First Impressions seminar : The Possibility of Love at First Sight

How could we come to love someone in just an instant, without knowing anything about them except the way they look? Although this is a familiar trope, the very idea of ‘love at first sight’ raises a number of difficulties that cast doubt on its intelligibility. I will discuss these difficulties and explore ways one might overcome them. It will be argued that ‘love at first sight’ does refer to a genuine phenomenon that we might call ‘love’, but a phenomenon that is distinct from the kind of love that we would characterize as ‘real’ or ‘deep’. The question will then be what ‘real love’ amounts to and what it has that love at first sight lacks.