Rationality of Love

Love has been the subject of much fascination. It is indeed one of those things which elude us in many ways. The long-lasting disagreement over love's nature is unsurprising. In light of this, a piecemeal approach to love is in order. Instead of asking what love is down the line, we might need to investigate its various features and its connection to other things. The Rationality of Love addresses the question whether love belongs, paradoxically enough, to the realm of reason, whether love belongs to the class of responses, such as belief and action, that admit of norms of justification and rationality. Are there normative reasons to love someone? Can it be an appropriate or fitting response to an individual? Can it be rational? Or is love, like perceptual experiences, sensations and urges, the sort of thing we just have and for which we cannot be rationally criticizable? Hichem Naar provides a sustained defense of the rationality of love. There are reasons to love others, reasons provided by the unique value of each individual. This will in turn rule out popular accounts of love which deny love's rationality and vindicate those accounts that make room for it. Drawing on various domains of philosophical inquiry such as the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of normativity, and epistemology, Naar provides a careful assessment of the various positions in the debate over reasons for love and develops his own answer to the normative question about love.

Hichem Naar is a research associate at the University of Duisburg-Essen and a member of the Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics Research Group. After receiving his PhD from the University of Manchester, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Geneva and the University of Montreal and as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. He works in philosophy of mind, philosophy of emotion, metaethics, and moral psychology.