Beloved Philosophical Writings on Love

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What philosophical writing about love would you’ve got us learn?

The above is a passage from “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love Is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, which appeared in Midwest Research in Philosophy in 1986. It explores the methods during which love and alter are associated, and the way an appreciation of that makes a loving relationship obscure absent an consciousness of the actual historical past of the modifications it has wrought on these in it. The essay seems to be at an imaginary couple, Louis and Ella, and at its finish, Rorty writes:

We’ve left them just where they were: in the continuous, delicate, and delicious balancing acts of their lives. But that is just exactly where we should leave them. It is only the details of their particular situation that can determine what would be rational, what would be appropriate, what would constitute (whose?) thriving. No general philosophical conclusion about the presumptive connections between rationality, appropriateness, and thriving can possibly help them determine just what corrections rationality recommends or requires as appropriate to their condition. It can’t even help them determine whether their sensitivities are sound or pathologcal, insufficient or excessive, let alone whether they should ramifi or regionalize their responses to one another, to balance integrity with continuity in such a way as to conduce to thriving. The confluence of rationality, appropriateness, and thriving cannot help them to determine the directions in which rationality or appropriateness or even thriving--taken singly or coordinately--lie. And that is as it should be. Our task cannot be to resolve but only to understand the quandaries of Louis and Ella. Since their condition and its problems are historical, that is, particular, their solutions must be particular.

Completely happy Valentine’s Day, philosofriends. When you’re up for it, within the feedback, counsel a philosophical work on love you’d advocate we take a look at.



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