Journal of Philosophy of Emotion Podcast · Journal of Philosophy of Emotion

JPE Book Symposium: The Arc of Love: How Our Romantic Lives Change over Time, Part 1

·1 hr 10 min·4 clips

"I love you, but I am leaving you" is presented as paradoxical, then treated as a real romantic compromise.

The issue starts as printed philosophy read aloud. First come the journal details: article titles, publication notes, copyright limits, citations, and references. It is formal, a little stiff, and very exact. Then Aaron Ben-Zaev's The Arc of Love becomes the thing under review. Emotion gets the first serious pass. The narrator separates an emotion's intentionality from its feeling: aboutness belongs to a subject-object relation, while feeling is treated as bodily experience. That sounds tidy, but the episode does not let it stay tidy for long. Ben-Zaev's account treats emotions and moods as affective attitudes, while giving emotions the fuller intentional structure. Moods get a narrower role. Emotions, by contrast, need cognition, evaluation, motivation, readiness for action, and some practical bite. Feelings make trouble for that setup. The excerpt grants that feelings may have a primitive intentionality, while still refusing to make feeling the same thing as evaluation. That leaves an obvious gap: if feelings are already about something, how exactly do they connect with cognition, evaluation, and motivation? From there, the symposium shifts to romantic time. Love is not a fixed thing someone simply has. Its phases change what lovers know, promise, and get wrong. Early love gets treated with suspicion. Excitement may be a promise of love, not love already grounded in the real other. The closing objection lands neatly: the early I-and-other phase, and the later we perspective, seem underplayed in Ben-Zaev's otherwise thoughtful discussion.

As heard by us

A thoughtful look at how long-term romantic love endures, grounded in a careful philosophy of emotion.

The episode follows how long-term romantic love changes over time and asks what it takes for love to stay. Its best feature is the careful split between cognition, evaluation, motivation, and feeling, which gives the discussion a solid philosophical spine and keeps it from…

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Why you'd press play

For a patient look at how romantic love changes over time.

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