Abstract

What place should love of others occupy in moral and political philosophy? As Ryan Patrick Hanley explains in this impressive study, many contemporary philosophers have recently tried to revive a moral psychology of love to remedy the egocentrism and narcissism that often seem to characterize modern life. But is love the answer to the problems we face today and how much can we expect of it? To try to answer these questions, Hanley turns to the ideas of four eighteenth-century philosophers for illumination: David Hume on humanity, Jean-Jacques Rousseau on pity, Adam Smith on sympathy, and Immanuel Kant on love. All four philosophers, Hanley argues, helped to shape a distinctively modern understanding of love....