Love's Vision

by Troy Jollimore

Love often seems uncontrollable and irrational, but we just as frequently appear to have reasons for loving the people we do. In Love's 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's 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's Symposium, love is "something in between."


Jollimore makes his case by proposing a "vision" view of love, according to which loving is a way of seeing that involves bestowing charitable attention on a loved one. This view recognizes the truth in the cliché "love is blind," but holds that love's blindness does not undermine the idea that love is guided by reason. Reasons play an important role in love even if they rest on facts that are not themselves rationally justifiable.


Filled with illuminating examples from literature, Love's Vision is an original examination of a subject of vital philosophical and human concern.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Troy Jollimore was born in Liverpool, Nova Scotia and attended the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University in 1999. He has lived in the U.S. since 1993 and is currently Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico. He has been an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (2006–07), the Stanley P. Young Fellow in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2012), and a Guggenheim Fellow (2013).

Jollimore's philosophical writings frequently concern ethical issues connected to personal relationships. His first book, Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality (Studies in Ethics, was published in 2001; his second, Love's Vision, appeared in 2011, and his third, On Loyalty, in 2012. He has also published on topics including the ethics of terrorism, the depiction of evil in literature, the nature of happiness, and so-called "admirable immorality."

His first collection of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in 2006. It was also nominated for the 2007 Poets' Prize, and individual poems in the collection received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. His second collection, At Lake Scugog, appeared in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2011.

Jollimore's poems have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Believer, McSweeney's, The Walrus, and Poetry. He is also a frequent book reviewer, writing for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Review, among others.

Reviews

[Rob Elisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent, even-handed, and helpful work of scholarship. Close to giving it 4 stars, but I pretty much only reserve 4 stars and up for classics or my favorites

[Ari Bradford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jolliomore's quasi‐aristotelian visions view of love responds well to the debate about love's rationality, however he lacks justification for many of his claims in my opinion