Love at first sight, a philosophical analysis
(Below is an interview I did recently with the French magazine Dim Dam Dom. Since it won’t appear in English, I figured my readers might be interested. I’m scheduling this post for the day after the US elections. Because — regardless of the outcome — we probably all need to think about something else.)
How does philosophy explain love at first sight? Who were the main philosophers who tackled this subject? And what were their different point of interests in this phenomenon?
Philosophy isn’t really in the business of explaining facts about the world, such as how and why people fall in love — whether at first sight or not. We’ve got science for that, as I’ll explain in a minute. Philosophy, by contrast, is in the business of providing accounts of human phenomena to aid our understanding of such phenomena. These accounts are informed by science, but go beyond it because we wish to extract meaning from what we do. Moreover, philosophy uses a prescriptive (as opposed to descriptive) approach to things: it doesn’t ask just what people do, but whether they should do it. That, specifically, is the province of that branch of philosophy known as ethics.
From a scientific perspective, the work of cognitive scientist Helen Fisher has illuminated the various aspects of human love using neurobiology, including love at first…
