In this dissertation, I argue that love, understood in terms of the notion of eros, is central not only to our aesthetic and romantic experience, but also to our moral experience. Eros, on the view that I put forward, has five main components. It is (1) a form of desire, (2) directed toward a particular object that is (3) understood to make a normative demand on the subject, but (4) whose value cannot be captured under a closed description, and which thus (5) calls forth an effort of open-ended, creative imagination. If I am right in claiming that eros is central to our moral experience, then the limited and partial nature of our moral vision and our connections and vulnerabilities to particular people, places, and things are not merely the results of contingent defects in moral character; they are essential features of what it means to be a finite moral agent. My argument thus aims to recover a Platonic tradition in moral philosophy that has been underrepresented in contemporary work. The main inspiration behind the dissertation is the work of the 20th century British philosopher Iris Murdoch. My goal is to draw upon what I take to be some of the central insights of Murdoch's writings to construct an account of love that cannot simply be assimilated to Kantian nor Aristotelian conceptions of practical reasoning, but that represents a distinct and significant mode of moral awareness in its own right.
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