The Nature of Love, Volume 1

The Nature of Love, Volume 1
Author: Irving Singer
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2009-02-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262258463

An analysis of concepts of bestowal, appraisal, imagination, and idealization followed by explorations into the writings of thinkers that include Plato, Ovid, and Martin Luther. Irving Singer's trilogy The Nature of Love has been called "majestic" (New York Times Book Review), "monumental" (Boston Globe), "one of the major works of philosophy in our century" (Nous), "wise and magisterial" (Times Literary Supplement), and a "masterpiece of critical thinking [that] is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round" (Christian Science Monitor). In the first volume, Singer begins by studying love as appraisal and bestowal as well as imagination and idealization. He 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 agape. 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.

The Love of Nature and the End of the World

The Love of Nature and the End of the World
Author: Shierry Weber Nicholsen
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2003-02-28
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780262250436

A psychological exploration of how the love of nature can coexist in our psyches with apathy toward environmental destruction. Virtually everyone values some aspect of the natural world. Yet many people are surprisingly unconcerned about environmental issues, treating them as the province of special interest groups. Seeking to understand how our appreciation for the beauty of nature and our indifference to its destruction can coexist in us, Shierry Weber Nicholsen explores dimensions of our emotional experience with the natural world that are so deep and painful that they often remain unspoken. The Love of Nature and the End of the World is a gathering of meditations and collages. Its evocations of our emotional attachment to the natural world and the emotional impact of environmental deterioration are meant to encourage individual and collective reflection on a difficult dilemma. Nicholsen draws on work in environmental philosophy and ecopsychology; the writings of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Wilfred Bion, Donald Meltzer, and D. W. Winnicott; and ideas from Buddhist and Sufi traditions. She shows how our emotional responses to the vulnerabilities of the natural world range from intense caring and compassion, through grief and outrage, to diffuse depression. Individual chapters focus on silence and the process whereby we move from the unspoken to the spoken, the love of nature, the "perceptual reciprocity" with the natural world to which we might mature, beauty in the human and natural realms, the psychological impact of the destruction of the natural world, and reflections on the future.

The Nature and Nurture of Love

The Nature and Nurture of Love
Author: Marga Vicedo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-08-20
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780226215136

The notion that maternal care and love will determine a child’s emotional well-being and future personality has become ubiquitous. In countless stories and movies we find that the problems of the protagonists—anything from the fear of romantic commitment to serial killing—stem from their troubled relationships with their mothers during childhood. How did we come to hold these views about the determinant power of mother love over an individual’s emotional development? And what does this vision of mother love entail for children and mothers? In The Nature and Nurture of Love, Marga Vicedo examines scientific views about children’s emotional needs and mother love from World War II until the 1970s, paying particular attention to John Bowlby’s ethological theory of attachment behavior. Vicedo tracks the development of Bowlby’s work as well as the interdisciplinary research that he used to support his theory, including Konrad Lorenz’s studies of imprinting in geese, Harry Harlow’s experiments with monkeys, and Mary Ainsworth’s observations of children and mothers in Uganda and the United States. Vicedo’s historical analysis reveals that important psychoanalysts and animal researchers opposed the project of turning emotions into biological instincts. Despite those substantial criticisms, she argues that attachment theory was paramount in turning mother love into a biological need. This shift introduced a new justification for the prescriptive role of biology in human affairs and had profound—and negative—consequences for mothers and for the valuation of mother love.

The Nature of Love

The Nature of Love
Author: Thomas Jay Oord
Publisher: Chalice Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2010-04-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0827208294

God is love. Consequently, shouldn't love exist at the center of Christian theology? When love is at the center, theology is understood differently than it has typically been understood. Some theologians have placed faith at the center, others God's sovereignty, still others-the Church, but Dr. Oord places the emphasis on love. God's love for us, revealed in Christ, in the Church, and in creation, and our love for God and others as ourselves-must be afforded its rightful place. Beginning with the foundation of "love" is what differentiates the Christian faith from others.a loving God. Dr. Oord defines love as: "To love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic/empathetic response to God and others, to promote overall well-being." Is this not what has defined Christians throughout history?

Shakespeare and the Nature of Love

Shakespeare and the Nature of Love
Author: Marcus Nordlund
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2007-08-27
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0810124238

The best conception of love, Marcus Nordlund contends, and hence the best framework for its literary analysis, must be a fusion of evolutionary, cultural, and historical explanation. It is within just such a bio-cultural nexus that Nordlund explores Shakespeare’s treatment of different forms of love. His approach leads to a valuable new perspective on Shakespearean love and, more broadly, on the interaction between our common humanity and our historical contingency as they are reflected, recast, transformed, or even suppressed in literary works. After addressing critical issues about love, biology, and culture raised by his method, Nordlund considers four specific forms of love in seven of Shakespeare’s plays. Examining the vicissitudes of parental love in Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus, he argues that Shakespeare makes a sustained inquiry into the impact of culture and society upon the natural human affections. King Lear offers insight into the conflicted relationship between love and duty. In two problem plays about romantic love, Troilus and Cressida and All’s Well that Ends Well, the tension between individual idiosyncrasies and social consensus becomes especially salient. And finally, in Othello and The Winter’s Tale, Nordlund asks what Shakespeare can tell us about the dark avatar of jealousy.

For The Love of Nature

For The Love of Nature
Author: Martin C Dodge
Publisher: FriesenPress
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2021-03-25
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 152559723X

For the Love of Nature is an intimate collection of essays written by a man whose love of nature dates back to his earliest days. These travel stories span a range of global ecosystems, with an emphasis on Alaska, a site of great delight for the author. Here is a love letter to the natural world that begins around the ponds, forests, and meadows of a childhood and journeys through a lifelong career as an educator keen on sharing not only passion for the living parts of our planet, but respect and knowledge, as well. Marty Dodge focuses on situations where he had the opportunity to share his informed appreciation for the complexity and beauty of actual places. He describes adventures where, as a college instructor, he led student groups through the Florida Everglades, Costa Rica, Belize, and Alaska. And his adventures didn’t stop when his working life did; Dodge’s post-retirement travel was just as vigorous, and his documented tributes include spirited descriptions of visits to Nepal, Chile, the western United States, and, as ever, his adored Alaska.

Why We Love

Why We Love
Author: Helen Fisher
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2005-01-02
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1466829443

A groundbreaking exploration of our most complex and mysterious emotion Elation, mood swings, sleeplessness, and obsession—these are the tell-tale signs of someone in the throes of romantic passion. In this revealing new book, renowned anthropologist Helen Fisher explains why this experience—which cuts across time, geography, and gender—is a force as powerful as the need for food or sleep. Why We Love begins by presenting the results of a scientific study in which Fisher scanned the brains of people who had just fallen madly in love. She proves, at last, what researchers had only suspected: when you fall in love, primordial areas of the brain "light up" with increased blood flow, creating romantic passion. Fisher uses this new research to show exactly what you experience when you fall in love, why you choose one person rather than another, and how romantic love affects your sex drive and your feelings of attachment to a partner. She argues that all animals feel romantic attraction, that love at first sight comes out of nature, and that human romance evolved for crucial reasons of survival. Lastly, she offers concrete suggestions on how to control this ancient passion, and she optimistically explores the future of romantic love in our chaotic modern world. Provocative, enlightening, and persuasive, Why We Love offers radical new answers to the age-old question of what love is and thus provides invaluable new insights into keeping love alive.

The Nature of Self-Love

The Nature of Self-Love
Author: Laura Coe
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-11
Genre:
ISBN: 9781737369905

There are two realities. The reality of living our soul's calling, and the reality of being human.??Being human is hard, filled with ego, trivial problems, and plagued by emotional and cultural ideas that lead us astray from our eternal selves.??Living our soul's calling makes us feel alive, fully ourselves, and gives us the ability to heal, to grow, and to be who we were meant to be.??The Nature of Series is written from the Akashic Records-an energetic space that holds our soul's histories-and is designed to help us navigate the realities of being human, all while getting us back to what our soul is meant to be doing in this life.??Each book in this series sheds light on a topic that-when we get in right relation to it-changes the trajectory of our lives. Before, it was hard to understand. But now, with the Records, we can.??This book is about self-love.

The Nature of Love

The Nature of Love
Author: Dietrich Von Hildebrand
Publisher:
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2009
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN:

Early on Dietrich von Hildebrand distinguished himself as a thinker with an unusual understanding of human love. His books in the 1920s on man and woman broke new ground and stirred up fruitful controversy. Toward the end of his life he wrote a foundational book on love, The Nature of Love. He had in fact been preparing all his life to write this work; he was so drawn to the philosophical analysis of love that his students long ago had dubbed him doctor amoris, the doctor of love. The Nature of Love is a masterpiece of phenomenological investigation. Not since Max Schelers work on love have the resources of phenomenology been so fruitfully employed for the understanding of what love is and what it is not.

Love and Its Place in Nature

Love and Its Place in Nature
Author: Jonathan Lear
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780300074673

"Jonathan Lear has shown us both Freud`s texts and his subject matter from a new angle of vision, one that renders much recent controversy about psychoanalytic theory irrelevant. For any student of those texts this book is indispensable."--Alasdair MacIntyre "Lear makes one understand how psychoanalysis works not only on the therapist`s couch but also as a condition of being alive. . . . Love and Its Place in Nature not only offers a form of spiritual nutriment for the self, it also defines that self with a clear profundity that few readers will have encountered before."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times "A brief and engaging philosophical perspective on Freudian psychoanalysis. The book is simply written, but important themes are profoundly investigated. . . . An important philosophic reading of Freud."--Don Browning, Christian Century In this brilliant book, Jonathan Lear argues that Freud posits love as a basic force in nature, one that makes individuation--the condition for psychological health and development--possible. Love is active not just in the development of the individual but also in individual analysis and indeed in the development of psychoanalysis itself, says Lear. Expanding on philosophical conceptions of love, nature, and mind, Lear shows that love can cure because it is the force that makes us human.