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The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love

The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love

Edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins

Foreword by Arthur Danto

Sales Date: June 14, 1991

536 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in

Paperback
9780700604807
Published: June 1991

$34.95

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"A feast for the intellect. The book is equally a delight for the mature scholar’s philosophical reflection on a subject that interests all human beings as it is for the beginning student’s use in the philosophy classroom as topical reader."—Canadian Philosophical Reviews
"[The book] is suitable for undergraduates, graduates students, and scholars. Alone or with other texts, it is ideal for courses in the philosophy of (erotic) love. With other texts ..., it would work well in courses in the philosophy of personal relations. It could supplement a traditional text in introduction to philosophy or ethics."—Teaching Philosophy
"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
In the end one loves one’s desire and not what is desired.—Friedrich Nietzsche
Free love? As if love is anything but free!—Emma Goldman
I know of no more frequently cited word than love . . . Shouldn’t this support the suspicion, along with rump-shaped hearts on bumper stickers . . . that in our language there may be no more bankrupt a word? Still these days bankruptcy does not prevent one from continuing to do very profitable business.—William Gass
Love is a kind of war, and no assignment for cowards.—Ovid
Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman . . . Even if no woman existed, it would still be possible to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted physically.—Carl Jung
Love as a virtue? The passion that makes fools of us all and has led to the demise of Anthony, Cleopatra, young Romeo, Juliet and King Kong? Love is nice but it is not a virtue. Maybe it is not even nice.—Robert C. Solomon

Foreword, Arthur C. Danto

Introduction, Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins

-Plato, from Symposium

-Sappho, Poems

-Theano, Letter on Marriage and Fidelity

-Ovid, from The Art of Love

-Augustine, from The City of God

-Heloise and Abelard, Letters

-Andreas Capellanus, from On Love

-William Shakespeare, Thirteen Sonnets

-John Milton, on Marriage and Divorce

-Baruch Spinoza, from Ethics

-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from the Second Discourse, Emile, and New Heloise

-G.W.F. Hegel, a Fragment on Love

-Arthur Schopenhauer, from World as Will and Idea

-Stendhal (Henri Beyle), from On Love

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Selections

-Sigmund Freud, On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love, On Narsissicm: An Introduction, and “Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness

-Carl Jung, Marriage as a Psychological Relationship

Karen Horney, Love and Marriage

-Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems

-Emma Goldman, On the Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation, and Marriage and Love

-Denis de Rougemont, from Love in the Western World

-Jean-Paul Sartre, from Being and Nothingness

-Simone de Beauvoir, from The Second Sex

-Philip Slater, from The Pursuit of Loneliness

-Shulamith Firestone, from The Dialectic of Sex

III

-Irving Singer, from The Nature of Love

-Martha Nussbaum, The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium