The Meeting of Essences

This chapter addresses a much debated question in contemporary (analytic) discussions of love, namely, what grounds one’s love for another. First explaining the project’s specific approach to this question, the chapter then focuses on J. David Velleman’s suggestion that it is the personhood of the beloved—personhood being a universal quality essential to a person—that grounds one’s love. While agreeing with Velleman that the beloved’s essence plays a crucial role in grounding one’s love, the argument offered here departs from Velleman’s in two significant ways: first, by positing that the beloved’s essence amounts to selfhood rather than personhood and second, by suggesting that while the beloved’s selfhood is the focus of love, that which grounds love is the correspondence between the selfhood of the beloved and that of the lover.