The Paradox of Love: A Historical Exploration of Western Philosophical Perspectives on Love, Exclusion, and Liberatory Potential
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present work tracks some of the most well-known thinkers on love in the Western philosophical tradition, where various theories emerge, conflict, converge, and fade away. Given that many questions about its nature have persisted for centuries, love's identity appears unsettled. Due to its unresolved identity, love might be best understood as a paradox existing between its resistance to definition and yet commonly recognized and experienced. The other central thread stemming from these philosophers of love is how the history of its theorizing constructed a restrictive notion that commonly excluded women from the experience. Offering a natural rebuttal to the history of exclusion promoted by these prominent thinkers is bell hooks' notion of an expansive and healing love that possessed the capacity to realize more fulfilling relationships and a compassionate society. This paper concludes with thoughts on love's liberatory nature, its capacity to create personal meaning, and its identity as a paradox without attempting to define it.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".