Who is your favorite philosopher and why?

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H. L. Mencken had his moments. Some of it is still relevant today.

The Buddha. All other philosophy makes very little sense when you really start to know and live Buddhism (and I consider it a philosophy way more than a religion in any sense of the word).

That said, I always had a soft spot for the Stoics. When I'm really down in the dumps, I sometimes read Marcus Aurelius.

Currently it is between Immanuel Kant & Albert Pike. Because both men opened up religion and set it upon its ear. Not one religion, but all. Immanuel Kant created metaphysics & Albert Pike took back the term Luciferian for its original meaning. Both men devoted themselves to improving the worlds they lived in, both were incredibly intelligent, both were obsessed with empirical facts & undeniable truths that they absorbed themselves to philosophy of original thought. Albert Pike book: Morals & Dogma - Immanuel Kant book: Introduction to Metaphysics

1. But how do you define "love"?

2. Mothers murder their children out of "love". This is a common occurrence in the news. The mother will say, "I love my children so much, and I didn't want my children to suffer". Another common occurrence is that spouses murder the other spouse, because they don't want the other spouse to suffer with an illness.

3. So your argument is to say the "ego" of these murderers are motivated not by self-interest, but instead, by referencing the feelings of others ? However, their reasoning seems to always be about them as in "I did" .. "I felt" .. "I didn't want ...".

4. It seems like the concept of "love" is the same as "seeking pleasure over pain" per the motivational hedonists philosophy, and psychological hedonists ?

At the moment, Bertrand Russell

by using it in a particular way.
it would seem to to be a grossly misguided expression of love.

it seems to me that intentions are determined by belief. belief is not always about self-interest, e.g., "people should not beat their dogs." so some intentions are with reference to a self and some are not. apart from beliefs about self-interest, there's no such thing as 'self-interest'. if a fixed reference point with respect to which all intentions are intended and all feelings felt does not exist, then self-interest is not invariably a factor in motivation. one need only believe, or wholeheartedly intend, that an action is in another person's interest in order for it to be unselfish. whether it really is in the other person's interest is another matter. on the other hand, a person may very well kill someone they love because they can't handle the stress of taking care of them and then rationalize the act in terms of easing the other person's suffering in order to avoid feelings of guilt.

that we retrospectively frame our behaviors in terms of a default mode of reference does not necessarily indicate that they occurred within that frame. the typical question we are responding to when justifying behaviors is of the form, "why did/would you do that?" the expectation that we answer in a particular way, with respect to self, is built into the question; it's not "why did that happen?" or "how did it happen?" but "why did you do that?" i.e., what you see depends on how you look.

almost, except for the sense in which seeking pleasure is the pain.

Hume's a good choice!