Title: The Nature of Love, Volume 1: Plato to LutherPublisher: University of Chicago PressISBN: 0226760952Author: Irving SingerTitle: The Nature of Love, Volume 2: Courtly and RomanticPublisher: University of Chicago PressISBN: 0262512734Author: Irving Singer.

"Begins by studying love as appraisal and bestowal as well as imagination and idealization. Then examines the contrasting views of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Ovid, Lucretius, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther. After having described the nature of erotic idealization, Singer analyzes the religious idealization in Judeo-Christian concepts of eros, philia, nomos, and agapē. Medieval Catholicism sought to combine these four ideas of love in the "caritas synthesis." Luther repudiated that attempt on the grounds that love (...) exists only in God's agapastic bestowal of unlimited goodness upon humanity and all of nature. In relation to the different modes of theorizing, Singer explores the humanistic implications of each"-- Publishers website. (shrink)

In 1984, Irving Singer published the first volume of what would become a classic and much acclaimed trilogy on love. Trained as an analytical philosopher, Singer first approached his subject with the tools of current philosophical methodology. Dissatisfied by the initial results, he turned to the history of ideas in philosophy and the arts for inspiration. He discovered an immensity of speculation and artistic practice that reached wholly beyond the parameters he had been trained to consider truly philosophical. In (...) his three-volume work The Nature of Love, Singer tried to make sense of this historical progression within a framework that reflected his precise distinction-making and analytical background. In this new book, he maps the trajectory of his thinking on love. It is a "partial" summing-up of a lifework: partial because it expresses the author's still unfolding views, because it is a recapitulation of many published pages, because love--like any subject of that magnitude--resists a neatly comprehensive, all-inclusive formulation. Adopting an informal, even conversational, tone, Singer discusses, among other topics, the history of romantic love, the Platonic ideal, courtly and nineteenth-century Romantic love; the nature of passion; the concept of merging ; ideas about love in Freud, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dewey, Santayana, Sartre, and other writers; and love in relation to democracy, existentialism, creativity, and the possible future of scientific investigation. Singer's writing on love embodies what he has learned as a contemporary philosopher, studying other authors in the field and "trying to get a little further." This book continues his trailblazing explorations. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have critically analyzed the effects of sex segregation in numerous social institutions, yet sex-segregated sport often remains unchallenged. Even critics of sex-segregated sport have tended to accept the merits of women-only teams at face value. In this article, we revisit this issue by examining the underlying assumptions supporting women’s and girls’ teams and explore how they perpetuate gender inequality. Specifically, we analyze the 14 U.S. court cases wherein adolescent boys have sought to play on girls’ teams in their (...) respective high schools. The courts’ decisions reveal taken-for-granted, essentialist assumptions about girls’ innate fragility and athletic inferiority. While the courts, policy makers, and many feminist scholars see maintaining teams for girls and women as a solution to the problem of boys’ and men’s dominance in sport, the logic supporting this form of segregation further entrenches notions of women’s inferiority. (shrink)

THE SHOCK of LOVE is a book about spirit. It is a book within a book. The book found within is a manuscript entitled THE SHOCK of LOVE. It is purportedly written by Paolo Cellini, Professor of Romance Languages and a student of the era of the troubadours and courtly love. Based on the idea of a book of the heart, current during that time, it is divided into nine chapters that give allegorical detail of the journey (...) of love, a love that completes the spirit in a person. There the reader follows the courtship, the 'alchemical' marriage, and the dark gestation before emerging transformed and completed. The outer book, the book that encloses the found manuscript, tells the story of Cellini as well as speculating on why it came to be written. (shrink)

Religious believers understand the meaning of their lives and of the world in terms of the way these are related to God. How, Vincent BrU;mmer asks, does the model of love apply to this relationship? He shows that most views on love take it to be an attitude rather than a relationship: exclusive attention (Ortega y Gasset), ecstatic union (nuptial mysticism), passionate suffering (courtly love), need-love (Plato, Augustine) and gift-love (Nygren). In discussing the issues, BrU;mmer (...) inquires what role these attitudes play within the love-relationship and examines the implications of using the model of love as a key paradigm in theology. (shrink)

Western culture, at its best, has been a continuous effort to move from the low, the necessities of the body, toward the high, an eternity toward which all men aspire in their capacity for goodness. The purpose of politics, now understood as democracy, has been to regulate the low, the base desires that set men apart from each other. Politics, then, follows culture. But this linkage has been broken by the feminist demand for equality in romantic union, thus destroying the (...) connection between lovers, farmily, and the culture which seeks to protect them The attack on courtly love through the leveling of male and female relatedness is a vicarious effort to undermine hierarchical love, natural and divine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) 221-242 [Access article in PDF] Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America Nan Johnson [Figures]Nervous, enthusiastic, and talkative women are the foam and sparkle, quiet women the wine of life. The senses ache and grow weary of the perpetual glare and brilliancy of the former, but turn with a sense of security and repose to the mild, mellow (...) glow irradiating the sphere of the latter. We associate all ideas of rest with quiet women. They are soul-divinities reverently guarding their sacred trusts in the Court of Silence. When she speaks, her words are aptly chosen and fitly spoken. She is wise and thoughtful, but loving and meek. "Still waters run deep," but not in the world-applied sense; babbling rills do not wear their channels deep, but streams of calmest flow have hidden depths undreamed of, unsuspected.--Anonymous, "Quiet Women" 461In an article entitled "Quiet Women," which appeared in The Ladies' Repository in 1868, an anonymous author argues that "quiet women are the wine of life." Capturing the deep cultural longing of the postbellum period for the icon of the American woman as angel of the hearth, this portrait deifies the quiet woman and demonizes the other possibilities: the enthusiastic woman, the talkative woman, the brilliant woman, and the babbling woman. The mild and mellow queen of the "Court of Silence" is graceful, calm, and, most important of all, silent. In this characterization, an idealized woman is defined as necessarily rhetorically meek. By worshiping "the quiet woman," influential proponents of public opinion such as The Ladies' Repository reinscribed for a postbellum readership a definition of true womanhood that equated silence with feminine virtue and enthusiastic vocality with its opposite. The argument that the rhetorical conduct of the "wise and thoughtful" woman could be contrasted instructively with the trivial and ultimately inconsequential rhetorical behavior of loud and talkative women is one that was made in so many cultural conversations of the postbellum period that it achieved the power of an ideological trope. 1 [End Page 221]Efforts to regulate women's rhetorical behavior intensified rather than abated in the decades following the Civil War as women pursued education, the right to vote, property rights, and mobility in public life. In conduct literature, a genre that proliferated during the postbellum period, the preferred construction of the "quiet" woman was a mainstay in an ideological agenda that supported the generally held nineteenth-century view that character and the nature of one's rhetoric are mutually revealing. Like other types of self-help materials marketed in the last decades of the century, such as elocution manuals and letter-writing guides, conduct manuals included among their vast tables of contents the matters of how and where one ought to speak. In their coverage of deportment in all areas of life, conduct manuals promised the aspiring middle-class American an education in the home in the culturally valuable skills of public speaking and writing. 2 The collective enterprise of the parlor rhetoric movement and conduct literature in particular was to offer happiness and success to those who would follow certain rules. Enormously popular in the postbellum period and well into the turn of the century, conduct manuals argued a conservative gender agenda that appealed to the middle-class readers of a nation who seemed eager to accept the idea that correct deportment in daily life could help to restore the social calm the postwar nation longed for. Although by the 1880s the American public had well in mind notable examples of women, such as Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Frances Willard, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had assumed powerful reformist voices in the causes of abolition, temperance, and women's rights, the rhetorical space these women occupied in shaping political and cultural life was viewed as the exception rather than the rule. 3 In spite of the high profile rhetorical careers of a handful of women, or, perhaps, because of them, postbellum America wondered uneasily just how public women's lives... (shrink)

"In this concluding volume of his impressive study of the history of Western thought about the nature of love, Irving Singer reviews the principal efforts that have been made by 20th-Century thinkers to analyze the phenomenon of love.... [T]he bulk of the book is taken up with critical accounts of the modern thinkers who have systematically called into question the possibility itself of love as a union of distinct human selves. For the most part, these critiques are (...) effectively executed, and they bring a high level of critical acumen to bear on skeptical theses about love that are now too often accepted as truisms."—Frederick A. Olafson, _Los Angeles Times Book Review_ "Irving Singer... has developed a method of historical analysis flexible enough to deal with all kinds of love, from Greek homosexual love in Plato, to the _philia_ and _agape_ of the New Testament, to the courtly love of medieval romance, to the Romantics, for whom love was magic.... [This] final volume brings us to the present. In 'The Modern World,' Singer offers readings of Freud, Proust, and Sartre, among others. He shows how their work was formed in reaction to the 19th-century ideal of 'merging' of the identities of lover and beloved. More often than not, the great modern writers portray love as impossible, as a field of failure and regret.... This masterpiece of critical thinking is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round."—Thomas D'Evelyn, _Christian Science Monitor_ "This is the third of a three-volume history of the philosophy of love. It begins with Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and treats Freud, Proust, Bergson, D. H. Lawrence, G. B. Shaw, Santayana, Sartre, and others in the twentieth. Although the author's approach is primarily historical, he intersperses critical remarks throughout. Most of the major themes which are discussed by philosophers of love make their way into this history, including friendship, sexual love, and the distinction between love that is based on the value of the beloved and love that bestows value on the beloved. Singer devotes a number of pages to his own views on falling in love, being in love, and staying in love.... Singer's exposition is lucid and organized; his criticisms are insightful."—_Ethics_ "In this third volume of historical overview of the development of the Western conception of love, Singer uses writers, philosophers, and psychologists to provide the reader with an overview of love in the late 19th and 20th century.... Analyzing authors such as Tolstoy, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, and Shaw and philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Santayana, as well as Freud, Singer... links each contributor's thoughts to the influence of previous writers and also provides some psycho-historical insight into their personal lives that might have been either a source or direct result of their views. In this final volume, Singer proceeds to look at not just the 'great men' influence but also provides a chapter overviewing scientific contributions to our understanding of love.... Singer's work is a significant contribution to understanding the social construction of important, abstract social and personal values. By tracing love through different historical periods through a variety of voices, Singer has created a rich history of the struggle between the ideal and the real, between the dreams of what love should provide and the reality of what relationships have been in each historical period. By personalizing the voice through psychohistorical analysis, Singer also provides insight into the shaping of ideas through the intimate struggles of the shapers."—Mark V. Chaffee, _Contemporary Psychology_. (shrink)

This is a comparative essay on two types of love: the Christian or Romantic type of love that equates love and death; and classical or amicable love that equates love with rhythmical rituals and conjugations. The essay explores the role of instincts, desire, aggression, ecstasy, oblivion, pneumatics, meters and eternal recurrence in love. The question of the relation between love and marriage, love and adultery is posed. Historical forms of love are (...) reviewed, from pederasty and renunciation to courtly and companionate love. (shrink)

The Eroticization of Distance engages with the theme of eroticism in Blanchot’s writings, and uncovers the nature of Nietzsche’s influence upon Blanchot’s writings of the 1940s and early 1950s.

Lorsque parut en 1977 l’article de Joan Kelly Gadol, « Did women have a Renaissance? », on commençait à parler de gender. Dans sa formulation, qui appelait évidemment une réponse négative, c’était bien une question « renversante » : elle soumettait à interrogation une notion rarement mise en doute, la Renaissance, et introduisait comme critère possible de sa pertinence, le Féminin. Cet article a profondément marqué les générations suivantes d’historiens, spécialistes de l’histoire des femmes et du genre, suscitant de profondes (...) remises en question, des controverses et une multitude de textes reprenant ce questionnement des fondamentaux de nos disciplines. Trois historiennes, deux médiévistes et une moderniste tentent ici, plus de trente ans après, une relecture faisant le point sur les apports et les remises en question de ce texte fondateur. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Petrarchan Love and the Pleasures of FrustrationAldo Scaglione—Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto III, st. 7As Byron ironically intimated, there is a behavioral connection between much of the literature of love and sexual frustration. What is known as medieval “courtly love” was an epiphany of idealized love. Whether self-imposed or forced (...) restraint, it infused much of Arthurian lore, the troubadours’ and then Petrarch’s lyric, and later partly merged with the Renaissance phenomenon of Platonic love. 1 But we wonder about possible historical derivation both on the cultural (literary) level and on the level of practical behavior. In other words, if taken case by case, is the similarity among cultural patterns and between literary phenomena and behavioral patterns a consequence of: 1) intertextual connections with courtly love and Petrarchism; 2) ideological circumstances similar to those which produced “courtly love”; or, inversely, 3) a broader human need that also lies in the background of courtly love? Where and how did frustration, denial, or sublimation acquire a deeper and greater value than consummation and satisfaction? Was it through religion, myth, morality, psychology, or a combination of these factors? Is this essentially an anthropological or rather a psycho-moral question? Does it originate in our perennial “nature” or in our time-bound mores?It seems safe to assume a combination of these factors. Ideals of psychologically sublimated, hence physiologically frustrated, love have an anthropological foundation and are inherent in any sophisticated cultural form. At the [End Page 557] same time, in the Western tradition they owe much to the persistence of the specific historical phenomena of courtly love and its Petrarchistic variations.Of course the folklore of love includes both satisfied and unfulfilled sorts. Jean Hagstrum’s Esteem Enlivened by Desire (1992) deals with the conjugal sort, implying consummation. He distinguishes his theme from “long-term relations that remain unconsummated, valorizing delayed or obviated climax, prolonged foreplay, ascetic discipline, traditional Platonic or Petrarchan love, or various forms of sublimation.” 2 Yet “this last... is dialectically and psychologically tied to [Hagstrum’s] main theme: it is one kind of long-term love relationship with often more than a tinge of the erotic.” 3 For Hagstrum these behavioral variations are determined by culture, since purely “natural” behavior would be more uniform and “unhistorically” steady. 4The notion that idealized desire is culture-bound finds support in Denis de Rougemont’s well-known thesis, that chivalry and courtesy are inventions of medieval Europe with no equivalent at other times and places except by direct influence or imitation: the behavior of an ancient Greek lover or a modern Japanese lover does not involve “chivalry” toward the woman. 5 For de Rouge-mont, ideal love came under the spell of what he called eros, defined as infatuation with desire itself rather than love for its natural end. Difficulties and obstacles became more meaningful than success, even to the point that, as in the story of Tristan and, differently and uniquely, in Dante’s poetry, the death of the beloved marked the culmination of eros. This eros postulates self-denial and sublimation for the sake of a higher achievement.Regardless of chivalry’s roots in medieval Europe, frustration can be a powerful ideal in non-Western cultures, too. One signal example might suffice. The Chinese literary classic, The Dream of the Red Chamber by Chan T’sao (ca. 1717–63), is the life story or Bildungsroman of a high prince who, after a [End Page 558] life of indulgence, decides to renounce the world and become an ascetic monk. 6 This problematic main character, Pao Yu, moves in the framework of Taoist and Confucian ideals, with the addition of some Buddhist religious traits. His final withdrawal from the world, however, which appears to family and society as a disappointing betrayal, obeys a psychological need for a frustration that represents a nobler achievement than the satisfaction of worldly ambition.The point of this essay is to sample a few cases of literary representations of idealized love while underlining their ideal and, at times, literal interconnections. I also mean to suggest... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Best Love of the Child: Being Loved and Being Taught to Love as the First Human Right ed. by Timothy P. JacksonMary M. Doyle RocheReview of The Best Love of the Child: Being Loved and Being Taught to Love as the First Human Right EDITED TIMOTHY P. JACKSON Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011. 416 pp. $28.00With The Best Love of the Child, (...) Eerdmans adds to an already impressive roster of books on children and families. While previous contributions to the field have challenged the appropriateness of rights in addressing the needs of children, Best Love explores the “best interest” standard that is commonly used by courts and international bodies to adjudicate cases involving children. The book’s fundamental claim is that what is “best” for children involves being loved and being taught to love. Although the essays in this volume acknowledge that the primary locus for the love and care of children is the family, they also engage other contexts including religious communities, courts, and legislative bodies.In a section dealing with social-psychological perspectives on this theme, Peter Benson and Eugene Roehlkepartain make the case that doing the best for children requires shifting from a deficit model that focuses on what children lack to a model that emphasizes their developmental assets. Other chapters in this section highlight the ways parents can pursue the best for children by introducing them to spiritual practices rooted in love for God and compassion [End Page 231] toward others, and by providing them with a narrative-rich environment that deepens bonds between adults and children.A section on historical perspectives continues this trajectory by highlighting the vocations of children from the late thirteenth century on to the early modern period. In his concluding essay in this section, Charles Reid links historical and contemporary concerns by focusing on the right to life and its implications for analyses of war and healthcare access.In a section on philosophical and theological perspectives, Cynthia Willett challenges liberal understandings of rights in view of the experiences of children and argues for an approach that recognizes a central paradox of human freedom: that relationships of interdependence do not weaken freedom but rather enhance it. This paves the way for developing a sense of collective responsibility for children based on shared commitments to justice and solidarity that reach beyond the privatized family. Richard Osmer tackles the concept of original sin in order to advance a vision of a missional church in which congregations work with families to encourage authoritative—rather than authoritarian—styles of parenting that model mutual forgiveness. Marcia Bunge’s contribution is the most practical, offering a list of practices for children, families, and congregations for nurturing children’s vocations.In a concluding section on legal perspectives, Michael Broyde notes that, in the context of custody cases in Jewish law, the primary question is not who loves the child the most but rather who can best meet the child’s needs in an atmosphere of respect. Margaret Brinig and Steven Nock argue that law can, in fact, foster the love of children and the potential children have for becoming loving themselves by promoting family structures that are stable and afforded status in the community. In this way families can model the covenantal relationships of unconditional love in which children thrive. The collection concludes with an essay by Don Browning that emphasizes weaving together love’s affective elements with the very practical activities of caring for children and respecting their emerging selves.By inviting thoughtful reflection on how loving and being loved are central to the well-being of children in families and other institutions, Best Love makes an important contribution to the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. The book is best suited for graduate students, although the essays by Osmer and Bunge are relevant to pastoral settings. [End Page 232]Mary M. Doyle RocheCollege of the Holy CrossCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This essay poses a critical response to Strauss’ political philosophy that takes as its primary object Strauss’ philosophy of Law. It does this by drawing on recent theoretical work in psychoanalytic theory, conceived after Jacques Lacan as another, avowedly non-historicist theory of Law and its relation to eros. The paper has four parts. Part I, ‘The Philosopher’s Desire: Making an Exception, or “The Thing Is...’’’, recounts Strauss’ central account of the complex relationship between philosophy and ‘the city’. Strauss’ Platonic conception (...) of philosophy as the highest species of eros is stressed, which is that aspect of his work which brings it into striking proximity with the Lacanian-psychoanalytic account of the dialectic of desire and the Law. Part II, ‘Of Prophecy and Law’, examines Strauss’ analysis of Law as first presented in his 1935 book, Philosophy and Law, and central to his later ‘rebirth of classical political philosophy’. Part III, ‘Primordial Repression and Primitive Platonism’, is the central part of the paper. Lacan’s psychoanalytic understanding of Law is brought critically to bear upon Strauss’ philosophy of Law. The stake of the position is ultimately how, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Law is transcendental to subjectivity, and has a founding symbolic force, which mitigates against speaking of it solely or primarily in terms of more or less inequitable ‘rules of thumb’, as Plato did. Part IV, ‘Is the Law the Thing?’ then asks the question of what eros might underlie Strauss’ paradoxical defense of esoteric writing in the age of ‘permissive’ modern liberalism – that is, outside of the ‘closed’ social conditions which he, above all, alerts us to as the decisive justification for this ancient practice. (shrink)

A number of authors claim that Western European modern romantic love has been ‘gamified’ by digital apps and platforms, resulting in a ludic market logic that is increasingly compulsive and even addictive. This paper will suggest that modern romantic love was, in fact, predicated on games, particularly games of chance and competition. These games are seen to provide a number of functions, including homosocial bonding, the vindication of personal responsibility, and bringing about the probability of the improbable. The (...) paper examines changing attitudes to chance at several key historical moments in Western Europe, changes which we can discern in romantic codification, as well as in the modern economy. We trace these tendencies to digital corporations, where gathered behavioural data accelerates the capacity to economize and determine futures. (shrink)

The right to informed consent, as established in the Supreme Court judgment in Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] UKSC 11, I claim involves a ‘journey of love’ between clinicians and...

This book examines six plays by Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest) as dramatizations of the Renaissance court in its developing history - a history searched by Shakespeare to disclose its most characteristic gains and losses. For these plays do not simply celebrate Tudor and Stuart rule: they scrutinize it too, in the centre of its institutional theatre of power, the court. This book shows how, if the plays (...) came into the court, the court also came into the plays, with its most salient features - its competitiveness, its inner tensions and its contradictions, its language, its cultural life and its entertainments - exposed to the scrutiny of an art-form that proved itself to be a new mode of historical understanding. (shrink)

The Argonautica is the dramatic story of Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece and his relations with the dangerous Colchian princess, Medea. The only extant Greek epic poem to bridge the gap between Homer and late antiquity, it is a major product of the brilliant world of the Ptolemaic court at Alexandria, written by Apollonius of Rhodes in the 3rd century BC. Apollonius explores many of the fundamental aspects of life in a highly original way: love, deceit, heroism, human (...) ignorance of the diven, the limits of science. This volume offers the first scholarly translation into English prose for many years, combining readability with accuracy and an attention to detail that will appeal to readers both with and without Greek. `Based on a deep understanding of the text, this translation, with informative notes and an excellent introduction, will bring Apollonius to the audience he deserves....' ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

Dans la littérature arabe médiévale, il existe une façon spécifique de mourir à cause d’une passion amoureuse, liée à la conception d’un amour chaste qui possède ses propres valeurs et qui ne peut s’exprimer que dans les limites de ses propres règles. Le présent article étudie les vers récités par les amants avant d’exhaler leur dernier souffle contenus dans une vingtaine de notices d’al-Wāḍiḥ al-mubīn fī ḏikr man ustušhida min al-muḥibbīn (ou Précis des martyrs de l’amour) de Mughulṭāy (m. 1361). (...) En analysant les situations dans lesquelles ces vers sont prononcés, nous avons essayé de comprendre s’il existe (ou non) une manière spécifique, déclinée au féminin, d’exprimer son émotion avant de mourir. (shrink)

This paper will, in its successive steps and movements, revolve around one single question, a question that might, at first sight, come across as somewhat irrelevant or even impertinent within the context of philosophical or academic discourse. How romantic is Jean-Luc Nancy? Or: is there a specifically Nancyan sense of romance? Notwithstanding these somewhat unscholarly formulations, I am increasingly convinced that the question of love, or indeed more specifically of romance, is the most intimate inspiration of Nancy’s work, the (...) key unlocking all other keys. The theme of love has always played an important role in his work, from the early essay “Shattered Love” (“L’amour en éclats,” 1986) to his later works on the body and pleasure. In this paper, I will touch upon a number of these texts, but I will more particularly refer to two of Nancy’s more recent works, the yet untranslated book Sexistence from 2017 and Expectation: Philosophy, Literature (2018, published in French in 2015 as Demande: Littérature et philosophie). The question of romance, that is, the question of passionate interaction, of intrigue, of writing, of dramatization. This quite heterogeneous web of associations already implies a number of age-old philosophical issues: the relation between love and thinking; the relation between love and literature; and, subsequently, between philosophy and literature; the issue of the relation itself. The knot uniting these issues under the single heading of “romance” has been most firmly tied about two centuries ago, in the late eighteenth-century movement of early German, i.e., Jena, Romanticism, that significant moment in intellectual history where the barriers between philosophy and literature were broken down and where, quite generally put, the sense of the world was conceived of as a matter of romanticization. Although Nancy himself would be reluctant to call himself a Romantic philosopher in this historical sense of the word, this is exactly what I want to argue here: I want to show that Nancy’s philosophy of love – and by extension his philosophical thinking tout court – should be placed in the tradition of German Romanticism, rather than in that of, for instance, phenomenology, ontology, or philosophy proper. This claim is massive in its depth and scope and can impossibly be explored here in an exhaustive way. Instead, I will flesh out this perspective by advancing four successive hypotheses that enable to mark the contours of what I call Nancy’s romanticism. With this exploration, I hope to do three things at once: firstly, to underscore what I take to be the core or pulse of Nancy’s thinking: the issue of romance; secondly, to investigate to what extent this romantic pulse might be traced back to the Romantic tradition; and, thirdly, to emphasize why Nancy’s romantic thinking is relevant for us today. (shrink)

This article examines the exchange between Montoro and Sor Juana about the nature of jealousy and its connection with romantic love. First, it shows that, while Montoro's position echoes Augustine's view of love, Sor Juana's position has strong parallels with views held in the courtly love tradition. Second, the article considers Sor Juana's responses to Montoro, which aim to establish that jealousy is not inherently wrong (as Montoro holds) and that it cannot be severed from love. (...) Finally, the article shows that Sor Juana's insights provide support for those who defend the importance of jealousy in human life. (shrink)

One of the most widely accepted explanations for the peculiarity of the modern European is his addiction to the ideal of romantic love. Its invention is supposed to have so radically transformed ethics, imagination and daily life, that we can hardly imagine the mental world of the ancients or the Orient where such an ideal of love is unknown. In the classic source for this view, The Allegory of Love , C. S. Lewis traces the modern ideal (...) back to medieval tales of courtly love. But he sees the devotion to romantic love as a distinguishing mark of the modern individualistic consciousness, which began, he says, with a new interest in ‘the inner workings of the human heart’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Hannah Baker Saltmarsh Hannah Baker Saltmarsh This Girl I Lost Touch With This girl, who was afraid to enter a room— a girl born in the woods, on moss, whose family dreamt under quilts, who wore dresses that matched anything fabric in the house, even the dresses without loneliness— I held her hand in the corridor-dark until the speaking-in-tongues at (...) the community college dispersed into prayers with too many gerunds and too much fervor that wouldn’t adjust if you got a thousand dollars in the mail or jury duty, faith subtle as a crucifix the size of God on the highway. I waited with her until it was over, although the prayer group was never really over. Over rooms of crowded, faith-based humidity, she loved corridors of woods, the rushes of running away. This girl and I, we were cult-lured, but then the leader stepped down—was it porn, alcohol? He drove us around in a red jeep without doors— the first time I drove in a man’s car, I was eighteen so I fell in love: looking straight ahead together, arm hair touching, the cathedral of autumn anticipating a shape to hold you, the wind that you sometimes hollered over. What happened I can’t see, but when he left the group, I left: the death of visions. Hannah Baker Saltmarsh 95 This girl could long for a man in her fingernails, and, without talking, take a man from his pregnant wife’s side, have his even newer children, this girl who wouldn’t go in a room all alone, walked right in, somewhere we’ve not been, and never left. Monostich in Praise of Four Missed Foul Shots in a Row, Ending with a Line by Shaquille O’Neal —Orlando Magic vs. Houston Rockets, Game 1, NBA Final, 1995 Each mistake at the foul line longs to be its own distinct trip-up, divorced from the tragic-comic failure automatic-reflex of a protagonist on a shame-rampage; each delicate flaw of glass, net, rim wants to be denied once at the charity line, once and only once of red-lipsticked points, the naive purity of one aberrant error in calculation—not bring bleacher-crowds to their feet, posterless hands in the vaulted air before tallying Nick Anderson up as Brick Anderson, most hated NBA player of all time, and by his own fans not believing their own eyes as a series of empty arcs toward scoring dovetails into quadruple humiliations and a goofy smile of gutted hopes and boyish fear-tangled awe that any brain so practiced (for this and what else?) could fail so many times in a row, each fail better and Beckett-harder until the last exit out of obliterating loss is part of the abyss too, unless you are quick on your feet for sports broadcasting... but there is no end to swindled championships if you are a man who’s never had to face the extinction of his early twenties or suck the aftertaste of multi-millionaire juice cocktails poured with a legend’s touch, but in the soapy-sweet glass of your Dixie cup liquor, however close to the sound of Shaq’s name spoken in every language, stares your same lovesick reflection in the welt of that shot-glass mirror, mouthing the bitters of paranoid distraction, unripe manhood, aged ingratitude, and a starless Orlando Magic blue diamond broomed over by nursery-rhyme witches brushing out the cobweb-haze because the crowd is always the same crowd calling you swept... each fumbling error of pressure you let get to you, if only it could be a plotless, lyric monostich without arc, not driven to the plot that is your grave, where the unfaithful, the murderers, liars, and cheaters are defined by threads, no, snapped pieces, of seconds and, as Dante would have it, sorted in hell by a singular thought or deed so 96 Hannah Baker Saltmarsh transformative as to name you; the blue and white jersey on the floor, fists and feet, knees and elbows vacuumed in tantrum, hyped up in the court glare and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.2 (2006) 450-470 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Romantic Love: A Literary Universal?Jonathan Gottschall Washington and Jefferson College (JG)Marcus Nordlund * Göteborg University (MN)ITo love someone romantically is—at least according to innumerable literary works, much received wisdom, and even a gradually coalescing academic consensus—to experience a strong desire for union with someone who is deemed entirely unique. It is to idealize this person, to think (...) constantly about him or her, and to discover that one's own life priorities have changed dramatically. It is to care deeply for that person's well-being and to feel pain or emptiness when he or she is absent.But is this intense emotional experience a universal experience, something that is characteristically and quintessentially human, or is it merely a sociocultural construct that belongs to a particular time and place? On this point there is less agreement, both within and between different academic disciplines. The audacious question we want to raise in the pages that follow is whether literature—or more specifically, a large-scale, multiple-coder content analysis of thousands of folk tales drawn from different parts of the planet—can contribute something to this difficult question about love, culture, and human nature.Let us first look briefly at the theoretical problem that we aim to address. A widespread view among literary scholars and social scientists over the last decades has been that romantic love is a social construction specific to Western culture. This is part of a relentless skepticism [End Page 450] toward assumptions that important categories of human psychology and emotion—romantic and parental love, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—are "natural" rather than constructed. This position is often, if not always, linked to an ideological concern to demystify (or at least problematize) what is perceived as an essentially destructive or oppressive emotion or belief. Taking her cue from Simone de Beauvoir, Marilyn Friedman gives no less than ten reasons why it may be problematic for women to fall in love with men. 1Of course, no argument of any kind can be strictly ideological in nature since it always involves empirical assumptions—either explicit or implicit—about the nature of things. For example, the psychoanalyst E. S. Persons opines that the "best evidence that romantic love is not hard-wired into the emotional repertoire of humanity but is a cultural construct is the fact that there are so many cultures in which it is virtually absent." 2 Another frequent argument for love's constructedness has been that "there is no definition that describes love throughout the ages or across cultures." 3In some literary-critical accounts, it is even argued that romantic love is a cultural invention that can be traced back with precision to the courtly troubadour culture of twelfth-century France. 4 According to yet another school, represented by the influential literary theorist Jonathan Culler, "the notion of romantic love (and its centrality to the lives of individuals) is arguably a massive literary creation." 5While the social constructivist position on romantic love typically involves a strong commitment to cultural specificity, a weaker version is held even by some cognitive theorists who grant more to biology and panhuman traits. From the perspective of their communicative theory of emotion, Philip Johnson-Laird and Keith Oatley argue that the "components [of romantic love] exist separately in different societies, but their integration into a recognizable complex is a cultural accomplishment [by the West]." 6At the other end of the romantic love continuum we find those who argue that this emotion belongs to a universal human nature: or, more specifically, that it can be attributed to specialised neural circuits whose ultimate purpose is to enhance reproductive success. Not surprisingly, this has been a favorite position among evolutionary psychologists, and it has recently received some support from neuroscientific studies.For example, the neuroscientists Andreas Bartels and Samir Zeki claim to have uncovered a "functionally specialised system" that lights up in fMRI (magnetic resonance) scans of brains whose owners claim to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) v-vii [Access article in PDF] On Feminizing the Philosophy of Rhetoric Molly Meijer Wertheimer When asked to define his editorial policies in choosing articles to publish in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Henry W. Johnstone Jr. disavowed following any strict editorial guidelines; instead, he gave two examples to show how selection worked as a process. In one case, he agreed to publish an "off the wall (...) article" by a distinguished classicist; in another, he accepted an unusually long article--a "behemoth"--by an eminent rhetorician. These examples demonstrate what was to me one of Henry's most unusual and endearing traits as an editor and scholar: he was willing always to go wherever the argument led. It was probably in this spirit that he agreed to publish a special issue on "Feminizing the Philosophy of Rhetoric." I want to thank him posthumously for that decision. As "guest editor" of the issue, I feel privileged to present four well-written essays and two reviews that lead the readers of Philosophy and Rhetoric to consider some philosophical issues that emerge when we overlap concepts of "gender," "culture," and "rhetoric."The essays in this issue explore tactics women have used to get their messages across to others who would not--even could not--entertain speech seriously if presented by a woman. In the first essay, "Unveiling Esther as a Pragmatic Radical Rhetoric," Susan Zaeske reads the Book of Esther as a rhetorical manual of exile and empowerment. She traces features of the narrative that were useful as a model of rhetorical behavior early on, as well as appropriations that were made throughout the Middle Ages, Antebellum South, and even in our own day. Her essay emphasizes the riskiness to the speaker that is often entailed by the act of speaking, especially when the listener is "all-powerful" (199); when "his decisions are based not on careful deliberation, but on who influences him the most, usually by prodding his sense of power and manliness" (200). In the narrative, the speaker, Queen Esther, is depicted as utterly thoughtful, careful, well planned and well timed. She seems very much in control of an "indirect" rhetoric. Says Zaeske, "[T]he book teaches that direct, resistant rhetoric is ineffective, even dangerous, while clever, indirect, noncon- frontational methods will succeed in gaining the desired end--power" (202). [End Page v] This is a "conciliatory strategy wise women are forced to use in the patriarchal world" (qtd. on p. 202). And this kind of strategy is contrasted to the defiant rhetoric of Vashti, the former queen, Esther's predecessor, who was banished for saying no to one of the king's commands. Silence and supplication, according to Zaeske, when adopted self-consciously as strategies, are effective with hostile, neanderthal-type auditors. They are "radical," at least in the sense that they are "extreme."Nan Johnson, in her essay "Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America," furthers discussion of women's rhetorical options. In Zaeske's essay, women assume positions of supplicants or petitioners, or they stand defiant in the face of an oppressive listener (the king). The former are idolized; the latter are demonized. Centuries later, in the fifty years following the Civil War, similar representations of women appeared in conduct literature. Johnson describes a media blitz of ideas and images in etiquette and other self-help manuals that sought to define rhetorical behaviors and actions appropriate for men and women. Some of the writings idolized the "quiet woman" of the home, who reigned silently as queen stitching together via indirection a rhetoric of nurturance that moved beyond the home only through the actions of husbands and sons. This kind of rhetoric was viewed as a natural consequence of femininity. Other writings demonized the woman who spoke from the public platform as a teacher, preacher, and advocate, and who needed a rhetorical education to do so effectively. Many writings highlighted the negative consequences of rhetorical experience to women (who risked their femininity and the love of their families) and to their families (who risked the true source of... (shrink)

What is a problem? What's asked in that question, and how does one even begin to take its measure? How else could one begin, except as one does with any other problem--by way of its impulsion. Of Learned Ignorance: Idea of a Treatise in Philosophy is about philosophy because philosophy is about problems: philosophy, in a word, is where problems become a problem. After Anti-Oedipus, in the Kafka book and in A Thousand Plateaus, what Deleuze and Guattari counsel, strikingly, is (...) sobriety. Sobriety is what they praise in Kafka. And it is sobriety that seems above all else to be necessary here. (Steven Shaviro has pointed out the prominence of structure in Deleuze's writing: "even when Deleuze's prose, by himself or with Guattari, seems to be ranging anarchically all over the place, in fact it has a rigid and unvarying architecture, which is what keeps it from falling apart.") Of Learned Ignorance is a dead letter because it names a problem. It's a dead letter because it is, cautiously, a love letter. It's a dead letter because it lovingly stages an experiment in whimsy, and perhaps above all, because it is problematic (in the Kantian sense): It is a (sober) attempt at exemplifying what it talks about -- and what eludes it: A series of footnotes, with blank (transcriptive) pages above, effects something like the integration of a differential, the reciprocal determination where the sources enter into in relation to one another in order to produce a paper, essay, or (inexistent) (chap)book. Of Learned Ignorance, in facing down a problem, makes a wager; it courts failure; it puts it all on the line. All, yes, for love -- a kind of love... (of wisdom?). (shrink)

From the barbed, childish taunt on the school playground, to the eloquent sophistry of a lawyer prising open a legal loophole in a court of law, meaning arises each time we use language to communicate with one another. How we use language - to convey ideas, make requests, ask a favour, and express anger, love or dismay - is of the utmost importance; indeed, linguistic meaning can be a matter of life and death. In The Crucible of Language, Vyvyan (...) Evans explains what we know, and what we do, when we communicate using language; he shows how linguistic meaning arises, where it comes from, and the way language enables us to convey the meanings that can move us to tears, bore us to death, or make us dizzy with delight. Meaning is, he argues, one of the final frontiers in the mapping of the human mind. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the criminalization and medicalization of homosexuality during the early twentieth century in Canada. Through court records and medical texts the discourse of homosexuality as a threat to the family unit and to the nation is contextualized within Cold War rhetoric. A Foucaultian conceptualization of power and discipline helps frame questions regarding homosexuality as a criminal offense and as a mental illness. It is argued that both state control and societal pressures constructed the homosexual as criminal, the homosexual (...) as mental patient and, as a result, the homosexual as Communist threat. (shrink)

The Song of Songs, a lyric cycle of love scenes without a narrative plot, has often been considered as the Bible’s most beautiful and enigmatic book. The present study questions the still dominant exegetical convention that merges all of the Song’s voices into the dialogue of a single couple, its composite heroine Shulamit being a projection screen for norms of womanhood. An alternative socio-spatial reading, starting with the Hebrew text’s strophic patterns and its references to historical realia, explores the (...) poem’s artful alternation between courtly, urban, rural, and pastoral scenes with their distinct characters. The literary construction of social difference juxtaposes class-specific patterns of consumption, mobility, emotion, power structures, and gender relations. This new image of the cycle as a detailed poetic frieze of ancient society eventually leads to a precise hypothesis concerning its literary and religious context in the Hellenistic age, as well as its geographical origins in the multiethnic borderland east of the Jordan. In a Jewish echo of anthropological skepticism, the poem emphasizes the plurality and relativity of the human condition while praising the communicative powers of pleasure, fantasy, and multifarious Eros. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAnna Letitia Barbauld's poem ‘To Mr. Barbauld, with a Map of the Land of Matrimony’ and its illustrated companion piece, ‘A New Map of the Land of Matrimony, Drawn from the Latest Surveys’, first published anonymously by Joseph Johnson in 1772 but attributable to Barbauld, show their creator playing in original ways with courtly and libertine variants of the map of love and marriage: a genre of allegorical and sentimental map tracing its provenance to ‘La Carte de tendre’ or (...) ‘The Map of the Country of Tenderness’, conceived by Madeleine de Scudéry for inclusion in her multi-volume prose romance Clélie and given illustrated form by François Chauveau. Taken together, map and drawing indirectly serve to illuminate Barbauld's complicated position within Enlightenment feminism and invite new insights into her relationship with the canonical male Romantics, reaffirming her status as a key transitional figure between Neoclassicism and Romanticism in the contribution she makes to the historical debate over the relationship between different arts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rushdie’s Dastan-e-Dilruba: The Satanic Verses As Rushdie’s Love Letter to IslamFeroza Jussawalla (bio)Meheruban likhoon ya dilruba likhoon hyran hoon ke apke khat me kya likhoonYe mera prempatr padh kar ke tum naraz na hona ke tum meri zindagi ho ke tum meri bandagi ho[Should I address you as respected one Should I address you as beloved one I am so distraught about how I should address youWhen you (...) read my love letter You should not be disappointed Because you are my life and you are my “life’s work”]—Popular Hindi film song from Raj Kapoor’s Sangam (1964) [my translation]Salman Rushdie has been classified as a postcolonial 1 writer whose fiction depicts the hybrid nature of postcolonials in their migrations and movements, their merging and mixing. Rushdie has variously been called a “Third World Cosmopolitan” [Brennan, Salman Rushdie viii], a “metropolitan intellectual,” and “a hybrid” but most often a [End Page 50] “postcolonial,” because of his “birth” as a “Midnight’s child”—a child born as India was gaining independence at midnight on 14 August 1947 2 —his subsequent education in England, and the making of his home in metropolitan London. Such a perspective is eurocentric and does not provide complete answers to Rushdie’s complex works or the complicated response to his work. For the very hybridity that Rushdie manifests results from his being not only a “post-British” colonial but also a “post-Mughal” colonial.The British were not the only colonizers of India. In fact, Indian historians have traditionally identified several waves of colonization. Journalists Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre best summarize the two major waves of colonization as follows:Hinduism itself had been brought to India by the Indo-European hordes descending from the North to wrest the subcontinent from its ancient Dravidian inhabitants.... The faith of the Prophet had come much later, after the cohorts of Genghis Khan and Tamurlane had battered their way down the Khyber Pass to weaken the Hindus’ hold on the great Gangetic Plain. For two centuries, the Moslem Mogul emperors had imposed their sumptuous and implacable rule over most of India, spreading in the wake of their martial legions the message of Allah, the One, the Merciful.[Freedom at Midnight 36]While the British were actually occupying India, post-Mughal colonialism in the form of Persian poetry, literature, and the general “sumptuousness” of its art and architecture held sway. The Persian language begot Urdu, often described by linguists as a “camp language” of the Muslim invaders of the Subcontinent. However, Persian, Arabic, and Hindi had come together to create a new language for the poetry, literature, arts, and in general the “high culture” of today’s Indian Muslims. Jawaharlal Nehru, in his definitive history of India entitled Discovery of India, wrote,The Mughals were outsiders and strangers to India and yet they fitted into Indian structure with remarkable speed and began the Indo-Mughal period.... Their dynasties became completely Indianized with their roots in India, looking upon India as their homeland, and the rest of the world as foreign.[236]A synthesis worked itself out: new styles of architecture arose; food and clothing changed; and life was affected and varied in many other ways.... The Persian language became the official court language and many Persian words crept into popular use.[237]Persian was the lingua franca of the incoming Muslims from AD 1193 onward, and Persian literature became the favored literature of India for approximately five centuries [Ali 3–4].It is in this tradition of post-Mughal Urdu high culture that Rushdie grew up. In a 1983 interview with Michael Kaufman, Rushdie said,My grandfather, my father’s father, was a good Urdu poet. My father is not a writer but he’s a very literary and literate man, a student of both Arabic and Persian Literature and of Western Literature. At Cambridge he was quite scholarly. So I grew up in an atmosphere of books. And both my parents, in their different ways, were very gifted storytellers. [End Page 51]My mother, in common with most Eastern women and perhaps even women of the West, was the... (shrink)

Kondratyk L. "Ideas of Civil Religion in the Creative Work of Cyril Methodians". The author is based on the fact that the civil religion is such a sociocultural phenomenon in which, through the prism of a peculiar religious language and specific practices, the necessity of acquiring and establishing a national state is substantiated, which originates in the need of the community to find the sacral in the activity that is inherent in the transcendent, eternally -linear character and which is rooted (...) in the history of the territory. It is proved that the soil on which the ideas of the Cyril and Methodius civil religion originated is Western European romanticism, religiosity, the starting point of which was the idea of religion as the focus of the spiritual world of the individual and community, the idea of the Higher Reason that sets the directions for historical development, Christianity a decisive role in the spiritual and moral and social renewal of mankind, the view of Ukraine as an independent cultural and historical and social force, the influence of creativity T. Shevche gt; The main ideas of the civil religion of the Cyril Methodians are as follows: the messianism of the Ukrainian spirit manifests itself in the ability to unite the Slavs in the best way, because Ukraine is inspired by self-sacrifice with the Christian spirit and has apostolic intercession; Kiev - the capital of the resurrected from the oppression of the Slavs, the city - in which the courts prevail, truth, equality; concepts "temple", "truth", "righteous judgment", "freedom", "brotherhood", "equality", "love", "Kiev", "Kiev mountains" - the basic concepts-symbols of the Ukrainian civil religion; in the Ukrainian community with the need to coincide Christian values and moral standards, which dominate it. (shrink)