Does love command an ineffability that remains inaccessible to the philosopher?
The essays collected in Thinking About Love take up the nature and experience of love with reference to some of our best-known Continental philosophers. The writings here focus on the contradictions and limits of love, manifested in such phenomena as trust, abuse, grief, death, violence, politics, and desire.
Thinking About Love does not offer prescriptive claims about authentic love. Rather, the book explores how one might think about love philosophically with recourse to the writings of Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others without attempting to resolve or alleviate its ambiguities, paradoxes, and limitations.
New forms of social organization, rapid developments in the field of psychology, and novel variations on relationships demand a new approach to thinking about love. This book fills a lacuna in the philosophy of a richly complicated topic.
Along with the editors, the contributors are Sophie Bourgault, John Caruana, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Marguerite La Caze, Alphonso Lingis, Christian Lotz, Todd May, Dawne McCance, Dorothea Olkowski, Felix O Murchadha, Fiona Utley, and Melanie Walton."