Research Seminars, Colloquia and Reading Groups
Summer Seminar 2024: Troy Jollimore, Love鈥檚 Vision
Thursday May 9, 2–4pm: Chapter 3: Blindness (2): Love鈥檚 Friendly Eye
Seminars will take place in R3.25. All colleagues, including undergraduate and postgraduate students, are very welcome.
鈥淟ove often seems uncontrollable and irrational, but we just as frequently appear to have reasons for loving the people we do. In Love鈥檚 Vision, Troy Jollimore offers a new way of understanding love that accommodates both of these facts, arguing that love is guided by reason even as it resists and sometimes eludes rationality. At the same time, he reconsiders love鈥檚 moral status, acknowledging its moral dangers while arguing that it is, at heart, a moral phenomenon—an emotion that demands empathy and calls us away from excessive self-concern. Love is revealed as neither wholly moral nor deeply immoral, neither purely rational nor profoundly irrational. Rather, as Diotima says in Plato鈥檚 Symposium, love is 鈥渟omething in between.鈥濃��