Taking love seriously: McTaggart, absolute reality and chemistry

Saunders, Joe

Abstract

McTaggart takes love seriously. He rejects rival accounts that look to reduce love to pleasure, moral approbation or a fitting response to someone’s qualities. In addition, he thinks that love reveals something about the structure of the universe, and that in absolute reality, we could all love each other. In this paper, I follow McTaggart in his rejection of rival accounts of love, but distance myself from his own account of love in absolute reality. I argue that in claiming that we could all love each other, he fails to adequately account for an important part of the phenomena of love, namely chemistry.

Citation

Saunders, J. (2018). Taking love seriously: McTaggart, absolute reality and chemistry. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 26(4), 719-737. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2017.1393617

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 21, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Nov 28, 2017
• Publication Date: Jul 4, 2018
• Deposit Date: Sep 26, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: May 28, 2019
• Journal: British Journal for the History of Philosophy
• Print ISSN: 0960-8788
• Electronic ISSN: 1469-3526
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 26
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 719-737
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2017.1393617
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1313340
• Related Public URLs: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/124721/