Abstract
In contemporary and historical contributions to the philosophy of love there has been considerable resistance to three claims concerning romantic love: (1) Romantic love is assessable for rationality, (2) romantic love is love for a reason, and (3) romantic love is reason-responsive. This chapter argues that these three ideas are intimately tied together. It offers justification for all three claims on the basis of more general considerations of the nature of emotions and evidence in support of the claim that romantic love is best rendered a complex emotion that when felt is truly multimodal. It attributes the property of causing certain internal qualities (e.g., a quickening of the heartbeat) that are experienced through interoception to a person identified through some perceptual or cognitive faculty (e.g., a sight of the beloved). Along the way it identifies some of the main ways in which romantic love differs from other kinds of love, such as friendship love and parental love.