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
beloved and is dependent on it.” Stump shows the issue with this account is that the will to love a beloved could be equally applied to another person, there is no good reason behind why one has to love their specific lover. “Since there is nothing about the particular person he loves which is the reason for his love, there is also no reason why he should love her rather than anyone else.”
The last account Stump mentions in her paper is the relational account.
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
account.
Stump brings forth Aquinas’ view on love which helps us understand all three accounts better. Aquinas believes the ultimate proper object of love is God, complete and perfect goodness personified. It is also shown that Aquinas believes every human being is made in the image of God, meaning the divine goodness of love is also reflected in every human. Stump supports Aquinas's account that at the heart of the nature of love is the idea that love requires two interconnected desires. The two desires are; the desire for the good of the beloved, and the desire for union with the beloved. Stump points out that her focus is on the nature of these two desires and how love emerges from their interaction.
Stump clarifies further by stating, it is helpful to understand that for Aquinas, the presence of a desire does not imply the absence of the thing desired. The fulfillment of a desire is compatible with the continuance of the desire. When both the desires of love are fulfilled, the lover finds joy in the beloved, but he does not cease desiring what he now has. Stump showcases that for Aquinas love comes from the interaction of two mutually governing desires, for the good of the beloved and for union with the beloved. Stump also shows that Aquinas’ account can handle the issues we found with the three accounts at the beginning of the paper.