On understanding love

Abstract

This paper considers two of the popular theories of love, The Appraisal View and The Bestowal View, and combines them in an attempt to create a more compelling explanation for the nature of love. Love is a way of responding to an object through a process of appraising it for its subjective, intrinsic value and then bestowing the experience of that appraisal back onto the object as an extrinsic quality whereby the object becomes valuable and irreplaceably important. By combining the appraisal and bestowal theories, I will be able to maximize their strengths into a coherent theory of love while casting out their weaknesses.