The Philosophy of Love · Part One
Love has remained a subject of inquiry throughout the history of human thought. Ancient philosophers discussed family affection, friendship, erotic love and benevolence, as well as love’s connections with desire, virtue, happiness, the divine and social life. In modern philosophy, the discussion has also extended to the structure of emotions, freedom, relationships between subjects, the value of persons and moral responsibility.
The word ‘love’ does not designate precisely the same phenomenon in all these discussions. The ancient Greek terms eros and philia, the Christian concepts of agape and caritas, the Chinese ideas of ren (benevolence) and jian’ai (inclusive care), and the Indian traditions of loving-kindness, compassion and devotion each have their own meanings and theoretical contexts. Even an individual philosopher may discuss several different senses of love.
This is the first article in the series ‘The Philosophy of Love’. It surveys representative philosophers and other thinkers from different periods and intellectual traditions. Each account identifies the kind of love under discussion, the thinker’s specific claims, their argumentative setting and principal texts. Where a thinker did not offer a single definition of love, the discussion describes what they actually wrote rather than presenting a later summary as their own definition. This article is a historical survey only: it does not assess the theories or interpret them through another philosophical framework.
1. Love in Early Chinese Philosophy
Confucius: Benevolence Means Loving Others
Confucius (551–479 BCE) discussed love primarily through the concept of ren, often translated as benevolence or humaneness. In the Analects, ‘Yan Yuan’, when Fan Chi asks what ren is, Confucius replies, ‘Love others.’ This is not restricted to romantic love. It concerns moral character and how people live together.
In ‘Yong Ye’, Confucius says that someone who wishes to establish themselves should help others establish themselves, and someone who wishes to succeed should help others succeed. ‘Wei Ling Gong’ offers another formulation: do not impose on others what you would not wish for yourself. These passages link concern for others with understanding their position and setting limits on one’s own conduct.
Confucius also attaches importance to genuine feeling within family relationships. In ‘Wei Zheng’, he suggests that providing for one’s parents is insufficient if the attitude behind that provision is missing. In ‘Ba Yi’, his discussion of mourning gives weight to sincere grief rather than merely the proper performance of ritual.
At the same time, Confucius does not treat ren as unregulated emotional expression. The phrase ‘overcome the self and return to ritual propriety’ in ‘Yan Yuan’ connects it with self-restraint, the practice of li (ritual propriety) and sustained moral cultivation. Confucian benevolence therefore involves feeling, attitude and conduct.
Mozi: Inclusive Care and Mutual Benefit
Mozi (approximately fifth to fourth century BCE) developed his account of jian’ai, usually rendered ‘inclusive care’ or ‘impartial concern’, in the three ‘Jian Ai’ chapters of the Mozi. He held that war, aggression and social conflict arise in significant part because people favour their own interests and groups while failing to give proper consideration to others.
The text asks people to regard other states as they regard their own, other families as they regard their own, and other persons as they regard themselves. Its practical point is that one’s decisions should not be governed solely by the interests of one’s immediate group. Inclusive care is associated with ‘mutual benefit’: by considering one another, avoiding harm and offering assistance, people can improve their shared circumstances.
Although jian’ai is sometimes translated as ‘universal love’, Mozi’s emphasis is on extending concern beyond narrow loyalties and acting accordingly. He is not simply demanding that everyone experience the same intensity of intimate affection for every person. His central question is how people ought to treat others, and how that principle can reduce social harm.
Mencius: Compassion and the Extension of Love
Mencius (approximately 372–289 BCE) continued the Confucian account of benevolence while paying particular attention to its psychological beginnings. In the Mencius, ‘Gong Sun Chou I’, he calls the heart of compassion the ‘sprout’ or beginning of ren. He illustrates the idea with the immediate alarm and distress people would feel on seeing a child about to fall into a well.
Such a spontaneous response is not yet a fully developed virtue. Mencius argues that this initial disposition must be extended and realised in action. He also distinguishes the responsibilities people have towards different objects of concern. In ‘Jin Xin I’, he describes affection for one’s family, benevolence towards the people and care for living things. Family members, people more generally and other beings can all matter to us, but the feelings and obligations involved need not be identical.
Mencius thus examines both the natural emotional beginnings of love and the process through which they may grow into wider ethical practice.
Xunzi: Feelings Need to Be Ordered by Ritual and Right Conduct
Xunzi (third century BCE) also considered affection between people, but placed greater emphasis on the role of ritual and moral norms in regulating emotions and desires. In chapters including ‘Human Nature Is Bad’ and ‘A Discussion of Ritual’, he argues that people have natural desires and feelings which, without suitable guidance, can produce competition and conflict.
Parents and children, spouses, siblings and friends occupy relationships with different ethical requirements. For Xunzi, ritual is more than an external ceremony: it provides socially intelligible ways of expressing, shaping and regulating feeling. Mourning rites, for example, express grief for the dead while giving that grief a form that can be sustained within communal life.
Xunzi did not develop a separate theory of romantic love detached from ritual and moral cultivation. His remarks belong to a broader account of emotion, ethical roles and social order.
Laozi and Zhuangzi: Compassion, Naturalness and Attachment
Chapter 67 of the Daodejing names compassion or kindness (ci) as one of its ‘three treasures’, alongside frugality and reluctance to put oneself first. Here ci suggests gentleness, protection of life and an avoidance of aggressive competition. It should not be equated with romantic love in the modern sense.
The Zhuangzi approaches interpersonal feeling through questions about nature, life’s transformations and human distinctions. The saying ‘rather than moistening each other with spittle, it is better to forget each other in rivers and lakes’ occurs in ‘The Great and Venerable Teacher’. Its image of fish stranded outside their proper environment concerns how living beings relate under different conditions and what it means to follow their nature. It cannot simply be taken as a declaration that people should not love one another.
The Zhuangzi also considers bereavement, grief and changes in life. Its concern is with how people face change, attachment and socially prescribed expressions of emotion. It does not present a universal definition of love equivalent to the Confucian ren or Mohist jian’ai.
2. Love in Ancient Indian Philosophy and Buddhism
The Upanishads: Love and the Self
Book II, chapter 4 of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad records a conversation between Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi. It suggests that the love of a husband, wife, children, wealth and other things is ultimately connected with concern for the Self (Atman).
The Self here is neither an everyday selfish individual nor simply the modern psychological concept of self-awareness. It belongs to the Upanishadic metaphysical discussion of ultimate reality, existence and self-knowledge.
The passage moves from the relation between a lover and a particular object to a more fundamental question: why do we love what we love, and how is that love connected with our understanding of our own existence?
Early Buddhism: Loving-Kindness, Compassion and Craving
Early Buddhism distinguishes several kinds of attitude that may all be associated with love in ordinary language. Loving-kindness (metta in Pali) is the wish that other beings be happy and well. Compassion (karuna) is concern that beings be free from suffering. Together with sympathetic joy and equanimity, these are among the four ‘immeasurables’ cultivated in Buddhist practice.
Buddhist teachings also analyse craving (tanha in Pali; trishna in Sanskrit). Within the framework of the Four Noble Truths, craving for sensory pleasure, existence or non-existence is an important condition of suffering. It is not the same phenomenon as the goodwill expressed by loving-kindness and compassion.
Buddhist texts therefore consider both the attachment that develops through desire and the goodwill towards others that can be cultivated through practice. The two differ in their psychological character, spiritual purpose and ethical significance.
The Bhagavad Gita: Devotion as a Relationship with the Divine
The Bhagavad Gita, particularly chapters 9 and 12, discusses bhakti, or devotion. This involves love, trust, dedication and surrender directed towards the divine. It may take the form of an inward orientation or a continuing religious practice.
In the Gita, devotion is considered alongside paths of knowledge and action. Through sustained attention, trust and dedication, a person may orient their conduct and their life towards the divine. The principal subject here is the relationship between human beings and God, rather than romantic attachment or ordinary friendship.
Shantideva: Compassion and Taking the Suffering of Others Seriously
The eighth-century Indian Buddhist thinker Shantideva discusses bodhicitta, compassion and altruistic conduct in the Bodhicaryavatara (A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life).
He argues that people should learn to regard the suffering of other beings as something that calls for a serious response, rather than attending only to their own pleasure and pain. He examines how self-centred attachment can be weakened, how the intention to help others can be cultivated and how that intention can become action.
In his account, compassion is more than a passing emotional reaction to suffering. It is also a disposition developed through continued practice, understanding and conduct.
3. Love in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy
Empedocles: Love as a Cosmic Power of Union
Empedocles (approximately 490–430 BCE) held that the world consists of four roots or elements—earth, water, air and fire—whose combinations and separations are governed by two opposing forces: Love (Philotes) and Strife (Neikos).
Love brings separated elements together; Strife separates what has been joined. The changing cycles of the cosmos can be understood through the alternating influence of these forces. Empedocles’ Love is therefore not specifically a human emotion but a principle of combination within his cosmology.
Plato: Love as the Pursuit of Beauty, Goodness and Immortality
Plato (approximately 427–347 BCE) discusses love chiefly in the Symposium, the Phaedrus and the Lysis. These are dialogues containing speeches and arguments by different characters. It would be misleading to identify every statement made in them with Plato’s final position.
In the Symposium, Socrates recounts the teaching of Diotima. She portrays Eros as an intermediate being between poverty and resourcefulness, and understands love as a desire for what is good and beautiful. People do not merely wish to possess good things: they wish the good to remain theirs. Love is thus connected with the longing for immortality.
That longing can find expression in having children, but also in creating virtues, institutions, ideas and intellectual achievements. The Symposium describes an ‘ascent’ or ‘ladder of love’: a person begins with attraction to the beauty of one body, comes to recognise beauty in many bodies, then in souls, conduct, institutions and knowledge, and finally seeks to apprehend Beauty itself.
In the Phaedrus, the image of the soul as a charioteer driving two horses explores the relationship between desire, reason and love. An encounter with beauty may arouse bodily desire, but it may also remind the soul of a higher reality once known to it. Love can therefore become a force leading towards philosophical understanding and the elevation of the soul.
The Lysis asks whether friendship (philia) arises from similarity, opposition, goodness or the need for what one lacks. The dialogue does not settle on a definitive answer.
Aristotle: Friendship and Reciprocal Goodwill
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) gives a sustained treatment of philia in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics. The Greek term covers more than friendship in its narrow modern sense; it includes familial affection, shared life and other relationships of attachment.
He distinguishes three main forms of friendship. Friendships of utility arise because each person benefits from the relationship. Friendships of pleasure arise because the other’s company, character or activities are enjoyable. Friendships of virtue arise from appreciation of the other’s good character.
Aristotle regards friendship grounded in virtue as the more stable kind. Each person wishes the other well for that person’s own sake, rather than treating the other merely as a source of advantage or enjoyment.
He also argues that full friendship requires reciprocal goodwill, with each party knowing, at least to some degree, that the goodwill is returned. One person’s wish for another’s happiness may be goodwill without yet constituting an established friendship.
Aristotle calls a friend ‘another self’ and explores the relationship between friendship and a proper love of oneself. Living together, sharing activities, knowing one another and maintaining a relationship over time all matter to friendship.
Epicurus: Friendship and a Tranquil Life
Epicurus (341–270 BCE) gives friendship an important place in a happy life. Pleasure, in his ethics, does not mean endlessly pursuing stimulation. It includes, above all, freedom from bodily pain and disturbance of the mind.
Principal Doctrine 27 singles out friendship as one of the greatest benefits wisdom provides for a happy life. Friendship offers security, trust, mutual help and a stable shared existence.
Epicurus recognises that friendships may begin from practical needs, but their value extends beyond immediate exchange. Enduring trust and concern for one another make friendship a relationship worth maintaining for its own sake.
Stoicism: Extending Concern from Those Close to Us to Humanity
Stoicism emerged in the third century BCE. Its leading figures include Zeno and Chrysippus, followed by thinkers such as Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Reason and virtue occupy central places in Stoic ethics.
The Stoic idea of oikeiosis, often translated as ‘appropriation’ or ‘affiliation’, examines how a living being’s concern for its own preservation can develop into concern for family, community and humanity at large. The later Stoic Hierocles illustrated human relationships with concentric circles extending from the self to family, relatives, neighbours, fellow citizens and the human race.
Marcus Aurelius repeatedly argues in the Meditations that people share a rational nature and ought to cooperate. Stoic care is not confined to intimate personal relationships; it also concerns duties towards strangers and the broader human community.
Cicero: Friendship Founded on Virtue
Cicero (106–43 BCE) offers a systematic account of friendship in Laelius de Amicitia (On Friendship). He holds that genuine friendship rests on good character, mutual respect and shared moral commitments.
Benefits may accompany friendship, but they should not be its ultimate purpose. Friends care for one another because they value each other’s character and wish one another well. Cicero also stresses loyalty, honesty and the willingness to offer correction. Friendship does not require agreeing with wrongdoing, nor does it justify asking a friend to do something dishonourable.
Plotinus: Love as the Soul’s Movement towards Beauty and the Good
Plotinus (approximately 204–270 CE), a major figure in Neoplatonism, develops Plato’s treatment of beauty, soul and love in the Enneads.
He holds that people perceive beauty in particular sensible things, but sensible beauty is not the highest form of beauty. The soul’s attraction to beauty can lead it beyond material appearances towards intelligible reality and a higher unity and goodness.
In Plotinus’ metaphysics, the ultimate principle is the One. The soul’s ascent is directed towards approaching and returning to that source. Love thus encompasses attraction to particular beautiful things and the soul’s spiritual movement towards a higher principle of being.
4. Love in Medieval Christian, Jewish and Islamic Thought
Augustine: Love as the Direction and Ordering of the Will
Augustine (354–430 CE) places love at the centre of his ethics and theology in works including the Confessions, The City of God and On Christian Doctrine.
For Augustine, human beings inevitably love something. The question is what they love and how the various objects of love ought to be ordered. He distinguishes rightly directed love (caritas) from disordered desire or covetous love (cupiditas). This does not mean that all love of earthly things is wrong. Rather, different objects must occupy their proper places in the order of value.
This is the basis of his account of the ‘order of love’ (ordo amoris). In The City of God, he also describes two cities constituted by two kinds of love: one centred on self-love even to the contempt of God, the other centred on the love of God and ordered accordingly.
Augustine connects love with the will. The moral quality of an action depends not only on its external outcome but also on the intention from which it proceeds. His well-known injunction in his homilies on the First Epistle of John, ‘Love, and do what you will’, presupposes a will already guided by rightly ordered love.
Pseudo-Dionysius: Love as a Power Drawing Beings into Union
Pseudo-Dionysius, a Christian thinker writing around the fifth or sixth century, discusses eros and agape in the theological context of The Divine Names.
He associates divine love with the diffusion of goodness, the connections between beings and the movement of all things towards their source. Love can draw a being beyond its isolated self and towards union with the beloved.
Love here has both cosmological and theological significance. It concerns the relation between human beings and God as well as the way all things proceed from goodness and turn back towards it.
Bernard of Clairvaux: Four Degrees of Love
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) sets out four degrees of love in On Loving God.
At the first degree, people love themselves for their own sake. At the second, they love God for the benefits they need. At the third, they love God for God’s own goodness. At the fourth, they come to love even themselves for God’s sake.
The account traces a change in the motives of love, from personal need towards concern for the divine object itself. Bernard is principally describing religious love and its development through spiritual practice.
Avicenna: Love as the Tendency of Beings towards Perfection
Avicenna (Ibn Sina, approximately 980–1037) treats love in a broad metaphysical setting in his Treatise on Love (Risala fi al-‘Ishq).
He argues that love is not restricted to human emotional life. Different orders of beings, in their different ways, tend towards the good and the perfection appropriate to their nature. The tendencies of natural things, the appetites of living beings and the aspirations of rational souls can all be understood in relation to love in this extended sense.
In his metaphysical system, love is connected with goodness, perfection and the hierarchy of existence. Human love can involve sensation and appetite, but it can also include the rational soul’s pursuit of higher goods.
Al-Ghazali: Love and Knowledge of God
Al-Ghazali (1058–1111) discusses love, longing, intimacy and contentment in The Revival of the Religious Sciences.
He relates love to knowledge: people commonly come to love what they recognise as good, beautiful or perfect, and deeper knowledge may deepen both their understanding and their love. For the religious seeker, knowledge of God and love of God are closely related.
Al-Ghazali also examines love of oneself, of other people and of things that benefit us, and how these different loves relate to divine love. His account combines psychological observation, ethical practice and spiritual discipline.
Maimonides: Love of God and Rational Understanding
The Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1138–1204) discusses love of God in The Guide for the Perplexed and the Mishneh Torah.
He links such love with understanding God and the order of creation. Greater understanding can lead to a greater love. In chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance in the Mishneh Torah, he particularly emphasises that loving God should not be motivated merely by hope of reward or fear of punishment. God is to be loved for God’s own sake.
This form of love is grounded in knowledge, rational reflection and religious life, rather than being simply a matter of sensory desire.
Ibn Arabi: Divine Love and the Manifestation of Being
Ibn Arabi (1165–1240) situates love within his thinking about God, being and manifestation in works including The Meccan Revelations and The Bezels of Wisdom.
He discusses divine, spiritual and natural love, linking the experience of beauty and the longing for God with the diverse forms of existence. In his account, love cannot be wholly separated from knowledge of divine reality: through different beings and experiences, people encounter manifestations of divine attributes.
Much of his thought is expressed in poetry, symbols and mystical language. Love accordingly has emotional, epistemic and metaphysical dimensions.
Thomas Aquinas: Love, Goodwill and the Virtue of Charity
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) makes several systematic distinctions concerning love in the Summa Theologiae.
In the First Part of the Second Part, in his discussion of the passions, he treats love as a fundamental inclination of the appetitive power towards a perceived good. Love may be a passion of the sensory appetite or an act of the rational will.
Aquinas distinguishes ‘love of desire’ (amor concupiscentiae) from ‘love of friendship’ (amor amicitiae). In the former, one wishes a good to belong to oneself or another; in the latter, one wishes good to a person for that person’s own sake. Loving someone is thus not identical to loving what that person can provide.
In the Second Part of the Second Part, he also discusses charity (caritas) as a virtue, describing it as a kind of friendship between human beings and God, to which charity towards one’s neighbour is related. Charity is not simply a passing feeling in his theological ethics.
Rumi: Love as a Path towards the Divine
Rumi (1207–1273), the Persian Sufi thinker and poet, returns repeatedly to longing, separation, encounter and divine love in the Masnavi and his other poetry.
In his philosophical and religious verse, the experience of separation from the beloved can become a motive for spiritual striving. Love is connected not only with personal feeling but also with self-transformation and the approach to divine reality.
Rumi works largely through poetry, parables and religious imagery. He does not offer a single, formal definition of love in the manner of a modern philosophical treatise.
Dante: The Love That Moves the Universe
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) brings personal love, the purification of the soul and divine order together in the Divine Comedy.
At the end of Paradiso, the phrase ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’ describes the ultimate divine principle. Within the poem, love can appear as an earthly emotion but can also point towards the relation between the soul and a sacred cosmic order.
Dante’s treatment is simultaneously literary, theological and philosophical. It should not be mistaken for an independent psychological definition of love.
5. The Development of Benevolence in Song and Ming Confucianism
Zhu Xi: Ren as the Principle of Love and the Virtue of the Mind
Zhu Xi (1130–1200) explains ren in his commentary on the Analects as ‘the principle of love and the virtue of the mind’. In his essay On Ren, he also connects benevolence with the ceaseless generative activity of Heaven and Earth.
Zhu Xi distinguishes the underlying principle of benevolence from its particular manifestations in life. Loving others and feeling compassion can express ren, but ren is not exhausted by any single emotional episode. It also concerns the moral principle that makes such care possible and the cultivation of human character.
For Zhu Xi, benevolence is expressed through the understanding of principle, personal cultivation and ethical practice. Love of one’s family and concern for other people are related, but they need not take identical forms.
Wang Yangming: The Unity of All Things and Innate Moral Knowledge
Wang Yangming (1472–1529) discusses the ‘benevolence that forms one body with all things’ in texts including the Great Learning Inquiry.
He holds that a fully cultivated person can regard Heaven, Earth and the myriad things as belonging to a unity with themselves. The suffering of others and the injury of other living beings can therefore call forth a direct response of concern.
Wang uses examples such as the compassion aroused by seeing a child about to fall into a well or hearing the distress of birds and animals. Benevolence, on this account, is not merely a rule imposed from outside; it is connected with the mind and with innate moral knowledge (liangzhi).
Love is thus tied to the manifestation of moral knowledge in action. Knowledge and conduct cannot be completely separated: recognising another’s circumstances calls for an appropriate practical response.
6. Love in the Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy
Marsilio Ficino: A Renaissance Interpretation of Platonic Love
Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), a leading Renaissance Neoplatonist, reconsidered beauty, desire and the soul’s ascent in his commentary on Plato’s Symposium, usually known as De amore (On Love).
For Ficino, the beauty of a particular person or thing can awaken love, but love need not remain a desire to possess a body. It can lead towards spiritual beauty and a higher good. He places different forms of love within a cosmic order combining Christian theology and Neoplatonism.
Love is therefore both a response to beauty and a force that can direct the soul towards greater perfection.
Montaigne: Friendship as an Irreplaceable Personal Bond
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) reflects on his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie in Book I, chapter 28, ‘Of Friendship’, of the Essays.
He distinguishes ordinary acquaintance, useful social connections and the exceptionally deep friendship he experienced. Such friendship cannot be explained by one advantage, attractive quality or isolated reason.
Asked why he loved his friend, Montaigne famously replies, ‘Because it was he, because it was I.’ The point is the unique relationship formed between two particular people, not a formula that can be mechanically applied to every friendship.
Hobbes: Love and Appetite
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) examines passions, appetites and aversions in chapter 6 of Leviathan.
Within his psychology, people move towards objects they desire and away from objects they find aversive. Love is closely connected with appetite: what one loves is ordinarily something towards which one is drawn.
Hobbes does not explain love by positing a separate spiritual entity independent of desire. He considers it within a wider account of human motion, inclination, pleasure and pain.
Descartes: Love as a Passion Inclining the Soul towards Union
René Descartes (1596–1650) explicitly defines love in article 79 of The Passions of the Soul.
He describes it as a passion which, when an object appears suitable or beneficial, moves the soul willingly to join itself to that object. This ‘union’ need not be bodily; it can involve the will’s regarding itself and the beloved as parts of a whole.
Descartes also distinguishes love from desire. Love involves a positive orientation towards the object and an inclination to union, while desire is more closely concerned with the prospect of obtaining something in the future or avoiding a loss.
He further considers differences in the objects and strength of love, and the influence of judgement upon it. Although the passion has bodily mechanisms, its object and meaning also involve the soul’s knowledge and evaluation.
Spinoza: Love as Joy Accompanied by the Idea of an External Cause
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) gives an explicit definition of love in Part III of the Ethics, among his definitions of the affects: love is joy accompanied by the idea of an external cause.
Within his system, joy is a transition to a greater degree of perfection or power of acting. When someone experiences such a transition and forms the idea that an external object is its cause, the corresponding affect is love.
This places love within a causal account of emotion. Its occurrence is connected with how a person experiences changes in their own condition and how they understand the causes of those changes.
Part V of the Ethics also discusses the ‘intellectual love of God’ (amor Dei intellectualis). This differs from everyday attachment to a particular external object and concerns the mind’s activity and freedom through adequate understanding.
Leibniz: Love as Finding Pleasure in Another’s Happiness
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) links love with another person’s happiness in his writings on natural law, justice and benevolence.
He characterises love in terms of taking pleasure in the happiness of another: to love someone is for that person’s happiness itself to be a source of one’s own joy.
This differs from liking someone only because they provide a benefit. The beloved’s happiness is a direct object of concern, rather than merely a means to some unrelated goal of the lover.
Leibniz connects this conception with benevolence, justice and an understanding of the common good.
7. Love in Enlightenment Philosophy
Hume: Love as a Passion Connected with Ideas, Feelings and Sympathy
David Hume (1711–1776) discusses love and hatred in Book II of A Treatise of Human Nature.
He classifies them as ‘indirect passions’ and analyses how their objects, associated ideas and impressions of pleasure and pain contribute to their formation. A person’s character, conduct or relationship to us, for example, may play a part in producing love or hatred.
Hume also analyses the psychological mechanism of ‘sympathy’: through imagination and understanding of another person’s circumstances, we may come to experience feelings related to theirs. This helps explain emotional communication and moral evaluation.
Hume does not, however, simply equate love with sympathy. He treats love, hatred, pride, humility and sympathy as distinct phenomena within a broader theory of the passions.
Adam Smith: Sympathy and Mutual Recognition of Feeling
Adam Smith (1723–1790) examines sympathy, affection and reciprocal emotional responses in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
His use of ‘sympathy’ is broader than pity for suffering. It includes our capacity to imagine ourselves in another person’s situation and to share, to some extent, in their joy, grief and other emotions.
Smith argues that people find satisfaction in having their feelings understood by others. Mutual recognition of feeling is important to social relationships and moral judgement. He also discusses how affection among family members, friends and acquaintances is shaped by shared life, habits and practical concern.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments is not a treatise devoted to defining love, but it offers a systematic analysis of affection, sympathy and mutual understanding.
Rousseau: Natural Self-Love, Pity and Social Self-Esteem
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) distinguishes amour de soi, natural self-love, from amour-propre, comparative self-regard or social self-esteem, in works including the Discourse on Inequality and Emile.
Natural self-love concerns self-preservation and the satisfaction of basic needs. It does not necessarily involve competition with others. Amour-propre, by contrast, develops through comparison, the desire for recognition and concern with social standing and other people’s judgements.
Rousseau also treats pity as a natural disposition that can make people recoil from the suffering of others. As social life develops, emotional life becomes more complex: romantic love, jealousy, vanity and dependence on others’ approval may all emerge.
His discussion of love is therefore closely connected with the natural condition of humanity, social development and the formation of personality.
Kant: Affective Love and Practical Love
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) distinguishes love as feeling from love as practical conduct in works including the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and The Metaphysics of Morals.
Affective love concerns spontaneous liking, warmth and emotional attachment. Such feelings cannot be produced simply by an act of will. Accordingly, Kant does not hold that the moral law can command people to feel identical intimate affection for everyone.
Practical love is expressed through principles of action: helping others out of duty, supporting their permissible ends and acting beneficently where one can. Even without a spontaneous feeling of affection, a person can act with concern for another in accordance with duty.
In the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant also discusses duties of beneficence, gratitude, sympathy and respect. He distinguishes love for others from respect for them, while treating both as important and related demands of ethical life.
8. Love in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
Hegel: Love and the Unity of Self with Another
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) discusses love in his early writings on religion and ethical life and in the Philosophy of Right.
In the sections on the family in the Philosophy of Right, he portrays love as a consciousness of ethical unity. Within family life, a person no longer understands themselves solely as an isolated individual; their shared life with another becomes part of their understanding of themselves.
This does not mean that the individual simply disappears. Love involves recognising one’s connection with another and understanding oneself within that connection. Because Hegel discusses marriage and family as institutions of ethical life, his account includes feeling, commitment, shared existence and social relations.
Schopenhauer: Sexual Love, Reproduction and Compassion
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) gives a distinctive account of sexual love in ‘The Metaphysics of Sexual Love’, a supplementary chapter of The World as Will and Representation.
He argues that the intense attraction and passion experienced by individuals are connected, at a deeper level, with the will to life and the continuation of the species. A person may experience the beloved as an irreplaceable source of happiness, while the attraction is, within his theory, shaped by reproductive considerations and the characteristics of potential offspring.
Schopenhauer does not reduce every form of love to sexuality. In On the Basis of Morality and elsewhere, he emphasises the moral significance of compassion (Mitleid). Compassion allows another person’s suffering to become a direct reason for action, breaking through an exclusively self-interested perspective.
His account of sexual love and his ethical account of compassion therefore address different dimensions of the subject.
Feuerbach: Love and Relations between Human Beings
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) relates religious ideas to human nature and interpersonal relations in The Essence of Christianity and other writings.
He emphasises that human beings are not isolated, purely abstract subjects. Feeling, mutual need and concrete relationships with others are essential to understanding human existence.
Feuerbach is particularly interested in how religious love relates to actual human life. He argues that many qualities attributed to divine beings can be understood in terms of human capacities, aspirations and relations.
Love, in his thought, connects one person with another and belongs to the sensory, social and shared character of human life.
Kierkegaard: Love of the Neighbour as an Ethical Demand
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) systematically examines Christian love in Works of Love (1847).
He distinguishes preferential forms of love, including romantic love and friendship, from love of the neighbour. Romantic attachment and friendship commonly arise through attraction, shared interests or special closeness. Neighbour-love does not depend solely on whether another person is appealing to us.
Kierkegaard treats love of the neighbour as a religious and ethical demand. Love must be expressed in deeds as well as inward feeling. He emphasises its endurance, disinterested concern and the responsibility to care even when no return is forthcoming.
He does not deny intimate affection. Rather, he asks whether our duties to others can extend beyond the circle of those we happen to prefer.
Marx: Love, Human Capacities and Reciprocal Relations
Karl Marx (1818–1883) discusses human sensory capacities, social relations and alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, including a passage about love.
In examining how human capacities are expressed through actual life, Marx argues that love should find a corresponding expression in human relations. He offers the example of someone who loves another person but cannot, through that love, awaken love in return. In that case, the hoped-for reciprocal relationship has not been realised.
This passage belongs to Marx’s wider analysis of human powers, alienation and social life; it is not part of a separate, systematic theory of romantic love. It concerns how feelings are expressed in real relationships and whether human activity can establish the social connections it seeks.
John Stuart Mill: Intimacy and Equality of Persons
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) discusses marriage, intimate relationships and social institutions in The Subjection of Women.
He opposes legal and customary arrangements that subordinate one spouse to the other. In his view, domination within marriage restricts the development of both persons and undermines the possibilities for intimacy, trust and cooperation.
Mill connects more equal partnerships with freedom, individuality and shared life. Although he does not offer a standalone definition of love, he examines how social institutions shape the forms intimate relationships can take.
Nietzsche: Desire, Possession and Self-Overcoming in Love
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) discusses love from several angles in The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
He observes that love can involve possessiveness, jealousy, idealisation and the projection of one’s own desires. He questions whether people always understand what they seek through love and criticises the use of universal moral language to conceal particular psychological motives.
Nietzsche also considers friendship, love of those who are distant, and amor fati, or ‘love of fate’. The last refers primarily to affirming one’s own life and experiences, not to romantic love for another person.
He does not offer a single definition of love. His reflections occur within analyses of desire, morality, value and the affirmation of life.
Solovyov: Love and Recognition of the Other’s Unique Value
The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900) devotes The Meaning of Love (1892–1894) to the question of romantic love between men and women.
He rejects the view that love can be explained entirely by reproductive function. Love, he argues, can lead a person beyond self-centredness and towards recognition of another individual’s unique and irreplaceable value.
His account includes the idealisation of the beloved, but he does not treat this simply as an imaginary fiction. It is connected with the attempt to recognise, affirm and realise the other’s full value. He places the question within a wider metaphysics of personhood, unity and spiritual development.
9. Love in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Phenomenology and Existentialism
Freud: Love and the Psychological Mechanisms of Libido
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, wrote about love in work that lies at the intersection of psychology and philosophical intellectual history.
In On Narcissism (1914) and writings on sexuality, he examines how libido is directed towards the self or external objects. He distinguishes narcissistic love from object-love and considers how early relationships with parents, the satisfaction of desire and unconscious processes influence later intimate relationships.
In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud also discusses the relation between love and social bonds. He sees the tendency to form loving connections as contributing to families and larger communities.
He does not identify love exclusively with conscious goodwill or moral commitment. He is especially interested in desires, conflicts and emotional histories that individuals may not fully recognise in themselves.
Max Scheler: Love Discloses Higher Values
Max Scheler (1874–1928), a major figure in phenomenology and value ethics, connects love with the experience of value in The Nature of Sympathy and writings on the ‘order of love’ (ordo amoris).
Scheler distinguishes love from sympathy and emotional contagion. Someone may understand or share another person’s suffering without necessarily loving that person.
For Scheler, love is a directed spiritual act. It can disclose higher values in an object or person that were not previously fully apparent and move us to respond to those values.
Developing the concept of an ‘order of love’, he argues that what a person loves and hates, and the relative ordering of those attachments, are closely related to their character and orientation towards value.
Ortega y Gasset: Love as a Continuing Activity Directed towards Its Object
The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) analyses romantic love, desire and attention in Studies on Love and related essays.
He distinguishes the desire to possess an object from love’s sustained attention and movement towards the beloved. Desire may diminish once its object is obtained; love does not necessarily end when possession becomes possible.
Ortega emphasises love’s continuing directedness. It affects a person’s attention, feelings and understanding of the world. A lover’s life may gradually become organised around a particular beloved.
Martin Buber: Love Happens in the I–Thou Relation
Martin Buber (1878–1965) distinguishes two fundamental ways of relating in I and Thou (1923): ‘I–It’ and ‘I–Thou’.
In an I–It relation, a person principally encounters something as an object that can be described, known, used or managed. In an I–Thou relation, one encounters and responds directly to another being.
Buber stresses that love is not merely a feeling located inside one individual. It concerns what happens between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’. He links love with responsibility and the obligation that arises in responding directly to the other.
I–Thou is not limited to romantic love. Buber’s account concerns relations between persons, with nature and with the eternal Thou.
Liang Shuming: Affection within Family and Ethical Relations
Liang Shuming (1893–1988) discusses ethical relationships and emotional life in Chinese culture in Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies and The Essence of Chinese Culture.
He argues that many relationships in traditional Chinese society are organised around family, kinship and networks of acquaintance, with emotion occupying a significant place in social life. He considers family affection, mutual understanding and ethical obligations together.
Liang does not propose one definition encompassing every kind of love. His discussion is chiefly about the place of feeling within human relationships and cultural life.
Simone Weil: Love and Attention to Another’s Actual Circumstances
Simone Weil (1909–1943) discusses love, attention and concern for those who suffer in Waiting for God, Gravity and Grace and other writings.
She assigns particular importance to attention in ethical life. Caring for another requires us, at least temporarily, to set aside our fantasies, expectations and self-centred judgements so that we can see the circumstances the other person actually faces.
In her religious philosophy, love of one’s neighbour is connected with love of God. Love is expressed not only in intense emotion but also in recognition of another’s reality and a willingness not to turn away from suffering.
Paul Tillich: Love as the Drive towards Reunion
Paul Tillich (1886–1965) describes love as the drive towards the reunion of what is separated in Love, Power, and Justice (1954).
He develops this idea in an ontological and theological setting. The reunion in question goes beyond emotional closeness between people; it concerns separation, connection and unity among beings.
Tillich also analyses how love, power and justice are related in social life. He holds that these concepts cannot be adequately understood merely as everyday feelings.
Erich Fromm: Love as a Capacity That Must Be Learned and Practised
Erich Fromm (1900–1980) systematically discusses love in The Art of Loving (1956).
For Fromm, love is not simply a powerful emotion that unexpectedly happens to someone. It is also a capacity requiring learning, discipline and practice. He distinguishes the initial experience of ‘falling in love’ from the mature love that can be sustained over time.
He identifies four interrelated elements of mature love: care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. Care involves attending to the beloved’s life and growth. Responsibility is a willingness to respond to the other’s needs. Respect means recognising the other as an independent person. Knowledge requires an effort to understand the other’s actual circumstances and needs.
Fromm also distinguishes brotherly love, motherly love, erotic love, self-love and love of God. He examines loneliness, possessiveness and the difficulties of loving in modern society.
Sartre: The Conflict between Love and Another Person’s Freedom
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) examines love and relations between subjects in Being and Nothingness.
He argues that people seek confirmation of their significance in the world of others through another person’s recognition. In love, one often wishes to become the special object freely chosen by the beloved.
A tension follows. The lover wants to be loved freely, yet also wants that free choice to be secure, settled and unchangeable. If the beloved’s freedom is eliminated through coercion, the response obtained is no longer the freely given love originally sought.
Sartre therefore discusses love as part of a complex and potentially conflictual relationship between free subjects, rather than as a naturally harmonious union.
Simone de Beauvoir: Love and the Recognition of Both Partners’ Freedom
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) discusses love, gender and freedom in The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity.
She examines how social institutions and cultural expectations may encourage women to treat love as the whole meaning of their lives, sometimes at the expense of independent purposes and the ability to act.
The more authentic form of love she describes requires mutual recognition between free subjects. One person should not have to erase their independence for the sake of the other, nor should either partner deprive the other of freedom through possession or control.
Love, in her account, is connected with personal equality, concrete social conditions and the possibility of a life shared by two independent people.
Hannah Arendt: Love and the Public World
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) studied Augustine’s concept of love in her early doctoral dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, examining desire, memory and relations with others.
In The Human Condition, she approaches love from the perspective of public life. She holds that intimate love is intensely private and does not normally exist through public display or political institutions.
Arendt therefore distinguishes intimate personal relationships from the public space needed for political action and common life. She does not deny love’s importance, but locates love and public action in different spheres of experience.
Levinas: Responsibility towards the Other and Intimate Relations
Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) examines ethical relations with others, including eros, in Totality and Infinity and related writings.
He argues that another person cannot be wholly reduced to an object of our knowledge or to concepts we already possess. An encounter with the other involves a difference that cannot be completely mastered or eliminated.
Levinas’ discussion of eros concerns intimacy, desire, secrecy and otherness. His ethical discussion of responsibility emphasises that another person’s vulnerability and claims upon us create a relation that cannot simply be reduced to an exchange of benefits.
Eros and ethical responsibility are not identical concepts in Levinas’ work. They must be understood in the contexts of his different arguments and texts.
Iris Murdoch: Love and Recognising the Reality of Others
Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) connects love with moral attention in The Sublime and the Good, The Sovereignty of Good and other works.
She describes love as an exceptionally difficult kind of recognition: becoming aware that other people exist outside oneself and possess a reality of their own.
Murdoch stresses that people often see others through fantasy, self-centred expectations and habitual judgement. Part of love’s ethical importance lies in trying to see another person more accurately rather than fitting them into one’s own needs and imaginings.
Love is thus closely related to attention, truthful understanding and the improvement of moral life.
10. Love in Later Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Philosophy
C. S. Lewis: Four Forms of Love
The British writer and Christian thinker C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) distinguishes four forms of love in The Four Loves (1960), drawing on Greek vocabulary and Christian traditions.
Affection (storge) commonly develops through family bonds and the familiarity of living together. Friendship (philia) often grows from shared interests, values or pursuits. Eros concerns a particular person as a romantic beloved. Charity or divine love (agape) concerns selfless care and, within Christianity, the love associated with God.
Lewis explores the ways these forms of love are connected and the difficulties and changes each can undergo. His book is a work of religious reflection with philosophical content rather than a system of definitions in the strict sense of analytical philosophy.
Robert C. Solomon: Romantic Love and the Formation of a Shared Identity
Robert C. Solomon (1942–2007) discusses romantic love from the perspectives of the philosophy of emotion and existentialism in About Love (1988) and related works.
He argues that love cannot be reduced to a fleeting passion. It also concerns how two people understand their lives together, make commitments to one another and form a shared identity.
Love, in his account, is a relationship involving emotion, judgement, action and continuing participation. Through shared life, two people develop a perspective of ‘we’ that differs from either person’s independent standpoint, without necessarily losing their individual differences.
Roger Scruton: Erotic Love Is Directed towards Another Person as a Subject
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) considers desire, embodiment, personhood and romantic love in Sexual Desire (1986).
He argues that human sexual desire and erotic love cannot be understood solely in terms of bodily stimulation or physiological responses. In an intimate relationship, one encounters another person who has intentions, feelings and self-consciousness.
Romantic love thus involves knowing and responding to another subject, mutual recognition and the possibility of a shared life. Love and desire can be related without being identical phenomena.
Robert Nozick: Love and the Formation of ‘We’
Robert Nozick (1938–2002) discusses romantic love and shared identity in The Examined Life (1989).
For Nozick, an important feature of romantic love is the formation of a ‘we’. The happiness, interests, aims and life plans of two people become interconnected in a new way.
This does not mean that they literally become one person. Rather, each comes to treat the shared relationship as an important part of their identity and life. They may make decisions together and find their own concerns altered by the other’s experiences.
Harry Frankfurt: Love as Stable Concern and a Structure of the Will
Harry Frankfurt (1929–2023) develops an account of love in the philosophy of the will in Necessity, Volition, and Love (1999) and The Reasons of Love (2004).
He argues that love cannot be defined merely by the intensity of a feeling at a particular moment. Loving an object involves a relatively stable and profound concern for it; its welfare and fate can become direct reasons for one’s actions.
Such concern need not arise from an external command or a calculation of advantage. Someone may find that they cannot simply choose to stop caring about a particular person. Frankfurt calls attention to this through the idea of ‘volitional necessity’: love helps determine what one genuinely values, what one is prepared to act for and what one cannot readily abandon.
He also examines self-love, parental love and the meaning of a person’s life. Love, in this account, is not only a passively experienced emotion but also a structure that organises the will and one’s orientation towards value.
Martha Nussbaum: Love and Value Judgements within Emotion
Martha C. Nussbaum (born 1947) discusses emotion, literature and moral judgement in Love’s Knowledge (1990) and Upheavals of Thought (2001).
For Nussbaum, emotions are not mere bodily impulses without cognitive content. They commonly involve an understanding of the importance and value of their objects. We may feel strongly when something is gained, threatened or lost precisely because it matters greatly to our lives.
She connects love with human vulnerability. To love another person is to recognise that some important conditions of one’s happiness are not fully under one’s control, because the beloved has an independent life and fate.
Nussbaum also draws on novels, drama and philosophical texts, stressing the value of concrete narratives and individual circumstances in understanding complex emotions.
Nel Noddings: Care Requires a Concrete Response
Nel Noddings (1929–2022) develops an ethics of care centred on particular relationships in Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984).
She distinguishes the ‘one-caring’ from the ‘cared-for’. The caring person must be receptive to the other’s situation and allow their actions to be guided, to some degree, by the other’s needs.
Noddings also stresses that some form of response from the cared-for matters to a complete caring relationship. It need not be an equal exchange of care or a spoken expression of gratitude. Children, people who are ill and others with limited capacities may respond in whatever ways are available to them.
She distinguishes spontaneous ‘natural caring’ from caring sustained through ethical commitment. Her primary subject is the moral structure of caring relations, which should not simply be identified with every form of love.
Carol Gilligan and Care Ethics: Responsibility within Relationships
The psychologist Carol Gilligan (born 1936) investigates moral judgement and interpersonal relationships in In a Different Voice (1982).
She argues that moral problems can be understood not only through universal rules, rights and justice but also through concrete relationships, responsibility and the prevention of harm. Her work was influential in the later development of care ethics.
Virginia Held, in The Ethics of Care (2006), extends the discussion beyond the family to social relations, public policy and political life. She stresses the widespread human need for dependence, care and mutual support, and argues that ethical theory must take these relationships seriously.
Gilligan and Held are chiefly examining the ethical significance of care and responsibility, rather than providing a single psychological definition of every form of love.
J. David Velleman: Love as a Distinctive Response to the Value of Persons
J. David Velleman proposes a person-centred account in ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’ (1999).
He argues that love cannot simply be equated with wanting someone to be happy or with liking the attractive qualities a person possesses. Love involves a distinctive response to another’s value as a person.
Velleman especially emphasises the way love can lower one’s habitual emotional defences, making one willing to be more emotionally open before the beloved.
He also distinguishes universal respect for persons from particular love for someone. Everyone ought to be respected, but it does not follow that everyone is loved in the same way. His analysis focuses on the value to which love responds and the special character of that emotional response.
Niko Kolodny: Love and the Value of a Relationship
Niko Kolodny argues for a relationship-centred account in ‘Love as Valuing a Relationship’ (2003).
The reasons for loving someone, he suggests, do not always consist of a list of admirable qualities. The relationship and shared history already established between parent and child, friends or partners may themselves give reasons for continuing concern.
For example, loving one’s child does not mean that the love could simply be transferred to another child who possessed more desirable qualities. The history, identity and value of a particular relationship matter.
Kolodny’s central question is how reasons for love are connected with relationships, and why love for a particular person is not interchangeable merely through a comparison of qualities.
Bennett Helm: Love as an Enduring Pattern of Emotional Concern
Bennett W. Helm discusses how love contributes to emotional life and self-identity in Love, Friendship, and the Self (2010).
He argues that love cannot be captured by a single intense feeling. Concern for a beloved produces connected emotional responses in different situations: joy at their success, sadness at their suffering and anxiety when they face danger.
These reactions are not unrelated episodes. They form a relatively enduring pattern around the objects and values that matter to the person who loves.
Helm also considers friendship and shared concern. Friends may deepen their relationship by valuing things together, responding to each other’s feelings and participating in a common life.
bell hooks: Love as the Will and Action to Foster Growth
The American cultural critic and feminist thinker bell hooks (1952–2021) discusses love, care, responsibility, trust, respect and social life in All About Love: New Visions (2000).
Drawing on a definition offered by the psychotherapist and writer M. Scott Peck, she understands love as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.
hooks emphasises that love cannot be judged only by verbal declarations or subjective feelings. Care, responsibility, respect, trust and honesty are recurring elements in her account of what it means to practise love.
She also examines how family life, intimate relationships and social structures of power affect the ways people learn and express love.
Eleonore Stump: Love as Wishing Another Well and Seeking Union
Eleonore Stump (born 1947) discusses love within Thomistic and religious philosophy in Wandering in Darkness (2010) and other works.
She associates love with two related desires: wanting genuine good for the beloved, and wanting some form of closeness or union with that person.
Love, in her account, involves more than securing another’s welfare. It also concerns mutual knowledge, intimacy and the relationship itself. She examines how suffering, vulnerability, free will and divine love are related.
Stump’s approach develops themes from classical friendship and Christian charity through methods associated with contemporary analytical philosophy.
11. Principal Texts and Reference Sources
The following are the main primary texts or research resources relevant to the accounts above. Many works have multiple English and Chinese translations; the titles used here are common English forms. Original-language terms are retained where differences in meaning are important.
Chinese thought: The Analects (‘Yan Yuan’, ‘Yong Ye’, ‘Wei Ling Gong’, ‘Wei Zheng’ and other chapters); the three ‘Inclusive Care’ chapters of the Mozi; the Mencius (‘Gong Sun Chou I’ and ‘Jin Xin I’); Xunzi (‘Human Nature Is Bad’ and ‘A Discussion of Ritual’); the Daodejing, chapter 67; the Zhuangzi, ‘The Great and Venerable Teacher’; Zhu Xi’s Collected Commentaries on the Analects and On Ren; Wang Yangming’s Great Learning Inquiry; Liang Shuming’s Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies and The Essence of Chinese Culture.
Indian and Buddhist thought: Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Book II, chapter 4; Bhagavad Gita, chapters 9 and 12; early Buddhist teachings on the Four Noble Truths and the four immeasurables; Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara.
Ancient Greece and Rome: surviving fragments of Empedocles; Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus and Lysis; Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII and IX; Epicurus’ Principal Doctrines; Cicero’s On Friendship; Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations; Plotinus’ Enneads.
Medieval and religious philosophy: Augustine’s Confessions, The City of God and On Christian Doctrine; Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Divine Names; Bernard of Clairvaux’s On Loving God; Avicenna’s Treatise on Love; al-Ghazali’s The Revival of the Religious Sciences; Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed and Mishneh Torah; Ibn Arabi’s Meccan Revelations; Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae; Rumi’s Masnavi; Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Early modern and nineteenth-century philosophy: Ficino’s De amore; Montaigne’s Essays, ‘Of Friendship’; Hobbes’ Leviathan; Descartes’ Passions of the Soul; Spinoza’s Ethics; Leibniz’s writings on natural law and benevolence; Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature; Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments; Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality and Emile; Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and The Metaphysics of Morals; Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and On the Basis of Morality; Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity; Kierkegaard’s Works of Love; Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; Mill’s The Subjection of Women; Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Solovyov’s The Meaning of Love.
Twentieth-century and contemporary thought: Freud’s On Narcissism and Civilization and Its Discontents; Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy and writings on ordo amoris; Ortega y Gasset’s Studies on Love; Buber’s I and Thou; Weil’s Waiting for God; Tillich’s Love, Power, and Justice; Fromm’s The Art of Loving; Sartre’s Being and Nothingness; Beauvoir’s The Second Sex; Arendt’s Love and Saint Augustine and The Human Condition; Levinas’ Totality and Infinity; Murdoch’s The Sublime and the Good and The Sovereignty of Good; Lewis’ The Four Loves; Solomon’s About Love; Scruton’s Sexual Desire; Nozick’s The Examined Life; Frankfurt’s Necessity, Volition, and Love and The Reasons of Love; Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge and Upheavals of Thought; Noddings’ Caring; Gilligan’s In a Different Voice; Held’s The Ethics of Care; Velleman’s ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’; Kolodny’s ‘Love as Valuing a Relationship’; Helm’s Love, Friendship, and the Self; hooks’ All About Love; Stump’s Wandering in Darkness.
Philosophical reference entries for further checking:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Love’: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Friendship’: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friendship/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy’: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotions-chinese/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Mohism’: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mohism/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Feminist Ethics’: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-ethics/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Ibn ʿArabī’: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ibn-arabi/
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Philosophy of Love’: https://iep.utm.edu/love/
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