Summary Of Love By All Accounts By Eleonore Stump

In, “Love by All Accounts,” Eleonore Stump brings forward three different accounts of love and shows how they all can be true through the use of Aristotle’s own account of love. Stumps focus is on how Aristotle’s two claims interaction leads to the emergence of love.
The first account brought forth by Stump is the responsiveness account. This account states, “Love is a response of the lover to qualities he perceives and values in the beloved.” These valuable intrinsic characteristics is why the lover has reason to love their beloved. However, Stump proves a fault in this account by stating, that others possess similar if not the same features of one’s beloved. Meaning another person could be acceptably substituted for the beloved, provided only that the new person had the valued characteristics of the beloved.
Stump then showcases an opposite theory to the responsiveness called the volitional account. The volitional account, “The beloved does have great value for the lover, but that value derives from the lover's love of the
Because of the apparent issues generated by the above two accounts, a new account is brought forward to focus on the relationship between the lover and the beloved. And stump defines relationship as on-going connections with a history of interactions between the connected people. On the relational account Stump tells us that, “Love consists in valuing a person and one's relationship with that person and in seeing that relationship as an appropriate reason for such valuing.” But to show an issue with the relational account Stump brings up Dante’s love story. There was virtually no interaction at all between Dante and Beatrice, and Dante's attitude towards his wife meets the conditions for love on the relational account. But he did not desire his wife like he did Beatrice. Stump clearly shows that love cannot be clearly explained with using just the relational