Reddit reviews The Nature of Love: The Modern World (Volume 3) (Irving Singer Library)

If you want to make a trip to your library, I suggest you look into Irving Singer's The Nature of Love (3 volumes) in which he gives a thorough account of love. https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Love-Modern-Irving-Library/dp/0262512742

https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Nature_of_Love.html?id=C-MTHjIOJBsC&redir_esc=y

There are many philosophers, so we can't list you all the definitions and accounts of what love is for all of them. Plato, for instance, highlights the fact that Greek language had three words for love: eros (sexual/physical desire for an object), agape (religious love, selfless in terms of behavior), and philia (friendship, brotherhood, a commitment towards people you intend to support reciprocally). Many other thinkers used Stendhal's idea that romantic love is the idealization of someone for some other end-goal (i.e: you love someone because you see in them something related to you, you do not see them for who they are, but for who you want them to be).

If you look at the article on love in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/), you'll see that there are a few theories that emerged within contemporary philosophy: the robust concern theory, the union view theory, etc.

You can also look at the romantic thinkers (Coleridge, Burke, Fichte, Goethe, etc.) and see that they are interested about love in terms of how it shapes social interactions and how it ought to shape them (i.e: many romantic writers and thinkers take on some of the ideals of the romance genre which advocates for loving commitment, freedom of choosing who to love, etc.).

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