New Books In Philosophy

Love – being loved and loving in the way two otherwise unrelated persons can be – is a kind of experience that just about everyone values intrinsically. As we say, or sing: love makes the world go ’round, and all you need is love. But what sort of experience is loving? What more can we say about it that will illuminate the kind of experience it is? In his thought-provoking new book, Love’s Vision (Princeton University Press, 2011), Troy Jollimore, Professor of Philosophy at California State University at Chico, argues that love is a matter of vision in that it literally transforms the eyes – it is an emotion that is partly but essentially characterized by the special kind of visual experience that it brings about. This visual-experiential view of love makes love a kind of emotion that is partly responsive to reasons and to the claims of morality. To Jollimore – who is also an award-winning poet – we do love for reasons, that is, because we see that the beloved has cer