This book was poorly written. The philosopher uses ideas that are not universally valid and makes statements that have been disproven by biology and psychology. His account for defining what love is and isn't and when it applies would have been a lot stronger if he had read more about attachment theory and affection in animal studies or even asked any academic at his university about it. I got the impression that the authour was irrational ignorant about love and attempted to philosophize about it without doing any investigation in meaningful and relevant literature about it. The consequence of the philosopher's lack of curiosity and motivation to be better informed before delving into questions about love made the foundation of the essence of love in his book incomplete. His inability to convince me in his initial statements about love effected how serious I took the rest of his attempt at insight into love. My skepticism made this book difficult to follow given the grounding points are false or poorly developed. Staying focused on his statements was like paying attention to someone who makes random statements about a field that they know nothing about. Then the secondary statements that follow each initial idea don't build off the the initial statement and lack logical flow; sadly this is a good thing because the secondary statements make good observations about the way that love functions in the mind. It's too bad that the authour neglected to develop his secondary statements about the mechanisms of love, that would have made for a more persuasive concept. Occasionally a secondary statement would be explained through a very badly thought out example that was relateable but inaccurate and that naively idealized social relations. The most common example of a naively idealized social relation that was used was about the parent-child relationship. From my point of view the examples that the authour used were equivalent to stating that because I own something, I love it. That is basically the driving point of this book. I expected a lot more.

This book made little sense to me. Yes he made maybe a handful of interesting comments that gave me something to ponder but most of the time I was wondering where the heck he was going with his argument. The ending I didn't like either. He ends with a story about a coworker who comments that being honest isn't important as people change their mind so having a sense of humour is better. This would have made more sense to put in the middle of the book but the end? That's it? Overall this book seemed convoluted to me. The best thing about this book was that it was only 100 pages!

After reading another book that vaguely touched on philosophy I began to see the helpfulness it brings in deciding how to order your life. I had heard of this book from a YouTuber (CJ the X) who had summarized some of the points, which sounded very enticing to me as love is the part of humanity I feel is most reasonable as pursuing.

Frankfurt here puts forth the logic behind allowing love to be the cornerstone of our pursuits. Frankfurt speaks on the seeming lack of a universal basis for a good life by way of explaining that you must know what you are measuring before you can objectively measure it, while deciding on what is to be measured is a subjective decision. There is in our existence a necessity to subjectively set out on our path that we will judge our adherence to with objective metrics. Frankfurt here posits that love, as in the people, things, and passions that we would pursue for their own ends and not simply as a means to our own, should be the guiding light in deciding the path we begin on and the metrics we set up to judge ourselves in that endeavor. In this line of logic, the most freedom we could experience is to be of one mind and undivided in passions, which sounds like a great place to be (or at least aspire to) to me.

I found this a very interesting and inspiring philosophical treatise which I am very fortunate to have found as my first foray into philosophy. Would definitely suggest to anyone looking into philosophy or simply struggling to decide on what they want to live by.

Rating: 4.5/5

A brilliant Philosophical take on 'Love' and its reasons. Simple as that...

I have mixed feelings about this book because I believe ten years ago, I would have loved it. It is very theoretical, vague, repetitive at points and sometimes unnecessarily wordy. Now I see that you could just go read C.S. Lewis' Four Loves or 1 Corinthians 13 and be more enriched.

Re-read this book (which I’ve read several times before) for an ethics class I taught this fall. The picture it paints of love and human agency is one that I find deeply compelling, even if it’s also one that is a bit elusive. Frankfurt is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers to read; I always feel like he is speaking to something real and important about the human experience.

Filosofía digerible y fácil como no había leído en mucho tiempo. Frankfurt se enfrenta a la pregunta del amor a otros, a las cosas y a nosotros mismos. A la vida. En sus tres capítulos, te conduce con una prosa suave, pedagógica y agradable por esta cuestión. Me iluminó sobre mi forma de amar y me reconcilió con el hecho de que amar es también un acto de amor propio y es lo que le da sentido a la vida.

Me caló la idea de la coherencia entre lo que se ama y lo que se desea, es decir, querer amar lo que se ama, algo así como la unicidad e integridad de la voluntad (como le llama él "wholeheartedness"). Esta pureza o entreza de corazón nos permite amarnos a nosotros mismos - amor al que Frankfurt da un lugar central - y así ser realmente capaces de amar a otros.

I wanted to read something out of my normal genres. This philosophy book is well written and digestible for the layman. However, I re-learned that I'm not interested in philosophy. Too abstract.

Having closely reread this book a third time, I can say with some authority that I've wasted hours of my life, that I've gone on an intellectual sojourn with a text that didn't appeal to me, that wasn't even my type.

This is not a text for those interested in Hamlet's vacillations or for persons who can related to Whitman's "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

Fans of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Proust, Freud or philosopher Donald Davidson will feel themselves on a different planet in this text.

Fans of Bertrand Russell, the young Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, and/or the Heidegger of the elemental, pretechnological human condition will feel right at home with this book.

Two-and-a-half stars.

I don't read a lot of philosophy and this is probably considered popular philosophy. Having recently read "On Bullshit" by the same author I thought it would be good to try one of his more serious works. But upon reflection they are both serious and both enlightening. This does seem to get the the basics of how to try to live. One needs to think about how to apply it. Maybe another book would help figure that out...

Frankfurt employs conceptual machinery to clarify real issues instead of stipulating irrelevant definitions of words. And interesting ideas, notably making the loving part of care the foundations of practical reason, are elegantly presented. I can see how the distinction between first- and second-order desires is at work in this book as well (he doesn't use the terminology in this book). That distinction seems to me more promising for defending a version of practical reason than for defending compatibilism. The only reason why I can only rate three stars is that I wanted more by the end of the book - the lectures tease and gesture but lack time and space to flesh ideas out...

If it is finally and definitively clear to you that you will always suffer from inhibitions and self-doubt, and that you will never succeed in being fully satisfied with what you are- if true self love is, for you, really out of the question - at least be sure to hang on to your sense of humor.