McKeever, N orcid.org/0000-0002-0799-1623 (2019) What can we learn about romantic love from Harry Frankfurt’s account of love? Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 14 (3). pp. 204-226. ISSN 1559-3061
Abstract
Harry Frankfurt has a comprehensive and, at times, compelling, account of love, which are outlined in several of his works. However, he does not think that romantic love fits the ideal of love as it ‘includes a number of vividly distracting elements, which do not belong to the essential nature of love as a mode of disinterested concern’ (Frankfurt, 2004, p. 43). In this paper, I argue that we can, nonetheless, learn some important things about romantic love from his account. Furthermore, I will suggest, conversely, that there is distinct value in romantic love, which derives from the nature of the relationship on which it is based. Frankfurt tries to take agape and reformulate it so that it can also account for love of particular people. Whilst he succeeds, to some extent, in describing parental love, he fails to accurately describe romantic love and friendship, and, moreover, overlooks what is distinctly valuable about them. Although it was not his intention to describe romantic love, by failing to include features such as reciprocity in his account of love, Frankfurt leaves no room for a kind of love that is important and valuable to many people
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 Author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) |
Keywords: | love; romantic love; Harry Frankfurt; philosophy of love |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 13 Mar 2019 13:26 |
Last Modified: | 13 Mar 2019 13:26 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | University of Southern California |
Identification Number: | 10.26556/jesp.v14i3.553 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:143592 |
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