While we are thinking about the relationship between love and hate, what about love-love and hate-hate? Would X hate Y just because Y hates X? And so forth. Here's a version of something I cover in my introduction to philosophy course. Consider the psychological hypothesis that in order for a person to be able to love another person, he or she must already have been loved by someone else (earlier). For example, parents must love their children if their children are to be able to love other persons later. But how were the parents able to love their children? By our hypothesis, by being loved by someone else, say, their parents. But why were they able to love? We have a causal stream paradox. Perhaps at one point, way back, there was someone who was able to love in the absence of himself or herself being loved. This original unloved lover started things going. But then our hypothesis is false. Or perhaps God loved that person, who was not loved by any other person, in which case we can get the stream of...

What is this question, the confession of a character in Desperate Housewives ? Glad to serve as your priest, or shrink: (1) "I am having an affair with a married man who ismy coworker. I did not begin the affair, he pursued me." What does this matter, that "he pursued me," if you ended up in bed together? Why mention something irrelevant? I suspect because it might not be true; you are engaging in rationalizing exculpation ("it's not my doing!") to evade responsibility. Are you conveniently forgetting or suppressing your attempts (either conscious or unconscious) to get him interested? Men very often approach only a woman who has already sent them subtle inviting messages. You ask, at the end , "Are his actions more unethical than mine?" This, too, suggests, that you are concerned with apportioning responsibility. ("He's worse than I am!") (2) "His wife doesnot know." How do you know this? Because he told you that he didn't tell her? Maybe he's lying. (He's...

In what follows, I ignore "flirting," perhaps merely arbitrarily, because flirting is ubiquitous and seems too innocuous for a serious moral investigation; others might well disagree, and I ask them kindly to fill in the lacuna(e) in my reply. (Perhaps this question and its replies can be added to the "Sex" category of the web site.) I don't know what you mean by "cheated slightly ." We could have (there have been) many arguments, philosophical, theological, and polemical, over what counts as "cheating" and what doesn't, and what moral significance cheating of various types or degrees has. If only we could establish a continuum from tiny cheating to huge cheating.... To my ear, "I cheated [but only] slightly" sounds like an excuse someone might use to get off the moral hook (Clinton), hoping for a generous and sympathetic reply from the other person (he in effect got one from Hilary). As an older sister once said to her just-starting-college female sibling (in a full-page advertisement for a...

It is close to being true that (x)(Px ---> Wx), where "P" = "is a [great] philosopher" and "W" = "wrote about love," and "x" ranges over, say, human beings. Just to mention a few from the history of Western philosophy (and theology, which is also philosophy): Plato ( Symposium , Phaedrus ), Aristotle ( Nicomachean Ethics ), St. Paul (1 Cor 13), St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Michel Montaigne, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and Soren Kierkegaard. In the 20th Century, philosophers who wrote about love include Bertrand Russell, Simone de Beauvoir, Anders Nygren, Gene Outka, Robert Solomon, Harry Frankfurt, and many others. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an entry on love that will be helpful, as does Sex from Plato to Paglia: A Philosophical Encyclopedia . Many philosophers who wrote about love are discussed or included in two of my books, The Structure of Love (Yale, 1990) and Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love (Paragon House, 1989).

Plato had much to say about love and sexual desire in his dialogues Symposium and Phaedrus and elsewhere (e.g., Laws , Lysis , Republic ). What we call "Platonic Love," however, may bear little resemblance to what Plato had in mind; "Platonic Love" might be a medieval or Neoplatonist corruption or variation of Plato's own ideas. Be that as it may, we don't talk about "Aristotelian Love" because it is a mouthful. Aristotle did talk about "love," in the sense of friendship, using the Greek word "philia" instead of Plato's word of choice, "eros." For Aristotle's account of friendship, see his Nicomachean Ethics ; the relevant passages, as well as commentary, can be found in my Eros, Agape, and Philia . Also take a look at Gilbert Meilaender's "When Harry and Sally Read the Nicomachean Ethics : Friendship between Men and Women," in Leroy S. Rouner, ed., The Changing Face of Friendship ( Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 183-96. You might also want to...

I wonder if Nicholas is telling us more about The Perfect/Good Life/Relationship than about ideal romantic love per se. But maybe they overlap.

Why merely "no" and "no" without some reason for the answers? This web site is AskPhilosophersDotOrg, not GiveMeYourBriefOpinionDotCom. (My philosophy is that an answer proferred on this web site ought to be one that the panelist would recite in the classroom, and in that context mere "no's" are an embarassment to the discipline.) One of many appropriate ways to answer (1), "Is friendship necessary for romantic love?", is to provide plausible analyses (they need not strictly be of the necessary and sufficent condition sort, but that would be nice) of both "romantic love" and "friendship" and to argue that there is inadequate overlap between them. I think the "no" answer is right, but that is because I tend to think of friendship along the lines of perhaps Aristotle and C.S. Lewis, while my understanding of romantic love places more emphasis on the "romantic" than on the "love" (were that not the case, there might well be something pointed in the question after all). I might go farther and claim that...

One more thought, by way of elaborating, with an example, the last thought in my previous message. In the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle, it is well known, argued that genuine philia (love, friendship) is constant . (This is supposed to be one of the slight ways in which Aristotle's philia is more like Christian agape than Platonic eros . See Gregory Vlastos, Platonic Studies .) However, Aristotle allowed that there could be exceptions. Although the passages of NE , a couple of paragraphs, in which he makes this concession are a little confused, his point seems to be this: that if X no longer has philia toward Y because ( = the reason why the philia ends) Y has radically changed -- in particular, Y has (as odd as it sounds, because virtue for Aristotle is supposed to be itself constant) become bad, evil, and not merely bad or evil but cannot be brought back to virtue despite all that X has done to try to save Y -- then, Aristotle implies, the philia that X...

The question seems to suggest the following thesis (or to inquire about it): if a person X has an attitude or emotion at some time "t1" toward or about another person Y, and if that attitude or emotion ever ends, or comes to an end, at a later time "t2," then that attitude or emotion could not have been, in particular, love. Or if X claims to love Y at t1 yet does not love Y at t2, then X's earlier claim to love Y had to be false (even if X believed it to be true). I see no reason to take this thesis seriously. Here's why: Suppose I hate Bill (or believe I hate him) at t1, yet I am able to put things aside and at t2 no longer hate him. Does this mean that my earlier attitude or emotion had not really been hate? No. Suppose I am afraid of snakes at t1, but with the support of my shrink I am able to pick up and caress snakes calmly at t2. I never feared snakes? No. Suppose I sexually desire you at t1 and at t2 feel nothing for you. (One of life's tragedies?) Does that mean I had never desired you? No...

The question is whether love must be reciprocal (reciprocated; mutual; bidirectional) to be love. The obvious answer is "no": I can love my child without my love being returned with equal affection or at all. Indeed, that seems to be a (good) parent's fate. But perhaps what you are talking about is a romantic or personal love between two adults (e.g., in a marriage—but not necessarily). So I will restrict myself to that context. Further, I will assume that the question is about the logic or concept of love and not merely about its psychology. Nevertheless, the answer is still "no." (A psychological answer would be: let's take an empirical look and see how often, if at all, or for how long, x can love y without y's returning love.) The argument that the conceptual answer is "no" is a reductio . Suppose xLy if and only if yLx. (I take that to be the thesis that love must be reciprocal to be love; "xLy iff yLx" says that a necessary condition of x's loving y is that y loves x, and that a...

Would you prefer to be the one who is good but everything thinks is bad, or the one who is bad but everyone thinks is good? Would you prefer to be the one who loves (but is not loved in return as much or at all), or the one who is loved (but does not return the love as much or at all)? Both questions are hard to answer--which is to say that it is not obvious that it is preferable to be the one who is loved but does not love in return.

Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics argued that philia (a type of friendship-love) is essential to the good life. But Aristotle was a pinhead. For another take from a contemporary philosopher, who rejects the claim that love is essential to the good life, see Raja Halwani, Virtuous Liaisons: Care, Love, Sex, and Virtue Ethics . Chicago, Ill.: Open Court, 2003. And which rock group (J. Geils Band?) more radically impressed upon us that "Love Stinks"? To counter, I suppose, the inanity of the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" (la la la la la....). The way the Rolling Stones torpedoed the Beatles' "Let It Be" with their own "Let It Bleed."