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This chapter explores the works of John Duns Scotus related to ethics. It presents the bare challenge of Scotian ethical dilemma and interprets the key words of Scotus's ethical terminology with a view to his language of argumentation in ethics. The chapter discusses the essentials of his philosophy of love, proposes solutions to the Quintonian and Harrisian fallacies, and also considers the Scotian solution of the problem of dispensation from law and the structure of virtue.

This chapter looks into the possibility of genuine loving relationships with robots (mutual love). Our primary aim is to offer a framework for approaching the question of mutual love. But we also sketch a tentative answer. Our tentative answer is that whereas mutual love between humans and sex-robots is not in principle impossible, it is hard to achieve. Nevertheless, building robots capable of mutual love may help to address concerns raised by critics of human-robot sexual relationships. Our discussion below generates a “job description” that advanced sex-robots would need to live up in order to be able to participate in relationships that can be recognized as mutual love.

This chapter discusses the two traditions of approaching philosophies of love, namely the “idealist” approach and the “realist” approach. The idealist tradition does not doubt that there are physiological components in sexual or even religious love, but it rejects the idea that such components define what love is and may become. It claims that they are neither necessary conditions for love nor sufficient to understand its essence. The realist tradition, on the other hand, relies on the latest science available at the time. According to realists, love can be defined by reference to physiological, biological, or sociopsychological aspects. In developing the idealist tradition, ideas regarding the oneness between men and women were altered as much as attitudes toward sex were. The transmutation of religious reverence into human devotion gave womankind an inherent value that never existed before.

This chapter is dedicated to an analysis of Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore (1505/1535). Their author was Lisbon-born Judah Abrabanel who ranked among the most important philosophers and writers of his time. At the center of his main work written in Italian are contemplations on the essence of love. In three dialogues the two noble characters Filone and Sofia discuss love as a cosmic concept. The chapter attempts to illustrate the simultaneous adoption of components from Christian, Arabic, and Jewish sources as a distinctive feature of this work. Dialoghi d’amore does not contrast new contexts with familiar ones, instead the boundaries between different contexts are eliminated altogether. The text’s representational foundation makes way for a permanent shift of meaning. From this procedural variation, a direct path leads to the literature and literary theory of European Romanticism.

This chapter concludes the volume by discussing the philosophy of love from antiquity into the Middle Ages. Troubadours of the twelfth century sang of an ideal love, and out of their poetry came the ideas that have made the modern world. When the northern tradition of courtly love presented ideas about adultery and sexual freedom, the church condemned these movements as heresies. The passage from courtly to Romantic love largely consists of a series of reactions to the narrowness of medieval religious idealization. The church had condoned the sexual instinct but condemned all attempts to idealize sexuality. Marriage was holy, but only as a means of reproducing the species, and could not serve as the basis of an ideal love.

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the philosophy of love. Since Plato's dialogue, Symposion, there have been almost no philosophical theories about love. The dialogue states that the philosophical truth of love is a spiritual truth. Love is not a theoretical phenomenon. The complex phenomenon that love is always involves two distinct perspectives—the subjective perspective of the lovers, and the third-person perspective of those who surround the lovers as involuntary observers and commentators. Love in this book will be addressed in a metaphysical sense, claiming that love, before it is classified within any particular domain of reality, is a relation. It is not in a subjective feeling but in a reciprocal relation of desire that love fully comes into being.