Gabriel Abend's Report Ways of Love-Making

Gabriel Abend, professor at the University of New York, reported on The Ways of Love-Making at the seminar of the Center for the History of Ideas and Sociology of Knowledge of the IGITI.

Annotation:

Current neuroscience and psychology investigate phenomena that were traditionally the turf of the humanities, social sciences, or human sciences. They include morality, empathy, compassion, gratitude, religious belief and experience, spirituality, leadership, happiness, aesthetic judgment, art, creativity, and love. But what are these things? How do neuroscientists and psychologists construe such objects of inquiry, so that they can be experimentally operationalized and measured? How do their master concepts actually come to be? And what epistemological and ontological assumptions are made in the process? My research examines these questions regarding neuroscientific and psychological experiments about love. First, I find that their love is a particular kind of love, which is based on the “production of love” set of assumptions. Second, I argue that neuroscience and psychology may depend on the human sciences to reasonably conceptualize their object, so the boundary is porous in both directions. Third, I propose a renewed focus on the empirical investigation of the epistemological and ontological assumptions that underlie scientific knowledge—and, for that matter, any other kind of knowledge. I hope to thereby recast the traditional problem of the sociology of knowledge (Mannheimian, Mertonian, and Sociology of Scientific Knowledge alike) in a unique and uniquely fruitful manner.