In this talk, I invite the audience to think together with me about the question What is it to know something? Cognitive science and philosophy of mind like to portray knowing as something that doesn’t require much involvement of the heart. But I explore the idea that knowing is, in a particular sense, loving, and that loving is, in a particular sense, knowing. Loving and knowing share the same fundamental tension of letting something be, without letting it go. Using everyday examples, I explore how this tension animates our lives, never letting us go, in a continual, inescapable, wonderful and exasperating dialectic.

This is the video of my presentation “Loving and Knowing,” presented at the “Time, Body and The Other: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Approaches” conference, Heidelberg, September 2018, organized to celebrate Thomas Fuchs’ work.