When someone uses the world love, it could be a variety of things. It is used to express interest in things, like, “I love football” and it is also used to express our innermost emotive desiring of attachment to another human being. People saying “I love chocolate,” mean something much different than people saying, “I love you.”
The Ancient Greeks did not have to pay as close attention to the context of the situations because they had for different words that share the definition of the English word love.
The first type of love was eros love, which is the love of desire, of wanting something or something. There is a sexual connotation to eros love. It is also a selfish love—a person loves things because of the pleasure that they bring to the self.
Soble understood eros as an object dependent love, ie., there had to be something motivating the love. In this way eros is the oppose of agape love which arrives without reason or cause. In the Christian tradition, which borrowed these Greek words for love, agape was the love that god had for people, unconditionally, and intrinsically loving because of what lay at its core.
Philia love is love of ones family and close friends.
Soble had a marked classification of these loves. Soble’s based these classifications on merit. For him, eros-love is property, and agape is not property based, and he did not believe that agapic love was rational, and argued that it was at a much lower value than eros love, which he would say, is actual love. He derives from the Greek terms, but assigns his own meanings to them.
Sources:
"Love (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Sept. 2013. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/>.
Schmid, Stephen . "Reconciling Eros and Agape." http://seschmid.org/. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Sept. 2013. <seschmid.org/LSF/LSF_Soble_2up.pdf>.
