Abstract

This volume chronicles the philosophical evolution of the concept of love, with each chapter providing an introduction to a discrete turning point in this evolutionary history. But it also aims to tell an interconnected story about the larger arc of this evolution, one focused on how the concepts of love bequeathed to us by ancient philosophical and religious traditions were transformed by later philosophers who operated under different conceptions of love's meaning and horizons. Specifically, where the traditional concepts of love tended to focus on love's relationship to the transcendent, more modern concepts of love have tended to focus on its relationship to the immanent. To this end, the volume is organized into three sections. The chapters of the first group examine ancient philosophical and religious ways of thinking about love, including those found in Judaic, Christian, Greek and Islamic religious and philosophical traditions. The second group examines the ways in which thinkers from the medieval period through the late enlightenment conceived of love. The final group examines the history of the concept of love from the beginning of the revolution inaugurated by romanticism through the mid-twentieth century, calling particular attention to the ways in which the concept of love came to be more explicitly and exclusively associated with sexual desire, and ever more distanced from certain more expansive traditional concepts.