Philosophy of Love and Sex

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Philosophy of Love and Sex

• Course Introduction

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• "The question of love is one that cannot be
  evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested
  in it, from the moment you are alive you are
  bound to be concerned with love, because love is
  not just something that happens to you It is a
  certain special way of being alive. Love is, in
  fact, an intensification of life, a completeness,
  a fullness, a wholeness of life."
• -Thomas Merton

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• And the true order of going, or being led by
  another, to the things of love, is to begin from
  the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the
  sake of that other beauty, using these steps
  only, and from one going on to two, and from two
  to all fair forms to fair practices, and from
  fair practices to fair notions, until from fair
  notions he arrives at the notion of absolute
  beauty, and at last knows what the essence of
  beauty is.
• -Plato

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• "You come to love not by finding the perfect
  person, but by seeing an imperfect person
  perfectly."
• -Sam Keen
• "You may only be one person to the world, but
  you may also be the world to one person."
• -anonymous

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• "I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest
  thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find
  a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let
  yourself fall in love. If you have not done so
  already, you are wasting your life."
• -D. H. Lawrence

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• The whole business of love and love-making, is
  painted by the novelists in a monstrous
  disproportion to the other relations of life.
• -W.D. Howells
• "Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing."
  
• -Goethe

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• Love is nothing else but pleasure accompanied
  by the idea of an external cause hate is nothing
  else but pain accompanied by the idea of an
  external cause.
• -Spinoza
• We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst
  inventions of humanity - romantic love and
  gunpowder.
• -André Maurois

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• Love is an egotism of two.
• -La Salle
• The reason why lovers are never weary of one
  another is this - they are always talking of
  themselves
• -Rochefoucauld
• That is the true season of love, when we
  believe that we alone can love, that no one could
  ever have loved so before us, and that no one
  will love in the same way after us.
• -Goethe

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• "Man's love is of man's life a thing a part,
  tis woman's whole existence.
• -Byron
• Man can think of himself without woman. She
  cannot think of herself without man...she appears
  essentially to the male as a sexual being...She
  is defined and differentiated with reference to
  man and not he with reference to her she is the
  incidental, the inessential as opposed to the
  essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute
  - she is the Other. -Simone de Beauvoir

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• The degree and kind of a mans sexuality
  extends to the highest pinnacle of his spirit.
  -Nietzsche

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• I never could explain why I love anybody, or
  anything.
• -Walt Whitman

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• What does the word Philosophy in the title add
  to the course?
• How is our approach to love and sex different
  from that which you might encounter in other
  disciplines treatment of the topics?
• You can take courses that study mammalian sex
  from a purely biological perspective
• English departments often offer upper-level
  courses in the treatment of the themes of love
  and sex in the history of English Literature
• Through much of the post-war 20th century few
  psychology departments were complete without
  courses on Freudian theories on sexuality

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• 1. One characteristic of the philosophical
  approach to the topic is perhaps its breadth -
  we will draw from many other disciplines in our
  study of love and sex.
• For example, you will find that some thinkers
  attempt to ground their views on sexuality on
  recent findings in evolutionary biology.

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• 2. We will make explicit use of some of the
  characteristic conceptual tools of philosophy in
  our study.
• For example, we will engage in critical analysis
  of various arguments about love and sex,
  explicitly using some of the techniques and
  concepts of logic - one of the historically
  prominent sub-disciplines of academic philosophy.

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• 3. We will often deal with the topics of love
  and sex at a characteristically philosophical
  general or fundamental level.
• A good deal of philosophy, and especially
  contemporary philosophy, involves analysis of
  fundamental concepts breaking them down,
  clarifying them, and thinking through their
  relation to other concepts.

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• What is love, exactly?
• Many writers refer to it, but are they all
  referring to precisely the same thing?
• More likely, as with many of our interesting and
  fundamental concepts, love is complex and refers
  to a variety of things, and we must pay careful
  attention to determining what it means in each
  instance of usage.

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• 4. We will inquire into the ethical dimensions
  of love and sex.
• We also want to know what the practical, moral
  implications of our thinking are for our
  individual lives and for the regulation of
  society as a whole.

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• Often our answer to an ethical question will
  depend in large part how we first answer the
  analytical / definitional one.
• This is especially so when we build into our
  definition a moral judgment of some sort.
• For example, some argue that the concept of
  sexual perversion refers not simply to sexual
  behaviour that is statistically rare, but more
  essentially, to behaviour that is morally
  degenerate in some way. By definition, they
  claim, a sexually perverse act is morally wrong.
• Our answer to the question of whether gay
  marriage is permissible turns in large part on
  how we define marriage.