Love

A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion

AvSimon May

Inbunden, Engelska, 2019

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Beskrivning

What is love's real aim? Why is it so ruthlessly selective in its choice of loved ones? Why do we love at all? In addressing these questions, Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards whomever or whatever we experience as grounding our life--as offering us a possibility of home in a world that we supremely value. He sees love as motivated by a promise of "ontological rootedness," rather than, as two thousand years of tradition variously asserts, by beauty or goodness, by a search for wholeness, by virtue, by sexual or reproductive desire, by compassion or altruism or empathy, or, in one of today's dominant views, by no qualities at all of the loved one. After arguing that such founding Western myths as the Odyssey and Abraham's call by God to Canaan in the Bible powerfully exemplify his new conception of love, May goes on to re-examine the relation of love to beauty, sex, and goodness in the light of this conception, offering among other things a novel theory of beauty--and suggesting, against Plato, that we can love others for their ugliness (while also seeing them as beautiful).Finally, he proposes that, in the Western world, romantic love is gradually giving way to parental love as the most valued form of love: namely, the love without which one's life is not deemed complete or truly flourishing. May explains why childhood has become sacred and excellence in parenting a paramount ideal--as well as a litmus test of society's moral health. In doing so, he argues that the child is the first genuinely "modern" supreme object of love: the first to fully reflect what Nietzsche called "the death of God."

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2019-07-04
Mått:239 x 160 x 30 mm
Vikt:567 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:304
Förlag:OUP USA
ISBN:9780190884833

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Mer om författaren

Simon May is visiting professor of philosophy at King's College London. His books include Love: A History (Yale University Press, 2011), Nietzsche's Ethics and his War on "Morality" (Oxford University Press, 1999), a collection of his own aphorisms entitled Thinking Aloud (Alma Books, 2009), which was a Financial Times Book of the Year, and two edited volumes on Nietzsche's philosophy (OUP, 2009 and CUP, 2011). He has contributed op-eds to newspapers such as the Financial Times and the Washington Post, and has appeared on radio and TV for the BBC, among other broadcasters. His work has been translated into ten languages.

Recensioner i media

Nearly every page offers up new insight and the book as a whole is a truly impressive achievement. It makes a serious contribution to analytic philosophy while at the same time being highly readable.

Innehållsförteckning

Acknowledgements Introduction Part I: Dead Ends: Why We Need a New Understanding of Love 1. The neglected question: what is love's specific aim? 2. Back to the future: secularizing divine agape 3. The six major conceptions of love in Western history: a summary 4. Why we need a new conception of love Part II: Love: Towards a New Understanding 5. Love and the promise of rootedness 6. What is ontological rootedness? 7. God as paradigm of a loved one - but not of a lover 8. Love as recognition of lineage 9. Love as recognition of an ethical home 10. Love as recognition of power 11. Love and the call to existence 12. Relationship 13. Fear: the price of love 14. Destructiveness 15. Why love isn't the same as benevolence 16. What divine violence teaches us about love 17. Self-interest as a source of self-giving 18. Exile as love's inspiration 19. Why some epochs (and people) value love more than others20. The languages of love 21. The primacy of loving over being loved 22. Attentiveness: love's supreme virtue 23. Love and death 24. "Overshooting" the loved one: love's impersonal dimension 25. Can we love ourselves? Part III: Narratives of Love As Rootedness 26. The Bible: love as a discovery of home 27. The Odyssey: love as a recovery of home Part IV: How Is Love Related to Beauty, Sex, and Goodness? 28. Why beauty is not the ground of love29. How important is sex to love? 30. The real relation between love and beauty 31. Can we love the ugly? 32. Can we love evil? Part V: The Child as the New Supreme Object of Love 33. Why parental love is coming to trump romantic love 34. The conservatism of romantic love 35. Why isn't friendship the new archetypal love? 36. Conclusion: the child as the first truly modern archetypal object of love Notes Bibliography Index

Betyg & recensioner

Alan Watkins, Simon May

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496 kr