‘Speak to us of love’: Some Difficulties in the Philosophical and Scientific Study of Love

How may science, philosophy and poetry aid us in our search for an understanding of the concept of love? By drawing on different attempts to articulate Wittgenstein’s notion that philosophizing about a concept is a matter of bringing it back to its natural home, the lives we live in language, this chapter presses what this may mean when the language we want to find the home for is the language of love. Is it a pre-requisite of such an investigation that it also speaks to us of love? What other existential dimensions and moral difficulties are there to be seen in the significance that different people are prepared to assign to different uses of ‘love’?