The Philosophy of (erotic) Love

Front Cover
Robert C. Solomon, Kathleen Marie Higgins
University Press of Kansas, 1991 - Family & Relationships - 522 pages
What does philosophy know of love? From Plato on, philosophers have struggled to pin love to the dissecting table and view it in the cold light of logic. Yet, as Arthur Danto writes in the foreword to this volume, "how incorrigibly stiff philosophy is when it undertakes to lay its icy fingers on the frilled and beating wings of the butterfly of love."

Love, elusive and philosophically intractable as it is, has long fascinated philosophers. In this collection of classic and modern writings on the topic of erotic love, Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins have chosen excerpts from the great philosophical texts and combined them with the most exciting new work of philosophers writing today.

The result is a broadly conceived, comprehensive, and important work, nearly as stimulating and provocative as love itself. It examines the mysteries of erotic love from a variety of philosophical perspectives and provides an impressive display of the wisdom that the world's best thinkers have brought, and continue to bring, to the study of love.

"Stunning! This brilliant interdisciplinary collection is as provocative, enchanting, and richly rewarding as its topic. Unrivaled in scope and richness, blending classic and contemporary readings on love, here is a wellspring of insights for scholars, students, and general readers alike."—Mike W. Martin, author of Self-Deception and Morality.

From inside the book

Contents

Plato from Symposium
13
Theano Letter on Marriage and Fidelity
36
Augustine from The City of God
44
Andreas Capellanus from On Love
56
William Shakespeare Thirteen Sonnets
72
John Milton on Marriage and Divorce
79
Baruch Spinoza from Ethics
85
JeanJacques Rousseau from the Second Discourse
104
Denis de Rougemont from Love in the Western World
214
JeanPaul Sartre from Being and Nothingness
227
Philip Slater from The Pursuit of Loneliness
241
Shulamith Firestone from The Dialectic of Sex
247
Irving Singer from The Nature of Love
259
Jerome Neu Platos Homoerotic Symposium
317
The Rhetoric of Courtly Love
336
Amelie Rorty Spinoza on the Pathos of Idolatrous Love
352

G W F Hegel a Fragment on Love
117
Stendhal Henri Beyle from On Love
132
Carl Jung Marriage as a Psychological Relationship
177
Solomon The Virtue of Erotic Love
492
Source Notes and Acknowledgments
519
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