ABSTRACT
Is love a response to rational autonomy (Velleman), or nothing to do with reason (Frankfurt)? This paper aims to do justice to both outlooks by offering a philosophical interpretation of attachment theory. The concept of love is argued to coincide roughly with that of attachment - a bond to another person for its own sake - and as such not a response to any particular properties (the Frankfurtian insight). However, attachments are to be seen as an Aristotelian ‘field’ divided into normative subspaces (secure and the various kinds of insecure attachment; compare the Aristotelian virtues and vices). It is thus a kind of bond that – as in secure attachment - is made good to the extent that intimacy is combined with the due acknowledgment of one’s own and the other’s autonomy (the Vellemanian insight). The paper also thereby shows why the concept of love is unified across parental, filial and ‘romantic’ subvarieties.
Edward Harcourt has been a Fellow of Keble since 2005. From 1998 to 2005 he was Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent, and from 1993 to 1998 Domus Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley (1996) and Visiting Lecturer at the Institut für Philosophie, University of Leipzig (1998). Before taking the BPhil and DPhil in Oxford he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Philosophy (Part I) and History (Part II). He was awarded a Mind Association Research Fellowship for 2007.