants (or at least some of them) because he believes y has some determinate characteristics ψ in virtue of which he thinks it worth while to benefit and be with y . He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means towards some other end. [p. 157]

In conceiving of my love for you as constituted by my concern for you for your sake, the robust concern view rejects the idea, central to the union view, that love is to be understood in terms of the (literal or metaphorical) creation of a “we”: I am the one who has this concern for you, though it is nonetheless disinterested and so not egoistic insofar as it is for your sake rather than for my own. [ 5 ]

At the heart of the robust concern view is the idea that love “is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional” (Frankfurt 1999, p. 129; see also Martin 2015). Frankfurt continues:

That a person cares about or that he loves something has less to do with how things make him feel, or with his opinions about them, than with the more or less stable motivational structures that shape his preferences and that guide and limit his conduct.

This account analyzes caring about someone for her sake as a matter of being motivated in certain ways, in part as a response to what happens to one’s beloved. Of course, to understand love in terms of desires is not to leave other emotional responses out in the cold, for these emotions should be understood as consequences of desires. Thus, just as I can be emotionally crushed when one of my strong desires is disappointed, so too I can be emotionally crushed when things similarly go badly for my beloved. In this way Frankfurt (1999) tacitly, and White (2001) more explicitly, acknowledge the way in which my caring for my beloved for her sake results in my identity being transformed through her influence insofar as I become vulnerable to things that happen to her.

Not all robust concern theorists seem to accept this line, however; in particular, Taylor (1976) and Soble (1990) seem to have a strongly individualistic conception of persons that prevents my identity being bound up with my beloved in this sort of way, a kind of view that may seem to undermine the intuitive “depth” that love seems to have. (For more on this point, see Rorty 1986/1993.) In the middle is Stump (2006), who follows Aquinas in understanding love to involve not only the desire for your beloved’s well-being but also a desire for a certain kind of relationship with your beloved—as a parent or spouse or sibling or priest or friend, for example—a relationship within which you share yourself with and connect yourself to your beloved. [ 6 ]

One source of worry about the robust concern view is that it involves too passive an understanding of one’s beloved (Ebels-Duggan 2008). The thought is that on the robust concern view the lover merely tries to discover what the beloved’s well-being consists in and then acts to promote that, potentially by thwarting the beloved’s own efforts when the lover thinks those efforts would harm her well-being. This, however, would be disrespectful and demeaning, not the sort of attitude that love is. What robust concern views seem to miss, Ebels-Duggan suggests, is the way love involves interacting agents, each with a capacity for autonomy the recognition and engagement with which is an essential part of love. In response, advocates of the robust concern view might point out that promoting someone’s well-being normally requires promoting her autonomy (though they may maintain that this need not always be true: that paternalism towards a beloved can sometimes be justified and appropriate as an expression of one’s love). Moreover, we might plausibly think, it is only through the exercise of one’s autonomy that one can define one’s own well-being as a person, so that a lover’s failure to respect the beloved’s autonomy would be a failure to promote her well-being and therefore not an expression of love, contrary to what Ebels-Duggan suggests. Consequently, it might seem, robust concern views can counter this objection by offering an enriched conception of what it is to be a person and so of the well-being of persons.

Another source of worry is that the robust concern view offers too thin a conception of love. By emphasizing robust concern, this view understands other features we think characteristic of love, such as one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved, to be the effects of that concern rather than constituents of it. Thus Velleman (1999) argues that robust concern views, by understanding love merely as a matter of aiming at a particular end (viz., the welfare of one’s beloved), understand love to be merely conative. However, he claims, love can have nothing to do with desires, offering as a counterexample the possibility of loving a troublemaking relation whom you do not want to be with, whose well being you do not want to promote, etc. Similarly, Badhwar (2003) argues that such a “teleological” view of love makes it mysterious how “we can continue to love someone long after death has taken him beyond harm or benefit” (p. 46). Moreover Badhwar argues, if love is essentially a desire, then it implies that we lack something; yet love does not imply this and, indeed, can be felt most strongly at times when we feel our lives most complete and lacking in nothing. Consequently, Velleman and Badhwar conclude, love need not involve any desire or concern for the well-being of one’s beloved.

This conclusion, however, seems too hasty, for such examples can be accommodated within the robust concern view. Thus, the concern for your relative in Velleman’s example can be understood to be present but swamped by other, more powerful desires to avoid him. Indeed, keeping the idea that you want to some degree to benefit him, an idea Velleman rejects, seems to be essential to understanding the conceptual tension between loving someone and not wanting to help him, a tension Velleman does not fully acknowledge. Similarly, continued love for someone who has died can be understood on the robust concern view as parasitic on the former love you had for him when he was still alive: your desires to benefit him get transformed, through your subsequent understanding of the impossibility of doing so, into wishes. [ 7 ] Finally, the idea of concern for your beloved’s well-being need not imply the idea that you lack something, for such concern can be understood in terms of the disposition to be vigilant for occasions when you can come to his aid and consequently to have the relevant occurrent desires. All of this seems fully compatible with the robust concern view.

One might also question whether Velleman and Badhwar make proper use of their examples of loving your meddlesome relation or someone who has died. For although we can understand these as genuine cases of love, they are nonetheless deficient cases and ought therefore be understood as parasitic on the standard cases. Readily to accommodate such deficient cases of love into a philosophical analysis as being on a par with paradigm cases, and to do so without some special justification, is dubious.

Nonetheless, the robust concern view as it stands does not seem properly able to account for the intuitive “depth” of love and so does not seem properly to distinguish loving from liking. Although, as noted above, the robust concern view can begin to make some sense of the way in which the lover’s identity is altered by the beloved, it understands this only an effect of love, and not as a central part of what love consists in.

This vague thought is nicely developed by Wonderly (2017), who emphasizes that in addition to the sort of disinterested concern for another that is central to robust-concern accounts of love, an essential part of at least romantic love is the idea that in loving someone I must find them to be not merely important for their own sake but also important to me . Wonderly (2017) fleshes out what this “importance to me” involves in terms of the idea of attachment (developed in Wonderly 2016) that she argues can make sense of the intimacy and depth of love from within what remains fundamentally a robust-concern account. [ 8 ]

4. Love as Valuing

A third kind of view of love understands love to be a distinctive mode of valuing a person. As the distinction between eros and agape in Section 1 indicates, there are at least two ways to construe this in terms of whether the lover values the beloved because she is valuable, or whether the beloved comes to be valuable to the lover as a result of her loving him. The former view, which understands the lover as appraising the value of the beloved in loving him, is the topic of Section 4.1 , whereas the latter view, which understands her as bestowing value on him, will be discussed in Section 4.2 .

Velleman (1999, 2008) offers an appraisal view of love, understanding love to be fundamentally a matter of acknowledging and responding in a distinctive way to the value of the beloved. (For a very different appraisal view of love, see Kolodny 2003.) Understanding this more fully requires understanding both the kind of value of the beloved to which one responds and the distinctive kind of response to such value that love is. Nonetheless, it should be clear that what makes an account be an appraisal view of love is not the mere fact that love is understood to involve appraisal; many other accounts do so, and it is typical of robust concern accounts, for example (cf. the quote from Taylor above , Section 3 ). Rather, appraisal views are distinctive in understanding love to consist in that appraisal.

In articulating the kind of value love involves, Velleman, following Kant, distinguishes dignity from price. To have a price , as the economic metaphor suggests, is to have a value that can be compared to the value of other things with prices, such that it is intelligible to exchange without loss items of the same value. By contrast, to have dignity is to have a value such that comparisons of relative value become meaningless. Material goods are normally understood to have prices, but we persons have dignity: no substitution of one person for another can preserve exactly the same value, for something of incomparable worth would be lost (and gained) in such a substitution.

On this Kantian view, our dignity as persons consists in our rational nature: our capacity both to be actuated by reasons that we autonomously provide ourselves in setting our own ends and to respond appropriately to the intrinsic values we discover in the world. Consequently, one important way in which we exercise our rational natures is to respond with respect to the dignity of other persons (a dignity that consists in part in their capacity for respect): respect just is the required minimal response to the dignity of persons. What makes a response to a person be that of respect, Velleman claims, still following Kant, is that it “arrests our self-love” and thereby prevents us from treating him as a means to our ends (p. 360).

Given this, Velleman claims that love is similarly a response to the dignity of persons, and as such it is the dignity of the object of our love that justifies that love. However, love and respect are different kinds of responses to the same value. For love arrests not our self-love but rather

our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person, tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by him. Love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other. [1999, p. 361]

This means that the concern, attraction, sympathy, etc. that we normally associate with love are not constituents of love but are rather its normal effects, and love can remain without them (as in the case of the love for a meddlesome relative one cannot stand being around). Moreover, this provides Velleman with a clear account of the intuitive “depth” of love: it is essentially a response to persons as such, and to say that you love your dog is therefore to be confused.

Of course, we do not respond with love to the dignity of every person we meet, nor are we somehow required to: love, as the disarming of our emotional defenses in a way that makes us especially vulnerable to another, is the optional maximal response to others’ dignity. What, then, explains the selectivity of love—why I love some people and not others? The answer lies in the contingent fit between the way some people behaviorally express their dignity as persons and the way I happen to respond to those expressions by becoming emotionally vulnerable to them. The right sort of fit makes someone “lovable” by me (1999, p. 372), and my responding with love in these cases is a matter of my “really seeing” this person in a way that I fail to do with others who do not fit with me in this way. By ‘lovable’ here Velleman seems to mean able to be loved, not worthy of being loved, for nothing Velleman says here speaks to a question about the justification of my loving this person rather than that. Rather, what he offers is an explanation of the selectivity of my love, an explanation that as a matter of fact makes my response be that of love rather than mere respect.

This understanding of the selectivity of love as something that can be explained but not justified is potentially troubling. For we ordinarily think we can justify not only my loving you rather than someone else but also and more importantly the constancy of my love: my continuing to love you even as you change in certain fundamental ways (but not others). As Delaney (1996, p. 347) puts the worry about constancy:

while you seem to want it to be true that, were you to become a schmuck, your lover would continue to love you,…you also want it to be the case that your lover would never love a schmuck.

The issue here is not merely that we can offer explanations of the selectivity of my love, of why I do not love schmucks; rather, at issue is the discernment of love, of loving and continuing to love for good reasons as well as of ceasing to love for good reasons. To have these good reasons seems to involve attributing different values to you now rather than formerly or rather than to someone else, yet this is precisely what Velleman denies is the case in making the distinction between love and respect the way he does.

It is also questionable whether Velleman can even explain the selectivity of love in terms of the “fit” between your expressions and my sensitivities. For the relevant sensitivities on my part are emotional sensitivities: the lowering of my emotional defenses and so becoming emotionally vulnerable to you. Thus, I become vulnerable to the harms (or goods) that befall you and so sympathetically feel your pain (or joy). Such emotions are themselves assessable for warrant, and now we can ask why my disappointment that you lost the race is warranted, but my being disappointed that a mere stranger lost would not be warranted. The intuitive answer is that I love you but not him. However, this answer is unavailable to Velleman, because he thinks that what makes my response to your dignity that of love rather than respect is precisely that I feel such emotions, and to appeal to my love in explaining the emotions therefore seems viciously circular.

Although these problems are specific to Velleman’s account, the difficulty can be generalized to any appraisal account of love (such as that offered in Kolodny 2003). For if love is an appraisal, it needs to be distinguished from other forms of appraisal, including our evaluative judgments. On the one hand, to try to distinguish love as an appraisal from other appraisals in terms of love’s having certain effects on our emotional and motivational life (as on Velleman’s account) is unsatisfying because it ignores part of what needs to be explained: why the appraisal of love has these effects and yet judgments with the same evaluative content do not. Indeed, this question is crucial if we are to understand the intuitive “depth” of love, for without an answer to this question we do not understand why love should have the kind of centrality in our lives it manifestly does. [ 9 ] On the other hand, to bundle this emotional component into the appraisal itself would be to turn the view into either the robust concern view ( Section 3 ) or a variant of the emotion view ( Section 5.1 ).

In contrast to Velleman, Singer (1991, 1994, 2009) understands love to be fundamentally a matter of bestowing value on the beloved. To bestow value on another is to project a kind of intrinsic value onto him. Indeed, this fact about love is supposed to distinguish love from liking: “Love is an attitude with no clear objective,” whereas liking is inherently teleological (1991, p. 272). As such, there are no standards of correctness for bestowing such value, and this is how love differs from other personal attitudes like gratitude, generosity, and condescension: “love…confers importance no matter what the object is worth” (p. 273). Consequently, Singer thinks, love is not an attitude that can be justified in any way.

What is it, exactly, to bestow this kind of value on someone? It is, Singer says, a kind of attachment and commitment to the beloved, in which one comes to treat him as an end in himself and so to respond to his ends, interests, concerns, etc. as having value for their own sake. This means in part that the bestowal of value reveals itself “by caring about the needs and interests of the beloved, by wishing to benefit or protect her, by delighting in her achievements,” etc. (p. 270). This sounds very much like the robust concern view, yet the bestowal view differs in understanding such robust concern to be the effect of the bestowal of value that is love rather than itself what constitutes love: in bestowing value on my beloved, I make him be valuable in such a way that I ought to respond with robust concern.

For it to be intelligible that I have bestowed value on someone, I must therefore respond appropriately to him as valuable, and this requires having some sense of what his well-being is and of what affects that well-being positively or negatively. Yet having this sense requires in turn knowing what his strengths and deficiencies are, and this is a matter of appraising him in various ways. Bestowal thus presupposes a kind of appraisal, as a way of “really seeing” the beloved and attending to him. Nonetheless, Singer claims, it is the bestowal that is primary for understanding what love consists in: the appraisal is required only so that the commitment to one’s beloved and his value as thus bestowed has practical import and is not “a blind submission to some unknown being” (1991, p. 272; see also Singer 1994, pp. 139ff).

Singer is walking a tightrope in trying to make room for appraisal in his account of love. Insofar as the account is fundamentally a bestowal account, Singer claims that love cannot be justified, that we bestow the relevant kind of value “gratuitously.” This suggests that love is blind, that it does not matter what our beloved is like, which seems patently false. Singer tries to avoid this conclusion by appealing to the role of appraisal: it is only because we appraise another as having certain virtues and vices that we come to bestow value on him. Yet the “because” here, since it cannot justify the bestowal, is at best a kind of contingent causal explanation. [ 10 ] In this respect, Singer’s account of the selectivity of love is much the same as Velleman’s, and it is liable to the same criticism: it makes unintelligible the way in which our love can be discerning for better or worse reasons. Indeed, this failure to make sense of the idea that love can be justified is a problem for any bestowal view. For either (a) a bestowal itself cannot be justified (as on Singer’s account), in which case the justification of love is impossible, or (b) a bestowal can be justified, in which case it is hard to make sense of value as being bestowed rather than there antecedently in the object as the grounds of that “bestowal.”

More generally, a proponent of the bestowal view needs to be much clearer than Singer is in articulating precisely what a bestowal is. What is the value that I create in a bestowal, and how can my bestowal create it? On a crude Humean view, the answer might be that the value is something projected onto the world through my pro-attitudes, like desire. Yet such a view would be inadequate, since the projected value, being relative to a particular individual, would do no theoretical work, and the account would essentially be a variant of the robust concern view. Moreover, in providing a bestowal account of love, care is needed to distinguish love from other personal attitudes such as admiration and respect: do these other attitudes involve bestowal? If so, how does the bestowal in these cases differ from the bestowal of love? If not, why not, and what is so special about love that requires a fundamentally different evaluative attitude than admiration and respect?

Nonetheless, there is a kernel of truth in the bestowal view: there is surely something right about the idea that love is creative and not merely a response to antecedent value, and accounts of love that understand the kind of evaluation implicit in love merely in terms of appraisal seem to be missing something. Precisely what may be missed will be discussed below in Section 6 .

Perhaps there is room for an understanding of love and its relation to value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal accounts. After all, if we think of appraisal as something like perception, a matter of responding to what is out there in the world, and of bestowal as something like action, a matter of doing something and creating something, we should recognize that the responsiveness central to appraisal may itself depend on our active, creative choices. Thus, just as we must recognize that ordinary perception depends on our actively directing our attention and deploying concepts, interpretations, and even arguments in order to perceive things accurately, so too we might think our vision of our beloved’s valuable properties that is love also depends on our actively attending to and interpreting him. Something like this is Jollimore’s view (2011). According to Jollimore, in loving someone we actively attend to his valuable properties in a way that we take to provide us with reasons to treat him preferentially. Although we may acknowledge that others might have such properties even to a greater degree than our beloved does, we do not attend to and appreciate such properties in others in the same way we do those in our beloveds; indeed, we find our appreciation of our beloved’s valuable properties to “silence” our similar appreciation of those in others. (In this way, Jollimore thinks, we can solve the problem of fungibility, discussed below in Section 6 .) Likewise, in perceiving our beloved’s actions and character, we do so through the lens of such an appreciation, which will tend as to “silence” interpretations inconsistent with that appreciation. In this way, love involves finding one’s beloved to be valuable in a way that involves elements of both appraisal (insofar as one must thereby be responsive to valuable properties one’s beloved really has) and bestowal (insofar as through one’s attention and committed appreciation of these properties they come to have special significance for one).

One might object that this conception of love as silencing the special value of others or to negative interpretations of our beloveds is irrational in a way that love is not. For, it might seem, such “silencing” is merely a matter of our blinding ourselves to how things really are. Yet Jollimore claims that this sense in which love is blind is not objectionable, for (a) we can still intellectually recognize the things that love’s vision silences, and (b) there really is no impartial perspective we can take on the values things have, and love is one appropriate sort of partial perspective from which the value of persons can be manifest. Nonetheless, one might wonder about whether that perspective of love itself can be distorted and what the norms are in terms of which such distortions are intelligible. Furthermore, it may seem that Jollimore’s attempt to reconcile appraisal and bestowal fails to appreciate the underlying metaphysical difficulty: appraisal is a response to value that is antecedently there, whereas bestowal is the creation of value that was not antecedently there. Consequently, it might seem, appraisal and bestowal are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled in the way Jollimore hopes.

Whereas Jollimore tries to combine separate elements of appraisal and of bestowal in a single account, Helm (2010) and Bagley (2015) offer accounts that reject the metaphysical presupposition that values must be either prior to love (as with appraisal) or posterior to love (as with bestowal), instead understanding the love and the values to emerge simultaneously. Thus, Helm presents a detailed account of valuing in terms of the emotions, arguing that while we can understand individual emotions as appraisals , responding to values already their in their objects, these values are bestowed on those objects via broad, holistic patterns of emotions. How this amounts to an account of love will be discussed in Section 5.2 , below. Bagley (2015) instead appeals to a metaphor of improvisation, arguing that just as jazz musicians jointly make determinate the content of their musical ideas through on-going processes of their expression, so too lovers jointly engage in “deep improvisation”, thereby working out of their values and identities through the on-going process of living their lives together. These values are thus something the lovers jointly construct through the process of recognizing and responding to those very values. To love someone is thus to engage with them as partners in such “deep improvisation”. (This account is similar to Helm (2008, 2010)’s account of plural agency, which he uses to provide an account of friendship and other loving relationships; see the discussion of shared activity in the entry on friendship .)

5. Emotion Views

Given these problems with the accounts of love as valuing, perhaps we should turn to the emotions. For emotions just are responses to objects that combine evaluation, motivation, and a kind of phenomenology, all central features of the attitude of love.

Many accounts of love claim that it is an emotion; these include: Wollheim 1984, Rorty 1986/1993, Brown 1987, Hamlyn 1989, Baier 1991, and Badhwar 2003. [ 11 ] Thus, Hamlyn (1989, p. 219) says:

It would not be a plausible move to defend any theory of the emotions to which love and hate seemed exceptions by saying that love and hate are after all not emotions. I have heard this said, but it does seem to me a desperate move to make. If love and hate are not emotions what is?

The difficulty with this claim, as Rorty (1980) argues, is that the word, ‘emotion,’ does not seem to pick out a homogeneous collection of mental states, and so various theories claiming that love is an emotion mean very different things. Consequently, what are here labeled “emotion views” are divided into those that understand love to be a particular kind of evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object, whether that response is merely occurrent or dispositional (‘emotions proper,’ see Section 5.1 , below), and those that understand love to involve a collection of related and interconnected emotions proper (‘emotion complexes,’ see Section 5.2 , below).

An emotion proper is a kind of “evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object”; what does this mean? Emotions are generally understood to have several objects. The target of an emotion is that at which the emotion is directed: if I am afraid or angry at you, then you are the target. In responding to you with fear or anger, I am implicitly evaluating you in a particular way, and this evaluation—called the formal object —is the kind of evaluation of the target that is distinctive of a particular emotion type. Thus, in fearing you, I implicitly evaluate you as somehow dangerous, whereas in being angry at you I implicitly evaluate you as somehow offensive. Yet emotions are not merely evaluations of their targets; they in part motivate us to behave in certain ways, both rationally (by motivating action to avoid the danger) and arationally (via certain characteristic expressions, such as slamming a door out of anger). Moreover, emotions are generally understood to involve a phenomenological component, though just how to understand the characteristic “feel” of an emotion and its relation to the evaluation and motivation is hotly disputed. Finally, emotions are typically understood to be passions: responses that we feel imposed on us as if from the outside, rather than anything we actively do. (For more on the philosophy of emotions, see entry on emotion .)

What then are we saying when we say that love is an emotion proper? According to Brown (1987, p. 14), emotions as occurrent mental states are “abnormal bodily changes caused by the agent’s evaluation or appraisal of some object or situation that the agent believes to be of concern to him or her.” He spells this out by saying that in love, we “cherish” the person for having “a particular complex of instantiated qualities” that is “open-ended” so that we can continue to love the person even as she changes over time (pp. 106–7). These qualities, which include historical and relational qualities, are evaluated in love as worthwhile. [ 12 ] All of this seems aimed at spelling out what love’s formal object is, a task that is fundamental to understanding love as an emotion proper. Thus, Brown seems to say that love’s formal object is just being worthwhile (or, given his examples, perhaps: worthwhile as a person), and he resists being any more specific than this in order to preserve the open-endedness of love. Hamlyn (1989) offers a similar account, saying (p. 228):

With love the difficulty is to find anything of this kind [i.e., a formal object] which is uniquely appropriate to love. My thesis is that there is nothing of this kind that must be so, and that this differentiates it and hate from the other emotions.

Hamlyn goes on to suggest that love and hate might be primordial emotions, a kind of positive or negative “feeling towards,” presupposed by all other emotions. [ 13 ]

The trouble with these accounts of love as an emotion proper is that they provide too thin a conception of love. In Hamlyn’s case, love is conceived as a fairly generic pro-attitude, rather than as the specific kind of distinctively personal attitude discussed here. In Brown’s case, spelling out the formal object of love as simply being worthwhile (as a person) fails to distinguish love from other evaluative responses like admiration and respect. Part of the problem seems to be the rather simple account of what an emotion is that Brown and Hamlyn use as their starting point: if love is an emotion, then the understanding of what an emotion is must be enriched considerably to accommodate love. Yet it is not at all clear whether the idea of an “emotion proper” can be adequately enriched so as to do so. As Pismenny & Prinz (2017) point out, love seems to be too varied both in its ground and in the sort of experience it involves to be capturable by a single emotion.

The emotion complex view, which understands love to be a complex emotional attitude towards another person, may initially seem to hold out great promise to overcome the problems of alternative types of views. By articulating the emotional interconnections between persons, it could offer a satisfying account of the “depth” of love without the excesses of the union view and without the overly narrow teleological focus of the robust concern view; and because these emotional interconnections are themselves evaluations, it could offer an understanding of love as simultaneously evaluative, without needing to specify a single formal object of love. However, the devil is in the details.

Rorty (1986/1993) does not try to present a complete account of love; rather, she focuses on the idea that “relational psychological attitudes” which, like love, essentially involve emotional and desiderative responses, exhibit historicity : “they arise from, and are shaped by, dynamic interactions between a subject and an object” (p. 73). In part this means that what makes an attitude be one of love is not the presence of a state that we can point to at a particular time within the lover; rather, love is to be “identified by a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75). Moreover, Rorty argues, the historicity of love involves the lover’s being permanently transformed by loving who he does.

Baier (1991), seeming to pick up on this understanding of love as exhibiting historicity, says (p. 444):

Love is not just an emotion people feel toward other people, but also a complex tying together of the emotions that two or a few more people have; it is a special form of emotional interdependence.

To a certain extent, such emotional interdependence involves feeling sympathetic emotions, so that, for example, I feel disappointed and frustrated on behalf of my beloved when she fails, and joyful when she succeeds. However, Baier insists, love is “more than just the duplication of the emotion of each in a sympathetic echo in the other” (p. 442); the emotional interdependence of the lovers involves also appropriate follow-up responses to the emotional predicaments of your beloved. Two examples Baier gives (pp. 443–44) are a feeling of “mischievous delight” at your beloved’s temporary bafflement, and amusement at her embarrassment. The idea is that in a loving relationship your beloved gives you permission to feel such emotions when no one else is permitted to do so, and a condition of her granting you that permission is that you feel these emotions “tenderly.” Moreover, you ought to respond emotionally to your beloved’s emotional responses to you: by feeling hurt when she is indifferent to you, for example. All of these foster the sort of emotional interdependence Baier is after—a kind of intimacy you have with your beloved.

Badhwar (2003, p. 46) similarly understands love to be a matter of “one’s overall emotional orientation towards a person—the complex of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings”; as such, love is a matter of having a certain “character structure.” Central to this complex emotional orientation, Badhwar thinks, is what she calls the “look of love”: “an ongoing [emotional] affirmation of the loved object as worthy of existence…for her own sake” (p. 44), an affirmation that involves taking pleasure in your beloved’s well-being. Moreover, Badhwar claims, the look of love also provides to the beloved reliable testimony concerning the quality of the beloved’s character and actions (p. 57).

There is surely something very right about the idea that love, as an attitude central to deeply personal relationships, should not be understood as a state that can simply come and go. Rather, as the emotion complex view insists, the complexity of love is to be found in the historical patterns of one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved—a pattern that also projects into the future. Indeed, as suggested above, the kind of emotional interdependence that results from this complex pattern can seem to account for the intuitive “depth” of love as fully interwoven into one’s emotional sense of oneself. And it seems to make some headway in understanding the complex phenomenology of love: love can at times be a matter of intense pleasure in the presence of one’s beloved, yet it can at other times involve frustration, exasperation, anger, and hurt as a manifestation of the complexities and depth of the relationships it fosters.

This understanding of love as constituted by a history of emotional interdependence enables emotion complex views to say something interesting about the impact love has on the lover’s identity. This is partly Rorty’s point (1986/1993) in her discussion of the historicity of love ( above ). Thus, she argues, one important feature of such historicity is that love is “ dynamically permeable ” in that the lover is continually “changed by loving” such that these changes “tend to ramify through a person’s character” (p. 77). Through such dynamic permeability, love transforms the identity of the lover in a way that can sometimes foster the continuity of the love, as each lover continually changes in response to the changes in the other. [ 14 ] Indeed, Rorty concludes, love should be understood in terms of “a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75) that results from such dynamic permeability. It should be clear, however, that the mere fact of dynamic permeability need not result in the love’s continuing: nothing about the dynamics of a relationship requires that the characteristic narrative history project into the future, and such permeability can therefore lead to the dissolution of the love. Love is therefore risky—indeed, all the more risky because of the way the identity of the lover is defined in part through the love. The loss of a love can therefore make one feel no longer oneself in ways poignantly described by Nussbaum (1990).

By focusing on such emotionally complex histories, emotion complex views differ from most alternative accounts of love. For alternative accounts tend to view love as a kind of attitude we take toward our beloveds, something we can analyze simply in terms of our mental state at the moment. [ 15 ] By ignoring this historical dimension of love in providing an account of what love is, alternative accounts have a hard time providing either satisfying accounts of the sense in which our identities as person are at stake in loving another or satisfactory solutions to problems concerning how love is to be justified (cf. Section 6 , especially the discussion of fungibility ).

Nonetheless, some questions remain. If love is to be understood as an emotion complex, we need a much more explicit account of the pattern at issue here: what ties all of these emotional responses together into a single thing, namely love? Baier and Badhwar seem content to provide interesting and insightful examples of this pattern, but that does not seem to be enough. For example, what connects my amusement at my beloved’s embarrassment to other emotions like my joy on his behalf when he succeeds? Why shouldn’t my amusement at his embarrassment be understood instead as a somewhat cruel case of schadenfreude and so as antithetical to, and disconnected from, love? Moreover, as Naar (2013) notes, we need a principled account of when such historical patterns are disrupted in such a way as to end the love and when they are not. Do I stop loving when, in the midst of clinical depression, I lose my normal pattern of emotional concern?

Presumably the answer requires returning to the historicity of love: it all depends on the historical details of the relationship my beloved and I have forged. Some loves develop so that the intimacy within the relationship is such as to allow for tender, teasing responses to each other, whereas other loves may not. The historical details, together with the lovers’ understanding of their relationship, presumably determine which emotional responses belong to the pattern constitutive of love and which do not. However, this answer so far is inadequate: not just any historical relationship involving emotional interdependence is a loving relationship, and we need a principled way of distinguishing loving relationships from other relational evaluative attitudes: precisely what is the characteristic narrative history that is characteristic of love?

Helm (2009, 2010) tries to answer some of these questions in presenting an account of love as intimate identification. To love another, Helm claims, is to care about him as the particular person he is and so, other things being equal, to value the things he values. Insofar as a person’s (structured) set of values—his sense of the kind of life worth his living—constitutes his identity as a person, such sharing of values amounts to sharing his identity, which sounds very much like union accounts of love. However, Helm is careful to understand such sharing of values as for the sake of the beloved (as robust concern accounts insist), and he spells this all out in terms of patterns of emotions. Thus, Helm claims, all emotions have not only a target and a formal object (as indicated above), but also a focus : a background object the subject cares about in terms of which the implicit evaluation of the target is made intelligible. (For example, if I am afraid of the approaching hailstorm, I thereby evaluate it as dangerous, and what explains this evaluation is the way that hailstorm bears on my vegetable garden, which I care about; my garden, therefore, is the focus of my fear.) Moreover, emotions normally come in patterns with a common focus: fearing the hailstorm is normally connected to other emotions as being relieved when it passes by harmlessly (or disappointed or sad when it does not), being angry at the rabbits for killing the spinach, delighted at the productivity of the tomato plants, etc. Helm argues that a projectible pattern of such emotions with a common focus constitute caring about that focus. Consequently, we might say along the lines of Section 4.3 , while particular emotions appraise events in the world as having certain evaluative properties, their having these properties is partly bestowed on them by the overall patterns of emotions.

Helm identifies some emotions as person-focused emotions : emotions like pride and shame that essentially take persons as their focuses, for these emotions implicitly evaluate in terms of the target’s bearing on the quality of life of the person that is their focus. To exhibit a pattern of such emotions focused on oneself and subfocused on being a mother, for example, is to care about the place being a mother has in the kind of life you find worth living—in your identity as a person; to care in this way is to value being a mother as a part of your concern for your own identity. Likewise, to exhibit a projectible pattern of such emotions focused on someone else and subfocused on his being a father is to value this as a part of your concern for his identity—to value it for his sake. Such sharing of another’s values for his sake, which, Helm argues, essentially involves trust, respect, and affection, amounts to intimate identification with him, and such intimate identification just is love. Thus, Helm tries to provide an account of love that is grounded in an explicit account of caring (and caring about something for the sake of someone else) that makes room for the intuitive “depth” of love through intimate identification.

Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) argue that Helm’s construal of intimacy as intimate identification is too demanding. Rather, they argue, the sort of intimacy that distinguishes love from mere caring is one that involves a kind of emotional vulnerability in which things going well or poorly for one’s beloved are directly connected not merely to one’s well-being, but to one’s ability to flourish. This connection, they argue, runs through the lover’s self-understanding and the place the beloved has in the lover’s sense of a meaningful life.

Why do we love? It has been suggested above that any account of love needs to be able to answer some such justificatory question. Although the issue of the justification of love is important on its own, it is also important for the implications it has for understanding more clearly the precise object of love: how can we make sense of the intuitions not only that we love the individuals themselves rather than their properties, but also that my beloved is not fungible—that no one could simply take her place without loss. Different theories approach these questions in different ways, but, as will become clear below, the question of justification is primary.

One way to understand the question of why we love is as asking for what the value of love is: what do we get out of it? One kind of answer, which has its roots in Aristotle, is that having loving relationships promotes self-knowledge insofar as your beloved acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting your character back to you (Badhwar, 2003, p. 58). Of course, this answer presupposes that we cannot accurately know ourselves in other ways: that left alone, our sense of ourselves will be too imperfect, too biased, to help us grow and mature as persons. The metaphor of a mirror also suggests that our beloveds will be in the relevant respects similar to us, so that merely by observing them, we can come to know ourselves better in a way that is, if not free from bias, at least more objective than otherwise.

Brink (1999, pp. 264–65) argues that there are serious limits to the value of such mirroring of one’s self in a beloved. For if the aim is not just to know yourself better but to improve yourself, you ought also to interact with others who are not just like yourself: interacting with such diverse others can help you recognize alternative possibilities for how to live and so better assess the relative merits of these possibilities. Whiting (2013) also emphasizes the importance of our beloveds’ having an independent voice capable of reflecting not who one now is but an ideal for who one is to be. Nonetheless, we need not take the metaphor of the mirror quite so literally; rather, our beloveds can reflect our selves not through their inherent similarity to us but rather through the interpretations they offer of us, both explicitly and implicitly in their responses to us. This is what Badhwar calls the “epistemic significance” of love. [ 16 ]

In addition to this epistemic significance of love, LaFollette (1996, Chapter 5) offers several other reasons why it is good to love, reasons derived in part from the psychological literature on love: love increases our sense of well-being, it elevates our sense of self-worth, and it serves to develop our character. It also, we might add, tends to lower stress and blood pressure and to increase health and longevity. Friedman (1993) argues that the kind of partiality towards our beloveds that love involves is itself morally valuable because it supports relationships—loving relationships—that contribute “to human well-being, integrity, and fulfillment in life” (p. 61). And Solomon (1988, p. 155) claims:

Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is “because we bring out the best in each other.” What counts as “the best,” of course, is subject to much individual variation.

This is because, Solomon suggests, in loving someone, I want myself to be better so as to be worthy of his love for me.

Each of these answers to the question of why we love understands it to be asking about love quite generally, abstracted away from details of particular relationships. It is also possible to understand the question as asking about particular loves. Here, there are several questions that are relevant:

• What, if anything, justifies my loving rather than not loving this particular person?
• What, if anything, justifies my coming to love this particular person rather than someone else?
• What, if anything, justifies my continuing to love this particular person given the changes—both in him and me and in the overall circumstances—that have occurred since I began loving him?

These are importantly different questions. Velleman (1999), for example, thinks we can answer (1) by appealing to the fact that my beloved is a person and so has a rational nature, yet he thinks (2) and (3) have no answers: the best we can do is offer causal explanations for our loving particular people, a position echoed by Han (2021). Setiya (2014) similarly thinks (1) has an answer, but points not to the rational nature of persons but rather to the other’s humanity , where such humanity differs from personhood in that not all humans need have the requisite rational nature for personhood, and not all persons need be humans. And, as will become clear below , the distinction between (2) and (3) will become important in resolving puzzles concerning whether our beloveds are fungible, though it should be clear that (3) potentially raises questions concerning personal identity (which will not be addressed here).

It is important not to misconstrue these justificatory questions. Thomas (1991) , for example, rejects the idea that love can be justified: “there are no rational considerations whereby anyone can lay claim to another’s love or insist that an individual’s love for another is irrational” (p. 474). This is because, Thomas claims (p. 471):

no matter how wonderful and lovely an individual might be, on any and all accounts, it is simply false that a romantically unencumbered person must love that individual on pain of being irrational. Or, there is no irrationality involved in ceasing to love a person whom one once loved immensely, although the person has not changed.

However, as LaFollette (1996, p. 63) correctly points out,

reason is not some external power which dictates how we should behave, but an internal power, integral to who we are.… Reason does not command that we love anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in determining whom we love and why we love them.

That is, reasons for love are pro tanto : they are a part of the overall reasons we have for acting, and it is up to us in exercising our capacity for agency to decide what on balance we have reason to do or even whether we shall act contrary to our reasons. To construe the notion of a reason for love as compelling us to love, as Thomas does, is to misconstrue the place such reasons have within our agency. [ 17 ]

Most philosophical discussions of the justification of love focus on question (1) , thinking that answering this question will also, to the extent that we can, answer question (2) , which is typically not distinguished from (3) . The answers given to these questions vary in a way that turns on how the kind of evaluation implicit in love is construed. On the one hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of the bestowal of value (such as Telfer 1970–71; Friedman 1993; Singer 1994) typically claim that no justification can be given (cf. Section 4.2 ). As indicated above, this seems problematic, especially given the importance love can have both in our lives and, especially, in shaping our identities as persons. To reject the idea that we can love for reasons may reduce the impact our agency can have in defining who we are.

On the other hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of appraisal tend to answer the justificatory question by appeal to these valuable properties of the beloved. This acceptance of the idea that love can be justified leads to two further, related worries about the object of love.

The first worry is raised by Vlastos (1981) in a discussion Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of love. Vlastos notes that these accounts focus on the properties of our beloveds: we are to love people, they say, only because and insofar as they are objectifications of the excellences. Consequently, he argues, in doing so they fail to distinguish “ disinterested affection for the person we love” from “ appreciation of the excellences instantiated by that person ” (p. 33). That is, Vlastos thinks that Plato and Aristotle provide an account of love that is really a love of properties rather than a love of persons—love of a type of person, rather than love of a particular person—thereby losing what is distinctive about love as an essentially personal attitude. This worry about Plato and Aristotle might seem to apply just as well to other accounts that justify love in terms of the properties of the person: insofar as we love the person for the sake of her properties, it might seem that what we love is those properties and not the person. Here it is surely insufficient to say, as Solomon (1988, p. 154) does, “if love has its reasons, then it is not the whole person that one loves but certain aspects of that person—though the rest of the person comes along too, of course”: that final tagline fails to address the central difficulty about what the object of love is and so about love as a distinctly personal attitude. (Clausen 2019 might seem to address this worry by arguing that we love people not as having certain properties but rather as having “ organic unities ”: a holistic set of properties the value of each of which must be understood in essential part in terms of its place within that whole. Nonetheless, while this is an interesting and plausible way to think about the value of the properties of persons, that organic unity itself will be a (holistic) property held by the person, and it seems that the fundamental problem reemerges at the level of this holistic property: do we love the holistic unity rather than the person?)

The second worry concerns the fungibility of the object of love. To be fungible is to be replaceable by another relevantly similar object without any loss of value. Thus, money is fungible: I can give you two $5 bills in exchange for a $10 bill, and neither of us has lost anything. Is the object of love fungible? That is, can I simply switch from loving one person to loving another relevantly similar person without any loss? The worry about fungibility is commonly put this way: if we accept that love can be justified by appealing to properties of the beloved, then it may seem that in loving someone for certain reasons, I love him not simply as the individual he is, but as instantiating those properties. And this may imply that any other person instantiating those same properties would do just as well: my beloved would be fungible. Indeed, it may be that another person exhibits the properties that ground my love to a greater degree than my current beloved does, and so it may seem that in such a case I have reason to “trade up”—to switch my love to the new, better person. However, it seems clear that the objects of our loves are not fungible: love seems to involve a deeply personal commitment to a particular person, a commitment that is antithetical to the idea that our beloveds are fungible or to the idea that we ought to be willing to trade up when possible. [ 18 ]

In responding to these worries, Nozick (1989) appeals to the union view of love he endorses (see the section on Love as Union ):

The intention in love is to form a we and to identify with it as an extended self, to identify one’s fortunes in large part with its fortunes. A willingness to trade up, to destroy the very we you largely identify with, would then be a willingness to destroy your self in the form of your own extended self. [p. 78]

So it is because love involves forming a “we” that we must understand other persons and not properties to be the objects of love, and it is because my very identity as a person depends essentially on that “we” that it is not possible to substitute without loss one object of my love for another. However, Badhwar (2003) criticizes Nozick, saying that his response implies that once I love someone, I cannot abandon that love no matter who that person becomes; this, she says, “cannot be understood as love at all rather than addiction” (p. 61). [ 19 ]

Instead, Badhwar (1987) turns to her robust-concern account of love as a concern for the beloved for his sake rather than one’s own. Insofar as my love is disinterested — not a means to antecedent ends of my own—it would be senseless to think that my beloved could be replaced by someone who is able to satisfy my ends equally well or better. Consequently, my beloved is in this way irreplaceable. However, this is only a partial response to the worry about fungibility, as Badhwar herself seems to acknowledge. For the concern over fungibility arises not merely for those cases in which we think of love as justified instrumentally, but also for those cases in which the love is justified by the intrinsic value of the properties of my beloved. Confronted with cases like this, Badhwar (2003) concludes that the object of love is fungible after all (though she insists that it is very unlikely in practice). (Soble (1990, Chapter 13) draws similar conclusions.)

Nonetheless, Badhwar thinks that the object of love is “phenomenologically non-fungible” (2003, p. 63; see also 1987, p. 14). By this she means that we experience our beloveds to be irreplaceable: “loving and delighting in [one person] are not completely commensurate with loving and delighting in another” (1987, p. 14). Love can be such that we sometimes desire to be with this particular person whom we love, not another whom we also love, for our loves are qualitatively different. But why is this? It seems as though the typical reason I now want to spend time with Amy rather than Bob is, for example, that Amy is funny but Bob is not. I love Amy in part for her humor, and I love Bob for other reasons, and these qualitative differences between them is what makes them not fungible. However, this reply does not address the worry about the possibility of trading up: if Bob were to be at least as funny (charming, kind, etc.) as Amy, why shouldn’t I dump her and spend all my time with him?

A somewhat different approach is taken by Whiting (1991). In response to the first worry concerning the object of love, Whiting argues that Vlastos offers a false dichotomy: having affection for someone that is disinterested —for her sake rather than my own—essentially involves an appreciation of her excellences as such. Indeed, Whiting says, my appreciation of these as excellences, and so the underlying commitment I have to their value, just is a disinterested commitment to her because these excellences constitute her identity as the person she is. The person, therefore, really is the object of love. Delaney (1996) takes the complementary tack of distinguishing between the object of one’s love, which of course is the person, and the grounds of the love, which are her properties: to say, as Solomon does, that we love someone for reasons is not at all to say that we only love certain aspects of the person. In these terms, we might say that Whiting’s rejection of Vlastos’ dichotomy can be read as saying that what makes my attitude be one of disinterested affection—one of love—for the person is precisely that I am thereby responding to her excellences as the reasons for that affection. [ 20 ]

Of course, more needs to be said about what it is that makes a particular person be the object of love. Implicit in Whiting’s account is an understanding of the way in which the object of my love is determined in part by the history of interactions I have with her: it is she, and not merely her properties (which might be instantiated in many different people), that I want to be with; it is she, and not merely her properties, on whose behalf I am concerned when she suffers and whom I seek to comfort; etc. This addresses the first worry, but not the second worry about fungibility, for the question still remains whether she is the object of my love only as instantiating certain properties, and so whether or not I have reason to “trade up.”

To respond to the fungibility worry, Whiting and Delaney appeal explicitly to the historical relationship. [ 21 ] Thus, Whiting claims, although there may be a relatively large pool of people who have the kind of excellences of character that would justify my loving them, and so although there can be no answer to question (2) about why I come to love this rather than that person within this pool, once I have come to love this person and so have developed a historical relation with her, this history of concern justifies my continuing to love this person rather than someone else (1991, p. 7). Similarly, Delaney claims that love is grounded in “historical-relational properties” (1996, p. 346), so that I have reasons for continuing to love this person rather than switching allegiances and loving someone else. In each case, the appeal to both such historical relations and the excellences of character of my beloved is intended to provide an answer to question (3) , and this explains why the objects of love are not fungible.

There seems to be something very much right with this response. Relationships grounded in love are essentially personal, and it would be odd to think of what justifies that love to be merely non-relational properties of the beloved. Nonetheless, it is still unclear how the historical-relational propreties can provide any additional justification for subsequent concern beyond that which is already provided (as an answer to question (1) ) by appeal to the excellences of the beloved’s character (cf. Brink 1999). The mere fact that I have loved someone in the past does not seem to justify my continuing to love him in the future. When we imagine that he is going through a rough time and begins to lose the virtues justifying my initial love for him, why shouldn’t I dump him and instead come to love someone new having all of those virtues more fully? Intuitively (unless the change she undergoes makes her in some important sense no longer the same person he was), we think I should not dump him, but the appeal to the mere fact that I loved him in the past is surely not enough. Yet what historical-relational properties could do the trick? (For an interesting attempt at an answer, see Kolodny 2003 and also Howard 2019.)

If we think that love can be justified, then it may seem that the appeal to particular historical facts about a loving relationship to justify that love is inadequate, for such idiosyncratic and subjective properties might explain but cannot justify love. Rather, it may seem, justification in general requires appealing to universal, objective properties. But such properties are ones that others might share, which leads to the problem of fungibility. Consequently it may seem that love cannot be justified. In the face of this predicament, accounts of love that understand love to be an attitude towards value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal, between recognizing already existing value and creating that value (see Section 4.3 ) might seem to offer a way out. For once we reject the thought that the value of our beloveds must be either the precondition or the consequence of our love, we have room to acknowledge that the deeply personal, historically grounded, creative nature of love (central to bestowal accounts) and the understanding of love as responsive to valuable properties of the beloved that can justify that love (central to appraisal accounts) are not mutually exclusive (Helm 2010; Bagley 2015).

• Annas, J., 1977, “Plato and Aristotle on Friendship and Altruism”, Mind , 86: 532–54.
• Badhwar, N. K., 1987, “Friends as Ends in Themselves”, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research , 48: 1–23.
• –––, 2003, “Love”, in H. LaFollette (ed.), Practical Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 42–69.
• Badhwar, N. K. (ed.), 1993, Friendship: A Philosophical Reader , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Bagley, B., 2015, “Loving Someone in Particular”, Ethics , 125: 477–507.
• –––, 2018. “(The Varieties of) Love in Contemporary Anglophone Philosophy”, in Adrienne M. Martin (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy , New York, NY: Routledge, 453–64.
• Baier, A. C., 1991, “Unsafe Loves”, in Solomon & Higgins (1991), 433–50.
• Blum, L. A., 1980, Friendship, Altruism, and Morality , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• –––, 1993, “Friendship as a Moral Phenomenon”, in Badhwar (1993), 192–210.
• Bransen, J., 2006, “Selfless Self-Love”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice , 9: 3–25.
• Bratman, M. E., 1999, “Shared Intention”, in Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 109–29.
• Brentlinger, J., 1970/1989, “The Nature of Love”, in Soble (1989a), 136–48.
• Brink, D. O., 1999, “Eudaimonism, Love and Friendship, and Political Community”, Social Philosophy & Policy , 16: 252–289.
• Brown, R., 1987, Analyzing Love , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Clausen, G., 2019, “Love of Whole Persons”, The Journal of Ethics , 23 (4): 347–67.
• Cocking, D. & Kennett, J., 1998, “Friendship and the Self”, Ethics , 108: 502–27.
• Cooper, J. M., 1977, “Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship”, Review of Metaphysics , 30: 619–48.
• Delaney, N., 1996, “Romantic Love and Loving Commitment: Articulating a Modern Ideal”, American Philosophical Quarterly , 33: 375–405.
• Ebels-Duggan, K., 2008, “Against Beneficence: A Normative Account of Love”, Ethics , 119: 142–70.
• Fisher, M., 1990, Personal Love , London: Duckworth.
• Frankfurt, H., 1999, “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love”, in Necessity, Volition, and Love , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 129–41.
• Friedman, M. A., 1993, What Are Friends For? Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• –––, 1998, “Romantic Love and Personal Autonomy”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy , 22: 162–81.
• Gilbert, M., 1989, On Social Facts , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1996, Living Together: Rationality, Sociality, and Obligation , Rowman & Littlefield.
• –––, 2000, Sociality and Responsibility: New Essays in Plural Subject Theory , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Grau, C. & Smuts, A., 2017, Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Hamlyn, D. W., 1989, “The Phenomena of Love and Hate”, in Soble (1989a), 218–234.
• Han, Y., 2021, “Do We Love for Reasons?”, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research , 102: 106–126.
• Hegel, G. W. F., 1997, “A Fragment on Love”, in Solomon & Higgins (1991), 117–20.
• Helm, B. W., 2008, “Plural Agents”, Noûs , 42: 17–49.
• –––, 2009, “Love, Identification, and the Emotions”, American Philosophical Quarterly , 46: 39–59.
• –––, 2010, Love, Friendship, and the Self: Intimacy, Identification, and the Social Nature of Persons , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Howard, C., 2019, “Fitting Love and Reasons for Loving” in M. Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics (Volume 9). doi:10.1093/oso/9780198846253.001.0001
• Jaworska, A. & Wonderly, M., 2017, “Love and Caring”, in C. Grau & A. Smuts (2020). doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199395729.013.15
• Jollimore, T, 2011, Love’s Vision , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Kolodny, N., 2003, “Love as Valuing a Relationship”, The Philosophical Review , 112: 135–89.
• Kraut, Robert, 1986 “Love De Re ”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy , 10: 413–30.
• LaFollette, H., 1996, Personal Relationships: Love, Identity, and Morality , Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Press.
• Lamb, R. E., (ed.), 1997, Love Analyzed , Westview Press.
• Liddell, H. G., Scott, R., Jones, H. S., & McKenzie, R., 1940, A Greek-English Lexicon , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 9th edition.
• Martin, A., 2015, “Love, Incorporated”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice , 18: 691–702.
• Montaigne, M., [E], Essays , in The Complete Essays of Montaigne , Donald Frame (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958.
• Naar, H., 2013, “A Dispositional Theory of Love”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 94(3): 342–357.
• Newton-Smith, W., 1989, “A Conceptual Investigation of Love”, in Soble (1989a), 199–217.
• Nozick, R., 1989, “Love’s Bond”, in The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations , New York: Simon & Schuster, 68–86.
• Nussbaum, M., 1990, “Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration”, in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 314–34.
• Nygren, A., 1953a, Agape and Eros , Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press.
• –––, 1953b, “ Agape and Eros ”, in Soble (1989a), 85–95.
• Ortiz-Millán, G., 2007, “Love and Rationality: On Some Possible Rational Effects of Love”, Kriterion , 48: 127–44.
• Pismenny, A. & Prinz, J., 2017, “Is Love an Emotion?”, in C. Grau & A. Smuts (2017). doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199395729.013.10
• Price, A. W., 1989, Love and Friendship in Plato and Arisotle , New York: Clarendon Press.
• Rorty, A. O., 1980, “Introduction”, in A. O. Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1–8.
• –––, 1986/1993, “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds”, in Badhwar (1993), 73–88.
• Scruton, R., 1986, Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic , New York: Free Press.
• Searle, J. R., 1990, “Collective Intentions and Actions”, in P. R. Cohen, M. E. Pollack, & J. L. Morgan (eds.), Intentions in Communication , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 401–15.
• Setiya, K., 2014, “Love and the Value of a Life”, Philosophical Review , 123: 251–80.
• Sherman, N., 1993, “Aristotle on the Shared Life”, in Badhwar (1993), 91–107.
• Singer, I., 1984a, The Nature of Love, Volume 1: Plato to Luther , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edition.
• –––, 1984b, The Nature of Love, Volume 2: Courtly and Romantic , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 1989, The Nature of Love, Volume 3: The Modern World , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn.
• –––, 1991, “From The Nature of Love ”, in Solomon & Higgins (1991), 259–78.
• –––, 1994, The Pursuit of Love , Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• –––, 2009, Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing-up , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Soble, A. (ed.), 1989a, Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love , New York, NY: Paragon House.
• –––, 1989b, “An Introduction to the Philosophy of Love”, in Soble (1989a), xi-xxv.
• –––, 1990, The Structure of Love , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• –––, 1997, “Union, Autonomy, and Concern”, in Lamb (1997), 65–92.
• Solomon, R. C., 1976, The Passions , New York: Anchor Press.
• –––, 1981, Love: Emotion, Myth, and Metaphor , New York: Anchor Press.
• –––, 1988, About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times , New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Solomon, R. C. & Higgins, K. M. (eds.), 1991, The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love , Lawrence: Kansas University Press.
• Stump, E., 2006, “Love by All Accounts”, Presidential Address to the Central APA, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association , 80: 25–43.
• Taylor, G., 1976, “Love”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 76: 147–64.
• Telfer, E., 1970–71, “Friendship”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 71: 223–41.
• Thomas, L., 1987, “Friendship”, Synthese , 72: 217–36.
• –––, 1989, “Friends and Lovers”, in G. Graham & H. La Follette (eds.), Person to Person , Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 182–98.
• –––, 1991, “Reasons for Loving”, in Solomon & Higgins (1991), 467–476.
• –––, 1993, “Friendship and Other Loves”, in Badhwar (1993), 48–64.
• Tuomela, R., 1984, A Theory of Social Action , Dordrecht: Reidel.
• –––, 1995, The Importance of Us: A Philosophical Study of Basic Social Notions , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Velleman, J. D., 1999, “Love as a Moral Emotion”, Ethics , 109: 338–74.
• –––, 2008, “Beyond Price”, Ethics , 118: 191–212.
• Vlastos, G., 1981, “The Individual as Object of Love in Plato”, in Platonic Studies , 2nd edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 3–42.
• White, R. J., 2001, Love’s Philosophy , Rowman & Littlefield.
• Whiting, J. E., 1991, “Impersonal Friends”, Monist , 74: 3–29.
• –––, 2013, “Love: Self-Propagation, Self-Preservation, or Ekstasis?”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 43: 403–29.
• Willigenburg, T. Van, 2005, “Reason and Love: A Non-Reductive Analysis of the Normativity of Agent-Relative Reasons”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice , 8: 45–62.
• Wollheim, R., 1984, The Thread of Life , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Wonderly, M., 2016, “On Being Attached”, Philosophical Studies , 173: 223–42.
• –––, 2017, “Love and Attachment”, American Philosophical Quarterly , 54: 235–50.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Aristotle , Nicomachean Ethics , translated by W.D. Ross.
• Moseley, A., “ Philosophy of Love ,” in J. Fieser (ed.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

character, moral | emotion | friendship | impartiality | obligations: special | personal identity | Plato: ethics | Plato: rhetoric and poetry | respect | value: intrinsic vs. extrinsic

Copyright © 2021 by Bennett Helm < bennett . helm @ fandm . edu >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2024 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

What would Thucydides say?

In constantly reaching for past parallels to explain our peculiar times we miss the real lessons of the master historian

Mark Fisher

The environment

Emergency action

Could civil disobedience be morally obligatory in a society on a collision course with climate catastrophe?

Rupert Read

Metaphysics

The enchanted vision

Love is much more than a mere emotion or moral ideal. It imbues the world itself and we should learn to move with its power

Mark Vernon

What is ‘lived experience’?

The term is ubiquitous and double-edged. It is both a key source of authentic knowledge and a danger to true solidarity

Patrick J Casey

Rituals and celebrations

A beginner’s guide to a joyful Persian tradition of spring renewal and rebirth

Thinkers and theories

Philosophy is an art

For Margaret Macdonald, philosophical theories are akin to stories, meant to enlarge certain aspects of human life

Simple entities in universal harmony – Leibniz’s evocative perspective on reality

The scourge of lookism

It is time to take seriously the painful consequences of appearance discrimination in the workplace

Andrew Mason

Our tools shape our selves

For Bernard Stiegler, a visionary philosopher of our digital age, technics is the defining feature of human experience

Bryan Norton

The cell is not a factory

Scientific narratives project social hierarchies onto nature. That’s why we need better metaphors to describe cellular life

Charudatta Navare

Stories and literature

Terrifying vistas of reality

H P Lovecraft, the master of cosmic horror stories, was a philosopher who believed in the total insignificance of humanity

Sam Woodward

The dangers of AI farming

AI could lead to new ways for people to abuse animals for financial gain. That’s why we need strong ethical guidelines

Virginie Simoneau-Gilbert & Jonathan Birch

Biography and memoir

The unique life philosophy of Abdi, born in Somalia, living in the Netherlands

A man beyond categories

Paul Tillich was a religious socialist and a profoundly subtle theologian who placed doubt at the centre of his thought

Public health

It’s dirty work

In caring for and bearing with human suffering, hospital staff perform extreme emotional labour. Is there a better way?

Susanna Crossman

Social psychology

The magic of the mundane

Pioneering sociologist Erving Goffman realised that every action is deeply revealing of the social norms by which we live

Lucy McDonald

Political philosophy

The battles over beginnings

Niccolò Machiavelli’s profound insights about the violent origins of political societies help us understand the world today

David Polansky

For Iris Murdoch, selfishness is a fault that can be solved by reframing the world

A hunter’s lyrical reflection on the humbling business of being mortal

Love and friendship

After his son’s terrorist attack, Azdyne seeks healing – and his granddaughter

Language and linguistics

Cathedrals of convention

Humans have a strong impulse to see things that are arbitrary or conventional as natural and essential – especially language

Reuben Cohn-Gordon

More than breathtaking, ‘The Birth of Venus’ signalled an aesthetic revolution

Comparative philosophy

Folklore is philosophy

Both folktales and formal philosophy unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world

Abigail Tulenko

Science must become attuned to the subtle conversations that pervade all life, from the primordial to the present

David Waltner-Toews