Friday Lates: Love: 15 minutes with a philosopher

Renoir’s tender, luminous paintings celebrate friendship, intimacy and connection in glorious colour. They offer a joyful vision of love. But love is rarely as simple as these pictures may first appear.

To love is to make oneself vulnerable to another person. It can bring delight, recognition and belonging, But it also brings risk, dependence and pain. Why, then, do we keep yearning for it? Is love necessary for human flourishing, or are we chasing an emotion that can leave us beautifully, painfully stuck?

Join the Centre for Philosophy and Art for a 15-minute, one-to-one conversation in Room 18, exploring the pleasures and pains of love. The session is led by philosopher of love Dr Lucy McDonald, King’s College London, with a team of expert philosophical puzzle-solvers.

Choose a question from our deck of love puzzles, test your first instincts, and see where the conversation takes you. Come for curiosity, wit and a few surprises, before returning to the galleries with newly discovered ways of looking, and perhaps even more lovingly.