Abstract:

This philosophical work lays the groundwork for a game-theoretic account of (romantic) love, substantiating the folk-psychological conception of love as 'a unification of souls'. It does so by setting up an appropriate universal framework of cognitive agency, that accommodates such unifications and motivates them. This framework applies the gene s eye view of evolution to the evolution of cognition, integrating it with a distributed, dynamic theory of selfhood "and the game-theoretic principles of agent-unification that govern these dynamics. The application of this framework to particular biological settings produces love as a theoretical evolutionary prediction (unveiling its rationality). Through this, the connection of the strategic normativity to love's real-life behavioral and phenomenological expressions is systematically explored.

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